Threadless.com – An Online Retailer?

The concept is simple. Threadless.com sells T-shirts. So what’s to special about it? The company has never advertised, nor does it employ professional designers, modeling agencies or fashion photographers, but last year they sold $16 million worth of T-shirts and their newsletter is delivered to 370,000 e-mail addresses each week.

E-Commerce Strategies in Web 2.0

You can create a T-shirt design and then upload the design and a picture of yourself wearing the shirt to Threadless. Threadless will take care of the printing and selling. Once posted, visitors and members of this social network community will score your design. User can even upload a picture of themself wearing the shirt after they bought it… Threadless successfully combined e-commerce, entertainment and social community tools into business and the community provides the value to it.

Harvard Business School professor Karim Lakhani summarizes it:

Threadless completely blurs that line of who is a producer and who is a consumer. The customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting. All that has been distributed.

See also:

• ‘Project Runway’ for the t-shirt crowd by CNN.com
• 7 reasons why Threadless rules by Matt