Mason (moderator, Adaptive Path, MightyGirl.net blog, ‘101 projects for your blog’ book)
Jake Nickell, Jeff Kalmikoff, Jacob Dehart (SkinnyCorp, Threadless)
Threadless has 15,000 unique visitors and sells 60,000 t-shirts every month. Two of them met at a convention, got together and 2 years later they quit their day jobs to design T-shirts full time. The business was successful enough that they didn’t need to work for clients anymore. They’re growing 4 times in size per year and have been moving offices every year due to expansions.
They presented their various projects…
Extra tasty is a new Web 2.0 project. Users submit their drinks recipes. Users can also post opinions, tag them, and search by tags. It’s in beta now but you can also access it on your cellphone. Nickell points out that they don’t advertise brand names. Eg, you can search for vodka but not ‘Absolut Vodka’. People could add brand names in their recipes, they suppose, but the site won’t be providing links to those companies.
Mason: You guys have had amazing business considering that you don’t do any advertising at all. What’s your strategy to ensure your business continues to grow?
They didn’t plan ahead but made decisions that made sense to them. They had no business training. 90% of people on their website don’t actually buy T-shirts, they participate in forums, submit T-shirt designs and share it with everybody. But SkinnyCorp thinks that’s cool as these people have something to be proud of.
[Vanessa: It’s a kind of ‘soft’ marketing because you’d probably want to buy your own T-shirts or your friends’ if the design is highly rated! And the good thing is, there’s no pressure to buy, which makes people comfortable with the site.] SkinnyCorp doesn’t delete posts but they admit they’ve been lucky. Nobody wants to submit a lousy design in the first place, so they don’t attract overly negative comments. But users feel so much loyalty towards the site that they also want to influence the decisions that SkinnyCorp makes. They posted a question in their blog about changing T-shirt printers and received 1,500 comments.
Dehart provides stats – 55% guys, 45% girls, average age 22. He had to rework the site to accommodate the growing number of users. The Threadless site now runs on 9 servers, and they have 20 servers in total for all of their sites.
The guys shared how at first they were only allowed 100 credit card transactions from FedEx, and they exceeded it by another 100 transactions. Each transaction cost $5. Racked up over 6 months (with no warning from FedEx) [How convenient… ], they owed $50,000 which at the time would have bankrupted them. However they bargained it down to about $10,000.
Tips:
- Allow your projects to be controlled by the community
- Put your project in the hands of it community
- Let your community grow itself. If people aren’t talking about your product, it probably isn’t good enough anyway. The money they saved on advertising went into designing better shirts.
- Reward the community that makes your project possible. Threadless is vulnerable to its own community – it can kill them, but that’s how their system works.
They didn’t sell out, either. They were approached by Target but the paperwork and branding put them off – they didn’t want to look like they ‘sold out’. In the short term they could have made more money but they’d lose their original customers. They’d just be another T-shirt like Urban Outfitters, there’d be no more story on the blog. [i.e. they’d lose their special community experience] They still don’t do things by first thinking, “We want to make money.” They felt it was cool if they could send stickers to people who ordered T-shirts. (Looking at the audience reaction, it appears that many people like getting their stickers.)
Someone asked whether about placing the fate of their employees in the hands of the community was a good idea. –ff says firstly he doesn’t think the community will kill them. However if they do then it probably deserves to die!
Someone else asked if they’d ever want to trash any projects that weren’t profitable. On the contrary. They had a silly project, “I Park Like An Idiot”.com where you could stick stickers on cars that were badly parked. The site also made money. They feel another project, 15megs of Fame, has potential. It’s related to music. [Note: gotta check that out!]
Technical questions:
What platforms are they using?
Threadless first ran on Coldfusion and Acess. They’ve moved to PHP and MySQL. Their main printer in Chicago is ShirtsRBusiness.
Which vendor do they use for text messaging?
They use Simplewire.
What features made their site a success?
They feel it’s the little things and having open conversations with their customers. [This seems to be a common theme in SXSW]
What’s a typical day for them?
It’s not 9 to 5 - they start late, break for a long lunch at 11.30am, but ultimately they get the work done.
What process do they use in creating their sites?
It starts with an idea, the rest of the team get really exciting about it. Other projects get stalled while they start on the new one.
How important is it that they’re like their community, in selling products?
It’s very important. If you’re not like your target audience, you won’t like what you’re doing.
Did they have problems with copyright infringements?
Yes, either:
- People stealing Threadless designs or
- People putting up copyrighted designs on Threadless.
They’re not harsh on infringers as it’s often on such a small scale that it’s not worth it.
My rating: 3.5/5. The SkinnyCorp guys aren’t natural presenters and there wasn’t much chemistry between them and the moderator. However, they warmed up towards the end.