The Santa Cruz Sentinel recently covered the recent book by Jake Nickell:
"Threadless" is the how-to book for crowdsourcing T-shirt designs. In it, Jake Nickell tells the story of his own amazingly successful company, Threadless, which he and co-founder Jacob DeHart started in 2000 with $1,000 in seed money. Without omitting the missteps and growing pains, Nickell describes how Threadless.com has grown in 10 years to become what Inc. magazine hailed in 2008 as "the most innovative small company in America." What makes Threadless a truly innovative company is the level of involvement of its online community. Designers upload their T-shirt designs to the Threadless website, where members of the community comment, critique and score them on a scale of 0 to 5. "Typically, a score of 3.0 and above [is] a great score," Nickell explains in the book. "But it's not just high scores that get printed. Sometimes we look for controversial designs that get a ton of zeros and a ton of fives."
NICKELL: An artist submits a design. It gets scored by our community of about 1.5 million people and the top scoring designs we actually print and sell. We pay the artist $2,000 and a $500 gift certificate and then royalties on reprint fees. And we come out with six to nine new designs every single week. Last year we paid over $1.5 million out to artists. RYSSDAL: So the business term, the nomenclature for this, is crowd-sourcing, right? You go out and you get these people to submit and then you crowd-source the evaluation. Did that come organically from your start in that online art community?
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