Very interesting article over at the Crowdsourcing blog about everyone’s favourite user-submission and rating tee shop, Threadless. As you would imagine, the article is about the economics of crowdsourcing and something called ‘long-tail’, which are a bit over my head (though it is fun to learn about the business behind the cotton), but there are some very interesting numbers in the article:
- They sell 60,000 t-shirts a month
- The estimated gross for 2006 is $18 million
- The user community amounts to about 350,000 people
- When they do a reprint, they reprint at least 1,200 of the design (and remember how fast Flowers in the Attic usually sells out)
- They’ve turned down offers from Target and Urban Outfitters and 99% of sales occur online.
I know it’s a subject a bit off the beaten track of HYA, but I’ve noticed a spate of articles recently about small and underground tee companies, and thought you might want to hear about one of the success stories.
Thank God for that, I was starting to run out of excuses for running a tee company!
If there was ever a tee design that was destined to be turned into a hoodie and be worn by record store owners across the world it was the Exploded Turntable, if I remember correctly, the artist actually takes apart items (such as the turntable) and draws based upon what he finds, how cool is that? I wonder if he knows that you ca usually find these things in manuals?
Whilst I do see the exploded turntable as being one of the best sellers, ‘Can’t beat’em Sell’em‘ and ‘Ghost Camera‘ are actually my favourites, I just like the cutesy design of the former, and the idea behind the latter.
The hoodies sell for $38, but if you use the coupon code ‘tell‘ (lowercase) then you will get $7 off your order.
In other Oddica news, they’re going to be sending out wallet-sized ‘tell cards’ with every order, so that when someone asks you where you got that awesome tee (which happened to me twice this weekend, whilst wearing ‘A Fathom Farewell‘ from Threadless) instead of you telling them, then them forgetting, you can just give them a little card, and then when they next go to the ATM and thumb through their cards they’ll be like, “oh yeah, Oddica, that octopus on a plane was awesome, what clever marketing!”
