I stumbled across this presentation via the How To Start A Clothing Company blog. It features Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell, co-founders of Threadless. They talk about how they turned a hobby into a multimillion dollar business and more importantly (for me at least), a leader in their market. Only a few companies are able to dictate trends in it’s market and when it comes to crowd sourcing t-shirt designs, Threadless are the go to guys.
ARVE Error: need id and provider
What really struck me was the way they approached their business in the initial stages. When I first came across Threadless, I never really thought of how it got started. I would have thought that for a company so big, there much have been some corporate business plan indicate how they were going to utilise crowd sourcing to maximise profits or something like that, but apparently not. It was simply two guys doing something they loved. The most important thing I took from this is that they just started doing something. That’s a really important lessen for me. If you want to go somewhere, just start running. Don’t get caught up in how things could turn out or what happens if…just start doing it. You never know what a start could lead to.
Hey there,
I found you via a post on t-shirtforums and liked this post. Its a cool video and interesting to learn that a big company like Threadless started out much like everybody else.
Thanks!
– Clint
http://www.scaredpanda.com
Thanks Clint. It was a definite eye opener for me. You never know where things can end up.
Cool site by the way. What kind of causes do you support?
Thanks, we support local not for profit organizations here in Chicago. For
every design & t-shirt that we do, we ask the artist to choose an
organization they would like to donate money to. The only requirement is
that they are not for profit and located in Chicago.