Grab More Market Share: How to Wrangle Business Away from Lazy Competitors

User-Generated T-Shirts

Threadless is a famous crowdsourcing success story that actually employed the crowd before crowdsourcing was even a word. This T-shirt company invites artists to upload their artwork to be considered for a Threadless design. The company then displays the artwork on its website, and the Threadless web community (with more than a million web visitors) has a chance to vote on designs they like. Each design is scored, and each week the brand management team at Threadless takes a look at the top-scoring designs and chooses a few to print. What's even cooler for the designers is that winners receive $2,000 in cash, a $500 gift certificate, and $500 every time there is a reprint of that design.

How did Threadless get a community of more than a million visitors? Well, if you're an artist who has submitted your design, you just lobby all of your friends to vote for you. You can see where this is going: T-shirt designs—American Idol style.

Threadless has been such a flashpoint for social networking that it has attracted 80,000 artists so far. Add in the friends of these 80,000 designers and the numbers get big, really fast. Cofounder Jake Nickell says that the success of Threadless isn't because it's a great brand; rather, it's due to the fact that Threadless is a strong self-generating community of creativity. Do you see what's happened here? The public consciousness—the community, the fans, the artists, and their friends—has catapulted Threadless into a $30 million, ...