5 (b) The Threadless T-shirt
Tapping the Community Talent
(The Threadless T-shirt)
Jake Nickell is the founder of Threadless.com an online community based t-shirt and apparel store. He is estimated to have a net worth of $50 million. 
Jake was born in 1980 in Minnesota and spent his childhood in Denver, Missouri, Houston and Crown Point[i]. Since his early years, Jake was addicted to online forums where he could collaborate on various projects with other people. While in college, Jake won an online t-shirt design competition[ii] worth $1000. This prompted him to design and develop Threadless.com in 2000.
Initially, Jake ran the business from a small studio apartment[iii]. As the business started growing, Jake quit his job and devoted all his energy to developing the site. All the profits from the initial years were invested in printing the t-shirts.
Today, the site has over 1 million members[iv]. People in the Threadless community create the designs for t-shirts which are then voted upon by other members of the community. Every week, 10 designs are selected from over 1500 entries. The winners are given a cash reward of $2500 and an additional $500 for reprints. Threadless is a perfect example of how the Internet is becoming a source of income for the general public and a million dollar engine for smart entrepreneurs.
Table 8: Growth of Threadless.com
|
2000 |
2003 |
2005 |
2006 |
2007 |
|
|
Number of t-shirts sold |
1 Million |
1.5 Million |
|||
|
Revenues |
$20,000 |
$320,000 |
$6.2 Million |
$18 Million |
$30 Million |
Source: Inc.com[v]
[i] “Jake Nickell” Squidoo.com. 21 Feb 2010. <http://www.squidoo.com/jake>
[ii] “Threadless”. Wikipedia.com. 21 Feb 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threadless>
[iii] “Jake Nickell Interview” Goodproduce.net. 21 Feb 2010. <http://goodproduce.net/blog/?page_id=271>
[iv] “Griffin Technology and Threadless bring unique designs to the UK”. Bit-tech.net. 6 Feb 2010. Dennis Publishing. 21 Feb 2010. <http://www.bit-tech.net/news/industry/2010/02/06/griffin-technology-and-threadless-bring-uni/1>
[v] “The Customer is the Company” Inc.com. 1 June 2008. Mansueto Ventures. 21 Feb 2010. <http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/the-customer-is-the-company_pagen_3.html>
