Threadless The Business of Community

1. DMSA
Threadless: The Business of Community
GROUP – 7
Meenakshi Kanakaraj
Poornima Satish
Sabareesh K
Sowmyanarayanan R
Tejus K S
Vishnu R
Akshai Sunil
Anoop J
Bandi Naveen
Emannuel Aloysius John JJ

2. The Case

3. How Threadless started
• London, year 2000 – T-shirt design competition
sponsored by the Dreamless community
• Jake Nickell wins the competition
• His design – official t-shirt for the event
• He wins no $, no shirt, just satisfaction
• Co-creation with a community – relatively untapped market
• Threadless was born – as a hobby and an outlet for the community of artists at
Dreamless

4. The concept
• Designers submit their original work
• Designs are rated for 7 days by members
• Threadless prints the most popular designs
• Users buy the designs
• The winning designer gets some $

5. The pitch

6. Community
More than 500,000 people
• Consumer
• Designer – college student or someone who likes to design
• Bloggers who love interaction
Street Team – point-based system
• Credit system for community members
• Referral system

7. Community population from 2002-07 (in 1000s)

8. Threadless blogs
• Artists posted blogs about work in progress
• Community feedback – design feedback before submitting to
maximize the chances of their designs scoring highly
• Design critique section in the blogs
• Version tracking from the initial to the final product

9. Culture at Threadless
• Community feel within the office environment
• Regular interaction throughout the day
• Key elements
• Communication
• Transparency
• Hard work
• Fun
• Built-in motivation for the staff to produce high-quality work

10. Threadless Revenues & Units Sold from 2002-2007 (in 1000s)

11. Monthly Blog Posts on Threadless: January 2005 - June
2007 (in 1000s)

12. Business process challenges
• Operational excellence
• Produce and ship more than 1 million t-shirts per year to meet customer demand
• Supply chain management
• Printing
• Warehousing
• Shipping
• Handling of returns

13. Concepts at work
Crowdsourcing
User-driven innovation
The customer as
• Designer
• Quality control
• Tester
• Recruiter
• Salesforce
• Brand ambassador
• Marketing staff

14. THANK YOU…!