NEW YORK — Everyone knows that the Web can be a great tool in selling hip fashions, but SkinnyCorp has found it also may be a good place to design and market-test new looks.
The Chicago-based company operates Threadless.com, which holds a continuous online contest in which designers submit T-shirt ideas, and visitors vote for their favorites. Designs that garner enough votes are made into T-shirts and sold on the site. More than 30,000 designs have been submitted since the site launched in December 2000, and some 100,000 users have signed up to vote. It seems to be an idea that’s picking up steam — 1,500 more people sign up each week.
“It’s kind of snowballed,” said Jake Nickell, who founded the site with Jacob DeHart. “It’s like having our own research department.” The pair started the venture after winning a design competition at the New Media Underground Festival in London, and the site took off from there.
Shirts sell for $15 to $17, and the company expects to generate T-shirt sales of at least $5 million this year.
Threadless awards $500 to design winners, and although Threadless maintains exclusive rights to print the design on a T-shirt, the designer retains the copyright and can use the design in other projects and portfolios.
Men and women respond differently to certain designs, Nickell said. Recently, the home page featured six winning designs, five of which were reprinted only in women’s sizes because “they don’t sell well for men, but we can’t keep them on the shelf for women,” he said.
One of those was “Squeaked,” in which an elephant and mice are chasing each other. The designer, Ross Zeitz, won so many Threadless competitions that the company hired him. Zeitz, whose other winning creations are “Fathom Farewell,” “Treading the Giant Eel,” “81 Gemini,” “Pandemonium” and “Trucker Hats Used to Be Cool,” started submitting designs while enrolled at Louisiana State University.
Novelty T-shirts have been around for years, but their popularity seems unshakable. “It’s a really down-to-earth thing that everyone needs to have in their wardrobe,” Nickell said. DeHart agreed, adding that Threadless’ appeal stems partly from the constant changing roster of designers. “We don’t have trends. We have such a variety of submissions that our design is always changing,” he said. “T-shirts have always been around and will stick around forever.”