Hasta La Creative!

Threadless is on the cover of Inc.

Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, two north side of Chicago graphic designers figured out how to create community and a thriving business in the same move. Academics, venture capitalists and the entrepreneurs who read Inc. are paying attention.

Threadless is at the vanguard of a new innovation model that is quietly reshaping a host of industries. Whether it’s called user innovation, crowdsourcing, or open source, it means drastically rethinking your relationship with your customers. “Threadless completely blurs that line of who is a producer and who is a consumer,” says Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “The customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting. All that has been distributed.”

Threadless runs design competitions on their site where members submit their ideas for T-shirts — hundreds each week — and then vote on which ones they like best. Threadless produces the most popular designs and sells them via their online store and at their new retail location in Lakeside.

Revenue is growing 500 percent a year, despite the fact that the company has never advertised, employed no professional designers, used no modeling agency or fashion photographers, has no sales force, and enjoys no retail distribution, except to their own store. Margins run above 30 percent, because community members tell them precisely which shirts to make – and every product eventually sells out. Threadless has never produced a flop.