Motherboard

In 2000, Jake Nickell was a Chicago college student who spent his days working at CompUSA and his nights cruising Dreamless.org, an online community forum for designers. After noticing an online T-shirt design competition, Jake mocked up a design based on the design of Dreamless, and asked his web friends to vote for him. It worked. With $1,000, Jake and a friend decided to start their own T-shirt design popularity contest. They called the site Threadless, a play on both clothing and internet forums, and opened the doors to a world of eager young designers.

But they weren’t doors; they were flood gates. Ten years later, the site has become the epicenter of DIY clothing design, with 1.2 million participants, and millions more customers than that. In total, 85,000 artists have submitted 300,000 designs; the most popular ones get printed on shirts that always sell out, earning each winning designer $2,500 and the satisfaction that comes with knowing your artwork is plastered across thousands of chests.

And not just chests: as of today, eleven winning Threadless designs are appearing on laptops too, thanks to a partnership with Dell (a sponsor of Motherboard). Read more about the project here and check out the laptops here.

Just before a party at Threadless’s Chicago headquarters to celebrate its tenth birthday, Motherboard spoke with Jake about how the company exploded, why ideas count more than tools, and how he became “the coolest dude on Earth.” No no – really.

It’s refreshing to see an online community that’s really productive, and that’s not just trading in negative comments.
I’ve never seen an online community stay strong for so long. It has to do with the fact that it’s such a clear thing that everyone’s excited about: T-shirt design. These artists are putting 8 to 10 hours on each design. This isn’t some site where you come on, see something quickly, comment on it, and try to be clever. It’s really this productive space, where people are working for hours and hours on this. It’s hard for somebody to come in and destroy that. If someone posts a bunch of porn on the forum, that’s not going to stop Threadless.

The status quo is companies saying, “you should buy this because we’re making it.” What we’re rocking is, the community reaching up and customizing the product, putting their twist on it.

How does an online community grow as large and as strong as yours?
You need an actual offering that’s compelling. I feel like a lot of answers to that question would end up getting caught in the tools – you need to be on Facebook, you need to be on Twitter, you need to make sure you have a share button on your page. But I think what it really comes down to is doing something that’s exciting enough for people to want to be involved in it. Best advice I would give: don’t get caught up in the tools, and think about why people would want to be a part of your community. What motivates somebody to want to spend two hours of your day in your community and not somewhere else?

Another thing we’re trying to stay on top of is, what’s the motivation for the artist to submit? We don’t want them to get caught up in the reward system, the $2,500 reward. We want to make sure that we’re providing value to the artist, even if their design isn’t selected for print. It’s something they can still do something with. That’s one of the things we’re doing to maintain the community – really getting in the heads of the artists and what motivates them to participate.

How have you seen those motivations spread across the web? What’s been the impact of Threadless?
Artists who have portfolios online are realizing they can do productive things with their art. There are a lot of examples out there like Etsy. It’s neat how the Internet has given artists a platform to show their work to so many more people. Before you put your paintings up in a local art fair. Now you can be everywhere.

And I think Threadless has also inspired a number of crowd-sourcing websites that have been good and bad. Think about Sellaband – a musician can put up a request for funding before they’ve created their album. People are doing things that they’re already passionate about – they’re learning how to play music or learning how to draw, and then they can do something productive with what they’ve created through these websites. Whereas on the other side of crowd-sourcing, it’s companies who want something – we need a logo, we want a commercial – and saying to the community, “you should make it for me.” I recently wrote a blog about this. I don’t think that shouldn’t exist, I just prefer to be on our side of the coin.

The Threadless flagship store in Chicago.

What’s the future of customized design? Where can Threadless designs really go beyond T-shirts?
The reason that I’m most excited about some of the partnerships – and there are some that speak to this more than others – is the opportunities for artists, even if they aren’t super financial successes for us. T-shirts was just an easy thing to start with. For ten years we haven’t done anything else, so we’re starting to and it’s so cool. Whenever I come into the office, Wilson [Fong, at Threadless] just has all these crazy products sitting everywhere with Threadless stuff on them… backpacks, sandals, skateboards, laptops. That’s pretty cool.

One one side, some of the companies we want to work with [to branch out into other products] are difficult for our community to accept. But the artists are excited to participate. With the Dell partnership, not one artist didn’t want to participate. They were so excited to see their art on another thing. With our iPhone cases, it’s been nothing but positive. The status quo is kinda getting jumbled.

What’s the status quo, and how is Threadless jumbling it?
Typically how consumer relationships work is this: You are a consumer and companies make things you want to buy. With Threadless, it’s like the real people are involved in that process. The status quo is companies saying, “you should buy this because we’re making it.” What we’re rocking is, the community reaching up and customizing the product, putting their twist on it.

Before whenever you bought something that has artwork on it from Target or somewhere, you never knew who the artist was, or what their story is, what they’re about. That’s just work they did for that brand. We’re trying to do something different.

People want to know where their stuff comes from – not just what artist designed this, but is it green? Where was it made? They don’t want some random thing that they have no idea where it came from.

I would look at it as a way to master a skill. Go into it saying, I want to learn T-shirt design, rather than I have the best idea and I want to get it printed. It’s kind of like learning how to play the guitar. You don’t just pick up a guitar and start playing the best songs in the world. Your motivation behind doing it is to progress as an artist, to grow your skill.

How many T-shirts do you actually own?
I have 800 T-shirts in my closet. I have favorites, but I’ll gravitate to a new design and start wearing that one more often. One of my favorite other companies that sells T-shirts is called Print Liberation. They have a shirt that says, real big in pink letters on a yellow shirt, “You’re not dead yet.”

What happened to the ironic hipster T-shirt – you know, the found T-shirt, the thrift store T-shirt. How do you think Threadless has impacted irony in T-shirts?
We don’t have super ironic shirts. We have a few that are pretty hipster-y and have some irony in there. We get talked about as if we’re a hipster T-shirt company. I don’t know what that word means. I think artists on Threadless are trying to be clever, not ironic.

What advice would you give to a would-be T-shirt designer?
I would look at it as a way to master a skill. Go into it saying, I want to learn T-shirt design, rather than I have the best idea and I want to get it printed. It’s kind of like learning how to play the guitar. You don’t just pick up a guitar and start playing the best songs in the world. Your motivation behind doing it is to progress as an artist, to grow your skill. I think some of the best artists on the site have done it that way.

Right now, crossing two different pop culture things is pretty hot. We just did a shirt that’s like a Smurf that’s like an Avatar character. But I think the best way to become a long-term printed artist is to do something completely new that we’ve never seen before.

As for tools, Photoshop and Illustrator are the main tools that people use. A lot of people are using Wacom tablets, which you can get for $100 bucks right now. For T-shirt design, it’s better to learn Illustrator than Photoshop, because Illustrator is vector art, which can get very high resolution. When you’re dealing with print products as screen art, that’s better.

Given its crowd-sourced model, Threadless has dealt with some challenges when it comes to ownership of ideas, compensation and copyright. Winning designers give up ownership of their designs, and design piracy is not uncommon.
That is a very tricky subject. Our biggest copyright issues are really other companies ripping off our designs and selling them. The other side of it is some artists are ripping off designs and selling them to Threadless. The pop culture things we do, if we get a cease and desist letter from whatever company owns that. We handle everything on a case-by-case basis. We don’t have policies in place in how we deal with copyright issues.

But we try to be creative about it. Somebody submitted a design that was a photograph of some graffiti that they saw. It was just a stencil of two characters under an umbrella. And the original graffiti artist contacted us, and said “that’s my design. I put that up.” We gave the graffiti artist the prize, and invited that artist to do a select design as well. When stuff like that comes up, you can really turn it into an opportunity.

When I started Threadless, we didn’t have a website. The first idea was launched an hour after we came up with it, as just a thread on a forum. I think a lot more businesses could start that small. Even if you’re working on a job, you can still carve out the hours to do something, something that’s a hobby on the side.

T-shirt design has evolved, but the basic structure of a T-shirt hasn’t really changed much. How do you see technology impacting T-shirts over the next decade?
I have put so little thought into that, and I actually kind of purposefully try not to think about that too hard. So many of the decisions that we’ve made in the company in the last ten years have been things I never could have predicted. And since we’re a community-driven company, I can’t sit here and say, “this is what our community is going to want.” The one thing I know that we will be doing in the next ten years is listening to them.

As for T-shirt technology, the progress that has happened there, has been us saying, “we can now do this with T-shirts.” Maybe we should think about that more. We’ve already had submissions using augmented reality. There’s a Flash presentation too for how it will all work. The designer designed the website so that when you show the shirt to your web camera, a character pops up on the screen. Even though we didn’t change anything about our website to present that, people can still submit abstract concepts through our submission process.

When the iPad came out, I concepted this idea with backpack straps that you hook on to your iPad so your iPad is worn on your chest. And then we had a Threadless app so that you could have any design you want “playing” on your chest.

Threadless straddles the line between the digital world and the real world of retail. What advice would you give to someone who is trying to start their own company, be it a non-digital company or not?
I wouldn’t say that you have to have a project that has a product for sale. But you’re right, it seems every startup is very digital, and it seems like there’s a few big players like Amazon or Zappos in the product area, but there’s a lot of room for a lot of other smaller projects.

I wouldn’t give people advice about their ideas. My advice would be try to stay as small as you can starting out. When I started Threadless, we didn’t have a website. The first idea was launched an hour after we came up with it, as just a thread on a forum. I think a lot more businesses could start that small. Even if you’ve got a full-time job, you can still carve out the hours to do something, something that’s a hobby on the side.

And the last thing I would recommend is to not be afraid how to do things. We wanted to a Facebook app, and I’ve never done a Facebook thing before. I just got the documentation and started hacking away at it. When we started Threadless, we didn’t have a screen printer, and we figured we could figure out how that all worked. I’d say have the drive to learn as you go and figure stuff out rather than hiring people who know how to do it.

You’re the coolest dude on Earth, Google tells me.
I’m not really the coolest dude on Earth. I was just playing around with SEO. I did it early enough on – I put “coolest dude on Earth” in the title of my blog, and wrote it in certain places around the web, wherever I went, so it linked back. One of my friends, whose job it was for two years to be an SEO guy, tried to take me over. He’s number two on there.

So basically, a combination of using the power of the network, and starting to do it early enough.
That’s it.

See the Threadless blog and check out some awesome Ts in the shop, including a shirt to benefit the oil spill clean-up. And see those Threadless laptops at the Dell store.