Threadless And User Generated Stars

In his Consumed column for the New York Times, Rob Walker puts the spotlight on the do-it-yourselves T Shirt market that Threadless and other sites have made. Anyone can submit a T Shirt design to Threadless - and they get about 125 submissions a day. These are voted on by the site’s “hundreds of thousands” of user-voters to half a dozen new T-shirt offerings a week and these lucky winners are sold in batches of 1,500.

Winning designers are paid $2,000 but what’s interesting about this ‘user-generated’ site is that it turns these designers into user-generated-stars. Rob explains:

Perhaps even more surprising is something else the Threadless audience does together: create stars. Glenn Jones, the creative director of Dashwood Design in Auckland, New Zealand, has won 17 times. He regularly gets fan e-mail, has been featured on the cover of the New Zealand magazine ProDesign as the “King of the Tees” and is often asked why he doesn’t start his own shirt company. (Jones says he is too busy at Dashwood, which does packaging and corporate-identity design.) But he has begun to sell occasional prints of his Threadless works from his own Web site. His closest rival, the 16-time winner Ross Zietz, started submitting designs when he was a student at Louisiana State University. He now works for Threadless, helping to oversee production. “You get kind of a following, almost,” Zietz says; in his case, that has helped him get freelance gigs designing shirts for the Dave Matthews Band and other musicians. Both he and Jones have also submitted designs under different names. “You want to make sure you’re getting printed because it’s good,” Kalmikoff says, “not because you’re a Threadless celebrity.”

Back in August 2006, PSFK interviewed some similar online T Shirt ventures including People Like Us, Oddica and T-Post.

Consumed - Rob Walker - Marketing and Advertising - Apparel - New York Times