Crowdsourcing worked on me

I was in Chicago this weekend, and when I told my friend that I liked the t-shirt she was wearing, she mentioned that she'd bought it at Threadless. This caught my attention because Threadless was one of the companies Jeff Howe and I talked about on Friday. Threadless asks people to submit t-shirt designs online, and then visitors to the site vote for which they like best. The company prints and sells the popular shirts—and gives each designer $2,000 in cash, plus a $500 gift certificate to buy other Threadless t-shirts. I didn't know Threadless had a store (turns out, just the one, which opened last September), so we went to visit:

The store gets new shirts in each week, the ones the Web community says it likes. Now, just because a person votes for a shirt doesn't mean he's going to buy it if it gets printed, but still, the whole process strikes me as some of the best—and cheapest—market research imaginable. Which is maybe why the Threadless model is one people have looked to copy.

The added bricks-and-mortar distribution is an interesting twist. According to the company, they've had some chances to go into big-box retailers, but decided not to, partly because they were afraid of losing the stories behind the designs, which they consider to be key to selling shirts. In the Chicago store, there are monitors above each of the shirts that give you the names of the designers:

That deliberate effort to keep connected to the people who design the t-shirts reminded me of what Howe said at the end of our chat about crowdsourcing. Community management, for anyone looking to tap the crowd, is key.

Oh, and for the record, my friend bought a t-shirt while we were in the store. It's that green one with the white bike in the picture above. The t-shirt I wanted had already been rotated out. So I bought it on the Threadless Web site once I got home.

Barbara!