Penniless & Threadless (threadless.com)

Member Name: tazzywazzy

Product:	threadless.com
Date:	01/06/07 (153 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Get famous (sort of), make a bit a dosh & stop being naked!

Disadvantages: if you are no good at designing t-shirts you may end up being naked for the rest of your life!

Ok, let's start with what the website offers….

Threadless is, in essence, a website to buy original t-shirts from. Sounds simple so far, there are a lot of sites out there that offer "original" t-shirts, so what makes this one, and it's t-shirts, so special?

Threadless only sell t-shirts that have been designed by all those aspiring artists and graphic designers, the idea is simple, come up with a t-shirt idea, download a template and submit it to the website, then kick back and wait for those in the threadless community to vote your t-shirt into the number 1 spot, your t-shirt gets printed, BOOM you win $2000.

~Getting in on the act~

The first thing you will need to do is to create yourself an account, it is all very simple, just create yourself a username, enter your email ad, create yourself a password, fill in your date of birth, add a country, check the box for the newsletter (if you want it) and you are away - simple as that.

In your account you will find that it is fairly simply laid out, with four tabs running across the top of the page, all of which are clearly labelled, from here you can edit your profile, writing a bit about yourself, put in your myspace, flickr etc links, so threadless can pull stuff from your page to create your threadless profile, track your orders and the designs or slogans that you have submitted, you can even post blogs from here.

~So you have got yourself an account and fancy yourself as a bit of an aspiring artist, how do you go about submitting your ideas?~

Anyone can submit an idea, but you do need a basic knowledge of Photoshop or Flash. Templates (for both Photoshop and Flash) to submit your designs are available on the website, the Photoshop one is basically just a coloured t-shirt, if you expand the layers table, you will see that all the available colours are listed in different layers - just drag and drop the ones that you want into your new document and place your t-shirt on it, save your layout at the specified dimensions, create yourself a little thumbnail (dimensions on site) and submit…

~My Experience Entering the Competition~

I joined the site with the intention of winning their rather appealing $2000 that they were waving under my nose, so I found a little design in my sketch book, which I thought would be really cute and decided to submit it.

First thing I did was make it print ready, so started cleaning it up in Photoshop, I then took a look around the site to see how others had been submitting their designs, I quickly noticed that a lot of people were not using the template supplied, they were creating their own layouts or adapting the existing one. I think that threadless will accept your design, regardless of the template that you use, as long as it is to the dimensions/resolution that they specify.

I created my template, followed all the instructions and submitted my design, which was then "pending" for a couple of days - in this time, apparently the threadless design team then check the design and may reject it before it goes up for scoring, I actually waited about 4 working days, with the promise that someone would email me to tell me when it was up on the site - I am still waiting for the email.

Each design that gets submitted to the website is scored for a period of seven days, however the design may be removed early, from what I can gather, each design has a period of 24 hours to score a certain amount of points - other members give your design a score from 0 - 5.

My design was removed after 48 hours and 655 people scored it, giving it an average score of 1.49 out of 5 (I have a feeling your score needs to stay over 1.5), when I clicked on my design to find out what my score was, it told me that I would be sent an email explaining why it had been removed - the email never arrived.

~Community Based Functions (Blog Forum)~

There is a page (listed under "participate") called Blog Forum, from here you can post blogs, talk about products available on the website, score t-shirt designs that have been entered into the competition, read the latest community news & also view the critique section.

The critique section is basically a place where you can upload your designs, before submitting them for real so that other members of the community can give you advice and help you tweak your design, so that you can submit it and, hopefully, have a shot at getting your t-shirt printed and winning the all important $2000. Unfortunately I discovered this function after submitting my first design, but I submitted another to see how it worked.

Submitting your design that is up for critique is pretty much the same as submitting it to the competition, except you click on the critique tab on the page where you upload your design for real, it immediately appears on the critique page and other members can rate it in one of three ways - "great submit it!" or "it needs work" or "umm….don't submit".

~Keep Your Eye on the Prize~

The prize is $2000, and is paid to you as $1,500 in cash, a 12 Club Membership (see below for further details), worth $200 and $300 in threadless gift vouchers.


~Other functions of the site~

For those that are not into drawing, you could try and get a slogan printed on a t-shirt, submission works in a similar way to submitting designs - you can do this from your account, members then score you in one of two ways - either they would wear it or they wouldn't.

There are also monthly (roughly) competitions run, which are called "threadles love's" - it's a small heart icon in the participate section. Basically each competition has a theme, and if you win the competition you are entitled to the normal threadless incentive + something else, normally an ipod or something.

You can always try to earn threadles points, as part of threadless' StreetTeam (you automatically become a member when you create an account) - you are given a link which you can post in blogs, on your myspace page, whatever - if someone clicks on your link and buys a t-shirt, you are entitled to 2 StreetTeam which equates to $3, or submit a photo of yourself wearing a threadless t-shirt and submit it, every time you submit an image of you wearing a t-shirt you get $1.50 in points, if they "love" it (not sure how that gets judged), you get $15 worth of threadless points, which you can then redeem in the form of t-shirts.

Threadless also have a club called "12 club" (you can win membership by submitting a money t-shirt) which costs $200 - for your $200 you get 12 t-shirts, one every month, selected by the threadless team and a $30 gift voucher, your $200 includes shipping costs ($250 international) - the only thing is, I don't think you can choose your shirt, it is just sent to you.

Obviously there is also the function to buy t-shirts, most range from $15 upwards, I think it is based on how many colours are printed on the t-shirt, each t-shirt is only available for a limited amount of time/stock, but re-prints are sometimes available.

~My Community Experiences~

This community is quite clique, I found it really hard to get people to even look at my design up for critique in the first place, the people are also not very friendly, or constructive in their criticism, for example, when I uploaded my critique, some guy's comment was "Horrible, poor design, pointless and shallow subject… just too ugly" - OK, that's your opinion, but maybe something constructive would have been more helpful, another comment was "the whole boob/star nipple thing is just weird, composition and colours don't work well, oddly proportioned" - again, fair enough, but how can I improve?

Looking around, yes there are good t-shirt designs out there, but it seems like some really good ones just don't get the ratings they deserve and others are a bit lame and are received well, I have yet to figure out whether this is a community thing or whether some of these people genuinely have bad taste….

So far, I have decided that if you want to make it on threadless you need to give the masses what they want, don't expect anyone to be forth coming with useful advice or information, they don't really want to help you to improve, a lot of the people that give out negative comments don't even submit ideas, I think they just like being able to tell people what to do, I did find a couple of members on there that were helpful and constructive, but a lot are only interested in those that are already established on the site and it seems like an uphill battle to get recognised or even get someone to help you out.

I may try submitting designs in the future, probably using the critique function first and then trying to see if I can eek some sort of constructive criticism out of the site, but in the future I will probably be using another website - café press to sell merchandise (look out for reviews later).

~Threadless Kids~

Threadless originally had a kids section and sold kids t-shirts (about $10 for a t-shirt & $15 for a baby grow thing), which they still have, however they seem to have started a new site - www.threadlesskids.com where you can vote for certain designs to become kids t-shirts.

Summary: Worthy of a gander...