Once again. Sorry about that for the last few months. Now when you score a design, the next one presented to you is randomly selected rather than being sequential.

I've been at Threadless now coming on 12 years. I'm super proud of this company, what we've built and the decisions we've been able to make. At our last company-wide town hall, I talked with our staff about why we are doing the work we are doing and wanted to also share that publicly. It's why I'm still here, motivated to do something I think is important to the world. So here it is!

First of all, there is the reason why I started the company in the first place. It actually started as a hobby and I had no idea the potential it had. But the reasons why I started it were important and are still important to me today. Coming out of high school, I was really frustrated with mainstream consumerism… everyone going to the mall and just buying clothes with corporate logos on their chests. I hated it. No individuality. Everyone listened to the same music and wore the same clothes. It's funny, Gap logo tees were probably one of the biggest perpatrators here! Meanwhile I was starting art school and learning a lot about the internet. I became involved with a small but talented & worldwide group of design misfits. I spent every possible waking minute hanging out online with them, making things out of code or photoshop or whatever and sharing them. Starting Threadless was a way for me to take that to the next level and make things with other people that we could all have.

To recap the WHY of this stage of the company – this is when we found our principle, found something in the world that we wanted to change. We were frustrated with the way things are created and wanted to make them differently and more collaboratively – and the internet empowered us to do so.

Then, things started to get traction. People really connected with this idea. Artists all around the world were regularly submitting designs and we were quickly finding people to actually buy them. This really blew my mind, I didn't think there were a lot of people in the world that shared this principle with me but apparently there were. Also, we were starting to get a lot of attention from academia and technology and business media. This really helped us to gain confidence around the idea… start to realize it's potential. But most importantly, this is the stage of the company when artist opportunities became real. In the beginning artists weren't even paid for their work and it was a very small audience so recognition wasn't a motivator either. But now we were paying meaningful sums of money to artists and giving them meaningful exposure.

The WHY of this stage of the company is that we discovered that this was more than a hobby, in fact it was, according to Inc magazine, "The most innovative company in America." We discovered we had the power to make an impact on the world with this idea.

Today we think we can change the world with what we are doing. We believe that we can make celebrating the stories and work of the individuals who make things an integral part of consumer culture. We can be the drivers of that change. Our partnership with Gap is a prime example of us getting in there and changing the status-quo. We're working with them and other partners to completely change the way things are done. We can apply what we've been doing all these years to all sorts of new products, open it up to new distribution channels and audiences through partners, have a major impact on how content is created and consumed. Our community is itching for it. The talent and size of the community of creators we've attracted over the years combined with huge, meaningful opportunities we build for them will become an unstoppable force.

So at this stage of the company, the WHY of it is about becoming bigger than ourselves. It doesn't just have to be us making t-shirts and selling them ourselves. We can share this with the world and with other products… We have an incredible community of super talented artists and designers and we need to spread what's happening here into the world in a huge way.

To distill the WHY down to a sentence, here it is. "Threadless exists to give the creative minds of the world more opportunities to make and sell great art." This started with a discovery of something we wanted to change in the world, became something attainable as we got traction and something that is actually going to changing the world with all this work we are putting in today.

Stoked to keep pushing and thanks for being a part of the madness!

UPDATE! Our latest partnership with Gap has launched! Check out this map to see it with your own eyes!

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Some of you may have heard about our latest massive partnership through the grapevine. Some of you may have even been notified that your design(s) is part of it... If not… you get the news early as an Alumni: Prepare to see exclusive Threadless products at Gap stores starting at the end of February! With how much help and support we've had from Alumni over the years on these types of initiatives, I wanted to make sure you were the first to know!

We are launching with 26 designs, every one of which has never been printed before. And, there will be many more launches of many more designs throughout the year. More details to come about this shortly but the thing I'm most stoked about with this partnership is how far Gap has gone in-store to tell the artist's stories, can't wait to show pictures! PLEASE KEEP THIS CONFIDENTIAL until we make the official announcement in late February.

What I really wanted to discuss in this thread is Threadless partnerships more broadly. The fact that, now, when you submit a design to Threadless, it's not just to become a Threadless tee. We are working with many partners, Gap is just one, to find opportunities for many more of the designs submitted. Some of these you've seen like Griffin, Dell, Thermos, etc. Others are future partnerships in the works and let me tell you, there are a LOT of them! Some are t-shirt based like Gap but others aren't. We're a design community first, it just so happens we've mostly been printing designs on tees.

One of the things we've struggled with is finding designs for partners. It's an extremely manual process. We've had nearly 400,000 designs submitted to Threadless in the past but we really don't have a very good way to search through them to find designs for partners. Well, now you can help by tagging your designs! For the best chance at getting your design selected for a partnership, we need you to tell us more about the content, concept and appeal of your design.

Go here to tag all of the designs you've submitted in the past!

Thanks! And keep in mind that when you submit a design in the future, it may not just be Threadless.com where or what you could see it end up on - we're looking for all sorts of opportunities to get your work out into the world. Over time you will also see us make submitting ideas for things other than tees an easier process.

p.s. In case it's not crystal clear, we always contact you about an opportunity before we give your design to a partner.

Back in 2005, my good friend Joe Suta came in and painted the walls in the first Threadless office. Here's a photo from then:



Since then, Joe has probably painted more than 30,000 square feet of Threadless stuff... be it display art for our store windows, offices walls, furniture, outdoor murals, etc. He still paints for us regularly today. Well, a couple years ago he moved out to Colorado and got started with a couple other guys creating a snowboard company. I joined on as an investor/advisor (and website builder.) They spent a good 2 seasons developing the perfect snowboard.

Just last week we launched the site and you can buy the boards online. These boards are literally the best. Get one if you are in the market.

Threadless will probably do a design challenge with them for some of next season's boards :) ... Fun fact: A couple of the boards were designed by Cole Blotcky, ex-threadless employee and designer of Rabbit Valley. See if you can figure out which ones =-O

Check it out: Nightmare Development (Facebook too)

is a labs tee!



pretty rad, i'm super excited that this design did well. we need more weird stuff!

post up your favorite underdog subs from the past here, or make new ones. let's start a revolution.

i dig these...

photo credit

Discuss.

Yo yo, we're working on a little somethin' somethin' right now and are sifting through the submission archives for some amazing holiday (christmas, hanukkah, kwanzaa, etc) related designs. If anyone remembers any great ones that we haven't printed or has any they've submitted in the past, post em up in this blog!

We're going to do something rad with them.

We just scored a Makerbot here in the Threadless Art Department!

This means we can take 3d models and print them out!!! It can print up to a 4" cube. Anyone want to make stuff for us to print out? We can download models from Thingiverse but we're much more interested in stuff you guys could make.

I'd like to recreate some Threadless tees in 3d and print them out. I'm reading through this FAQ ... downloading some free 3d software right now :)

Send your STL files to community@threadless.com and we'll make them! Maybe even send you one!

Fun :)