Threadless Social Network Monthly T-Shirts Over 10000

Online from Chicago, USA T-shirt The sales website Threadless is well versed in the true meaning of social networking, and operates a large and loyal fan group on the basis of social networking. Threadless regularly organizes the T-shirt design competition. Every day hundreds of design proposals are submitted. Fans vote for their favorite T-shirts, and the company put them into production.

　 5 million dollars in cool business

No advertising, no professional designer, no sales team. Threadless is like a community center, where people publish blogs, exchange ideas with people of similar interests, and buy a lot of T-shirts with 15 dollars each. Each T-shirt is sold well, with a profit margin of more than 30%, and the company's annual revenue growth is more than 100%.

　　 Threadless website The automatic scoring system was used to score the design of T-shirts, and the prize winners and the $2000 Prize were awarded to the highest scoring designers every week. At the same time, help designers to promote their T-shirts, and create advertising links for their own blogs and Myspace homepage. These T-shirts have diverse design styles, ranging from politics to cartoons to abstract styles. Every designer wants his works to be favored by the company's website users, because T-shirts are an outlet for civilian designers. One of the winners, Glenn Jones, said, "it's not about money. The whole thing is cool. Your work is printed on a T-shirt and you wear it on someone else."

Threadless will continue to provide design challenges to stimulate community creativity. Threadless has held a design competition on CES to find topics that users who are interested in technology and networks are passionate about. Another example is the convening of the concept design competition for zombies and monsters, because Threadless staff have noticed from the forum that users' discussions on monsters theme have increased significantly during this period. Threadless also tried the same way to hold the iPhone leather design competition and Dell notebook design competition, and the votes were chosen for the most popular design reproduction. These methods were successful without exception.

This kind of similarity outsource The practice is really effective in reducing the risk of enterprises. What Threadless needs to do is to maintain the website. According to the estimate of Frank Piller of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Threadless can sell 60 thousand T-shirts per month, with an average price of $20 per item. Under the gross margin of 35%, the company can earn 5 million dollars a year before deducting all kinds of sales and management costs. Threadless has only 50 employees, and the gross profit for each person can be as high as $100 thousand.

{page_break}

　　 Innovation comes from users

Of course, Threadles also knows that organizing such a network community means taking responsibility. They often seek advice and feedback from users, and carefully maintain the unique style of the T-shirts they make. For this reason, they have rejected the olive branches extended by large clothing stores such as Target and Urban Outfitters, and prefer to cooperate with some small businesses. Jake Nickell, the founder of Threadles, said: "we are just some kind of goods on their shelves. This is not the location we want."

Today, Threadless has become a platform for the service of about 500000 T-shirt lovers, and has a greater impact on the ever expanding scale. Visitors can browse up to 94000 different T-shirt designs on the website. These are all designed by community members, and about 800 new designs are released online every week. They comment on others' works, upload T-shirt photos, and update their personal pages to show their taste. The website receives about 750 thousand scores per week. So far, no Threadless T-shirt has failed, and every design that has been put into production has been sold out. The reason for this is that it has a sticky social networking fan base.

Since the start of Threadless, other traditional retailers have also started related attempts. In recent years, Nike has been trying to connect the runners around the world by building its own nikeplus.com. The fast fashion brand GAP has also set up a community website OldNavyweekly, allowing users to search for coupons on the Internet through the way of "treasure hunt", aiming to stimulate online customers to go offline to shop in the physical stores, which has once brought an extremely high popularity for GAP.

Karim Lakhani, a Harvard Business School professor, argues that Threadless has proved that innovation can come from users. Its success lies in rethinking the relationship between you and users, redefining manufacturers and consumers. Von Hippel, author of "democratic innovation", said that this is a new wave, which shows that companies can set aside Market Research to formulate market strategies.

　　 Community It is more effective to organize workers than companies, and the best person for a job is the person who wants to do the job most. Without any profound theoretical explanation, the products produced by brainstorming have surpassed the best products created by the world's top companies. The whole secret of the sale of Threadless T-shirts lies in a continuous active social network.