Threadless land

Threadless is a community-centered online store. Any person can become a member of the community and through the site upload t-shirt designs that later will be scored on a scale of 0-5. The staff team chooses 10 of the best designs of the month, and the winning members are rewarded with $2000 in cash and a $500 in store gift certificate.

SkinnyCorp that runs Threadless has understood that the primer thing to achieve is to let the members (or consumers) work the community on their own, as if there was no larger authority handling the site, except for selling and shipping the t-shirts. They have gotten to know their customers and listen to their demands in a full ongoing dialogue, and furthermore let the members interact with each other without that “invisible hand”.

Below the line media are being used in order to underline the strength of the consumer itself, erasing the feeling of interference of a large brand company. When a t-shirt is being chosen for printing, the amount of tees will only be as many as the members that voted for it. This way, production has been fully customized in order to match the consumer needs.

In order to create the design a commission kit is provided through the site, giving each member an easy design solution and at the same time use the website as a platform for communicating with others. Each design will be rated by other members within the community and therefore create an interaction in a fun and exciting way. The essence of “Threadless land” is then transmitted through Tee-V, a section for online videos uploaded by members and staff creating a 360 degree lifestyle around the t-shirt company. But the heart of this community still belongs to its members.

Through linked blogs all members gets an opportunity to learn more about how to create designs, making each part of the website linked together in a process. People visit the site, get interested of the designs, submit to the membership, learn about how to create t-shirts, uploads images and gets feedback from other members. In the end, they might win as much as $22500 after getting the t-shirt printed and sold and later participate in ”the Bestee Awards”.

The marketing is at a large scale based on word of mouth media, where all members can post comments and scores on t-shirts and show it on Twitter, Facebook and other social communities. There’s even a a product called “Twitter-tees” where a collaboration with them allows Threadless to print the “tweets” of the month.

The site is furthermore a platform that the members are likely to return to and spend time on, since purchasing, scoring and chatting about designs is part of the Threadless product. One section of the participation of the site is also dedicated to artist programs, where students aswell as teachers may download programs and software to use in class, and later in their curriculums.

Threadless surrounds its consumer with a fun site in true web 2.0 style and can be assured that their members will visit and interact with their brand as often as several times per day, almost as if forgetting that there is a product to be sold while participating in a social community.

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