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.
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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.
