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.