Threadless

So the thought process could have gone something like this:

Hey let’s sell t-shirts?
Yo
You hear me?
Yo
Let’s get other people to design them
Yo
Then mash it up with Pop Idol
Yo
So people vote on designs
Hmm… yo
And buy them, buy them by the million
Another Oreo?

(via PSFK) It’s a success story most of us only dream of: Think up a great idea, build a company fueled by nothing but passion and love of art and humanity, blink and suddenly you’re making millions, without compromising your ideals.

That, apparently, is what happened to the guys who started Threadless. An article in this month’s Inc. Magazine profiles Jake Nickell, college dropout and wildly successful co-founder of Threadless, who stumbled into the twenty-first century’s Utopian business model:

“Nickell is at the vanguard of a new innovation model that is quietly reshaping a host of industries. Whether it’s called user innovation, crowdsourcing, or open source, it means drastically rethinking your relationship with your customers. “Threadless completely blurs that line of who is a producer and who is a consumer,” says Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “The customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting. All that has been distributed.”

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