Hello friends, while researching about retail companies that have used social technologies in their business, I have come across one awesome example that not only uses social technology but is actually existing because of social technology.
Yes I am talking about 'THREADLESS'. Threadless is basically an apparel company, a company that makes it fuzzy to decide who's the company and who's the customer. This company was started in 2000 by Jack Nickell and Jacob Dehart (no longer with the company) with just $1,000 of their own, based in Chicago, Illinois.
This company has an online community of artists that creates designs. All the artists are welcomed to enter into contest and submit their design. These designs are then made public for public vote. The designs with most number of votes and community feedback is selected and printed on clothes, phone cover cases, mugs and other products and sold worldwide through the online store and their retail store in Chicago. The artist is whose work is selected for printing is rewarded with $2,000 in cash and $500 in Threadless giftcards that can be exchanged for $200 cash. Each time a design is reprinted, the respective artist will receive $500 cash.
This company has beautifully used many Mckinsey organisational functions like Product Development, Business Support, Marketing and Sales. The company has account in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Google+ and Flickr. Facebook has 866,838 likes and is regularly updated with the new contest, promotions, sales, winners and request from subscribers for reprinting of some T-shirts. The core success of this company lies behind its blog and Facebook page which attract more artists to submit their design and attract more customer to fund the artists. Most of the people visiting Threadless are willing buyers. To keep them coming back, company devised few incentive schemes like upload a photo of yourself wearing Threadless T-shirt and you will receive store credit if $1.50. Such marketing strategies resulted in sales of 1,550 T-shirts on a typical day. On a one day sale in this spring, company sold 35,000 T-shirts that gave company a good number of new visitors on a long term scale. The new visitors are encouraged to start blogs, upload their photos, leave flirty comments and also signup for Threadless newsletter. Every week the newsletter is delivered to 370,000 email addresses and 75% are actually opened to check the new designs available.
In 2000, Threadless printed t-shirts every few months. By 2004, the company started printing new t-shirts every week. Soon in 2006, the company that was started with $1,000 jumped to $6.5 million revenue. Soon the company was associated with crowdsourcing term. In 2008, the company got listed on the cover page on Inc. as 'THE MOST INNOVATIVE SMALL COMPANY IS AMERICA'. Customer play a very critical role in the operations of company including idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting and all that has been distributed.
In 2010, a book was published named "Threadless: Ten years of T-shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Online Design Community" by Jack Nickell that throws light on the decade of Threadless designs, their artists, interviews with many of the designers and detailed story on how company achieved such heights and success.
Below video shows few funny designs of Threadless T-shirt:
Wow...I got one more site for my shopping....Studying E2.0 is so fun...I feel like lets start my own company with friends...lol...
Reference:
CIHLAR, R. (2010). 4 Reasons Threadless Owns Social
Media and Community. MAY 27, 2010 from http://www.trada.com/blog/threadless-social-media-marketing/
interesting way of how the company works. keep it up.
ReplyDeleteP.S i also want to start a new company with friends but i need to graduate first .:D
Lol I m also waiting for that day...what sort of business are you interested in??
Deleteapology for my REALLY LATE reply , i am interested in become distributor of construction material.
DeleteWoooaaaa....I always wish to study civil engineering....if i was a civil engg. then i would have surely ordered the construction material from you...lol...
DeleteReally cool business concept. Similar to Etsy but still original. Great post.
ReplyDeleteI didn't knew about Etsy before your comment... :)
Deletenice way of using democratic way of producing goods of peoples choice. it actually gives 2 major advantages. firstly, the producer gets good market and also people can save their time in selecting the goods as they have already selected it earlier. good post. cheers.
ReplyDeleteYeah and in addition we can see lots of designs withing short time. It saves times too for the shopping which i plus point for girls...lol ;)
DeleteGreat and simple post you shared. It has such a mythology about it, but it really is just making a common sense! Thanks for pointing that in your post.
ReplyDeletedigitalbrief.com