No. 354 - Threadless

I was listening to NPR Now Marketplace on XM Radio and heard about a t-shirt company called Threadless. Their business model is something called crowd sourcing, in which artists submit designs and then a community of people vote on them. On average, around 1,500 designs compete in any given week. Each week, the staff selects about ten designs. Each designer selected receives $2,000 in cash and a $500 gift certificate.

Threadless has over a million users on its website. In October 2010, a book of the same name was published providing a ten-year retrospective of Threadless t-shirt designs and the company's history.