What Happened to Threadless?
racked.com
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This is exactly what happened to me, I used to wear a lot of their t-shirts, and needed a couple of new ones, so I did an order, and the fit had changed completely and they started loosing their print after a few washes.
I didn't bother contact them, since I did not want to get into a "ship items back, receive item again and pay import taxes again"-cycle and wrote them off.
They have been turning on their marketing emails a lot with me last couple of weeks, I think they are bleeding.
Since many (most?) designs that are on Threadless are also on Society6, and since Society6 shirts are still relatively high quality, I order from them now instead.
This isn't just a Threadless problem. All T-shirts now seem to be made out of this thin stretchy garbage material--good if you are an Italian model, bad if you are a normal 40 year old.
I'd kill for a supplier that actually still uses nice solid cotton material that drapes rather than stretches.
fat b∗∗∗∗∗d?
Who would have thought that people stop coming back to your business if the quality of your products goes way downhill?
I'm just one data point but having purchased from Threadless a few times, I haven't bought one graphic tee in the past five years or more. The novelty of a graphic tee wears off quickly. I'd rather have a more expensive but high quality plain shirt I'll like for years to come.
Same "single data point" disclaimer, but most of my peers lost interest in them mid-college when they began dressing more mature. The high schoolers I know still wear graphic tees but for whatever reason Threadless never connected with the next generation.
This is super insightful, and shouldn't be missed here. For them to stay successful for 17 years amongst a 5-10 year age group, they would need to completely refresh their customer base 2-3 times. That type of cultural relevancy is extremely hard, as anyone watching FB/Instagram vs Twitter vs Snap can attest.
Even setting aside the point that graphic shirts are a bit unfashioned, I have not seen a lot of good quality shirts at the very low threadless price.
Good shirts (good materials, fit, no sweatshop, last a long time) are way costlier.
A few years ago I tried ordering a few T-shirts again, but didn't get past the final order screen because custom-printed using Direct-to-Garment T-shirts had varying processing times, so I would have had to pay shipping fees for each separate T-shirt. That may be fine for domestic shipping (and Canada), but it quickly turns the deal unappealingly expensive anywhere else.
The shift to a more equitable royalties and rights model removed the gamification elements of Threadless that made the site so addictive to some designers and users... many designers said that the windfall $2,500 prize for winning the weekly design competition was preferable to them and they lost the motivation to submit designs due to the change.
That's a pretty dark lesson in human nature. If you give somebody nothing, they'll judge you by the big payoff you gave to someone else. If you give them a little more than nothing, they'll judge you by that. Better to give a few people a lot and give the rest nothing but dreams so everyone will always see you in a positive light.
With the Old Way:
Designer: does N work to create a design and has X% chance of winning $2500. They focus on what they love (i.e. design) and can get a nice quick payout if they're good. This is even better than a lottery, because it has the same excitement, but talent is also a factor which is very motivating. The marketing is done for them. Competing head to head is also kind of fun.
Shopper: look at the top / winning shirts and buy one if they like it. Paradox of Choice is not a problem.
With the New Way:
Designer: needs to setup a shop, do N work to create a design, then M work to market the shirt, and needs to sell nearly 400 t-shirts to get to that payout. For the winners to achieve the same outcome, it's a lot more work. For most designers, I think it's safe to assume that the marketing part is nowhere near as fun as the design part. The excitement factor is totally gone.
Shopper: has to wade through tons of shirts to figure out which one they like. Paradox of Choice is signifcant.
They had a sustainable small business model. They could have consciously leveled off when they hit their natural equilibrium and remained a profitable niche vendor in perpetuity. Instead, it appears they threw out their existing succesful business model and a good chunk of their reputation trying to scale beyond their natural limits.
What's wrong with being small if you're good at it?
MBA disease: Every MBA learns their reason for existing is to grow the business and extract maximum value for shareholders.
And if we'd change the old model to something like this:
No prize. N designers competing. Top 1/3 win, and take all of the royalties of all the shirts in the competition, forever.
How would you analyze that ? would it be a good model ?
For any contest to work, you need good entries. The prize is the payout that motivates those entries.
I think a hybrid approach could likely work, where everyone's entry is buyable by default (and they get royalties). I'm not sure people would like if the winner(s) get royalties of other entries, but it might work.
One factor I'm realizing (which may have motivated the change) is that contests are a more of a "novelty" from a marketing perspective, so it may have sustainability issues. People easily get bored, especially if it's the same experience repeated over and over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
The overjustification effect occurs when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task. The overall effect of offering a reward for a previously unrewarded activity is a shift to extrinsic motivation and the undermining of pre-existing intrinsic motivation. Once rewards are no longer offered, interest in the activity is lost; prior intrinsic motivation does not return, and extrinsic rewards must be continuously offered as motivation to sustain the activity.
Tangentially, I would encourage anyone still in college to take some psychology classes while you have the opportunity. Fascinating and useful stuff.
What will you give me?
It's impossible to know for sure, but what if Threadless had started out their "new" way?
Prior to the Great Depression, 90%+ of the US population was independent workers.
It's been a very short period in human history where lifetime employment, sitting still in one job for 30+ years, became fashionable.
It only became fashionable when the US government saw an opening to conquer the world, but needed to insure they didn't drop the ball, and tried to institute workers rights and the like, in a very hacky way, at that.
There's really no reason it has to look at all like it has to live a fulfilling life of creative output.
The whole dream of acquiring a stash of capital to free oneself from the daily grind seems largely illusory to anyone under the age of 50, thanks to many other things but the gig economy (IMO, the gig economy itself being a reaction to shitty office life conditions; the people are saying FU to oatmeal cubes, and staring a screen, being hassled by coworkers to do their job for them.)
A modern hunting-gathering lifestyle has been shown to promote positive moods on life as well.
Perhaps the notion of corralling the masses into "problem solver" groups (corporations) focused on some billionaires "problems" (not enough billions) isn't a sustainable model given inherent features of human biology and desire for free agency.
If you think about it, it's really just paid servitude to a rich master. Not really the American notion of freedom given history.
Was their model no longer profitable? Were they facing outside competition (and what was that competition doing better?). Did they take money and have to grow big / fast and therefore started selling to big box stores to increase revenues?
I don't see any reason why Threadless couldn't still be a profitable business (god forbid a lifestyle business) even today if they had maintained their cachet but maybe I'm missing something.
What they should've done IMO is spin off a secondary company or website, approach Threadless' thousands of artists and get them to publish to that one too - while keeping the weekly competition and availability that made Threadless neat.
Maybe there is mismanagement, or poor decisions, or just not staying ahead of trends in the market - but putting millions of dollars into the pockets of the business owners is the intent of all businesses. Knocking that as "premature profitability" seems silly
Or perhaps we need to consider the idea that it's actually OK for a company to not live forever. Threadless had a good run, made a lot of money for the employees and made a lot of consumers happy. It's not a failure if they don't continue to do that in perpetuity.
...What? Please explain why selling t-shirts online is a business where one winner will take all the market share.
Utilities are a natural monopoly. T-shirts are a commodity. There will always be thousands of sites selling them.
Becoming the number 1 player in that market could be profitable if said company could implement innovations that are difficult to replicate by others. But it's not the type of business where a network effect is going to shut out competitors. Customers will go to where they can get the best balance of price, quality, ease of use, and speed.
Spending a lot of VC funding selling dollar bills for 50 cents is not the only strategy, and it risks running out of money before getting to the promised land.
Running a profitable business doesn't mean you can't come to be the best in a market segment either. Profit can be reinvested in the business, and decisions can be made based on what makes sense for a sustainable business.
They have the marketplace and the tooling already, just artificially limiting scale.
Way back I made a list whilst researching for EU t-shirt/mug places -- http://alicious.com/www-cafepress-co-uk/.
I've used https://www.tshirtstudio.com/ for mugs, they were good quality.
Most large towns in UK probably have a dye-sub printing place.
If you want cheap then Vistaprint is pretty hard to beat (cart abandonment usually nets offers).
I am looking at Qwertee and want to find out about their business model and designer compensation, but whenever I approach the page footer, a new batch of T-shirts thumbnails is loaded in the page content pushing the footer away…
Someone didn't think that one through.
Edit:
> Artists/Designers receive 1 Euro per shirt sold or USD or GBP equivalent. You also retain all rights to your artwork before, during and after it appears on Qwertee (most other t shirt design sites want ownership of your design forever).
Threadless legal notice states you own and will maintain ownership of your design(s) after submission.
I have a few, and am satisfied with the quality (but only satisfied, they're still a bit thin.)
Or so we tought. I never bought a tee from them, since the international shipping fees were too high. And when they did, the stigma about their poor quality was very loud.
However I can't believe they're that low. Turns out quality does matter, and not just a very good design.
$750 cash + $250 gift card is the price in these days.
Over here they're known as TK Maxx.
"TK Maxx (Australia, Austria, United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland)"
On a side but related note: It might be interesting to read any stories about how some of the original dot-com companies are doing nowadays, those that survived, that is - from the 1997-2001 period.
CafePress IPO'd in 2012 ("PRSS") at around $19 and has been all downhill since to its current $1.76. CafePress started in San Mateo but is now apparently in Kentucky.
Zazzle seems to be healthy and active and 12 years later still run by its founders, the 3 Beaver brothers.
EDIT: Limited production runs (maybe originally needed because of printing tech, but also a possible marketing move) where also quite popular for a while.
I got everyone in my family hoodies recently, and the quality of the printing is atrocious. Obviously "printed" and flaking almost entirely off after regular wear.
Never again. They had me as a fierce loyal proponent. Now they have an enemy who will warn people away. :(
I think I just see fewer people in these kinds of t-shirts than I did ten years ago. Maybe they had to go after the long tail in a shrinking market.
They were pretty nice for the time.
They don't last that long though, and coupled with a desire to dress a bit better, I know try to buy better quality shirts .. and it is not the same price range at all !
Most of the good quality tshirts start at 40€, way more than a threadless shirt
It was a nice monthly surprise. A cool design for the most part, though, fabric quality varied from one shirt to another. Some of the shirt's fabric was so thin, it did not hold much after few washes.
At some point, I canceled it.
You want to surprise me, no problem, I'll join the game, just make sure you play it fair.
Order from them all the time.
You may also want to look locally. I came across a place that is local to me whose prices are competitive with CustomInk and it's nice to support the local business. Also no shipping. I'm sure they also do remote orders, so you can check them out too: http://eastcoastembroidery.com/