One of the biggest gripes that I had about Threadless was that they didn’t pay people when their designs were reprinted. I guess this was something that a lot of people have said since they’ve now changed their policy so that every time a design gets reprinted, the artist gets $500. They’ve even upped the original cash reward to $2500 as well (may they were getting jealous of Design By Humans and their rather well-endowed prize-packages).

They’ve also started the ‘Alumni Club‘, I’ll let their news release explain.

“…we’ve always wanted to do cool random stuff for designers that have been selected other than just paying out cash and now we have the ability to do so. When you first win, you will get access to the Alumni Club area in the blog forum, a membership card, a totally sweet Alumni Club medal of honor, an Alumni Club tee shirt, an Alumni Club coffee mug and a fancy Alumni Club mousepad. We plan to offer other awesome stuff for Alumni Club members in the future so stay tuned! And yes, everyone who has been selected in the past will have the opportunity to get all of these goodies.”

I think that’s something that is sorely needed within the Threadless community, and I’m pretty sure that this is linked getting desingers to pick future Threadless tees, as was recently mentioned in their New York Times article.

I wonder if the $500 for reprints is retrospective, I doubt it, but I’m sure the people that made ‘Flowers in the Attic’ and ‘The Communist Party’ wouldn’t mind their reprint cash!

Here’s the blog post from Threadless.