Green Cotton

A quiet revolution is starting in the fashion industry one mouse click at a time, which may chisel away at monolithic brand dominance. Web 2.0 is seeping into online apparel through retailers such as threadless.com which offer products driven by and/or created by the marketplace, e.g. consumers.

With its thousands of users not only creating its T-shirt designs, but also rating designs and eventually buying them, Threadless is a great example of a flourishing e-fashion marketplace. Threadless.com relies exclusively on its web users and customers to create, upload and rate designs. The best designs get produced and sold. Users rate the designs, e.g. anyone can rate the designs for free. With thousands of users, the model is sustainable and effective for ensuring adequate demand for supply.

As such, threadless demonstrates a near perfect supply-demand nexus with demand directly linked to supply and vice versa: the more popular the T-shirts, the more they produce. Incentives are built in to ensure optimal design submissions. Winning designs receive $2000 cash, plus a $500 gift certificate, as well as an additional $500 every time their design is reproduced.

The e-marketplace is perfect for not only incentivizing designers to create the next hottest look, but also for encouraging designers to go the next step and market and eventually sell as many of their shirts as they can. As such, threadless does not own nor contract any fashion designers themselves. Their users are their designers. And they appear to be doing exceedingly well.

What’s interesting is that while I as expecting an ‘itunes’ store, or Amazon.com ratings arrangement, whereby the site informs users which T-shirts are the most popular, the site refrains from doing this explicitly. The only information provided is how many people voted on an item. It does not tell you what the composite (or average) score is. It appears that threadless.com wants you to blindly vote, or rather to vote with your honest opinion, uninfluenced by others.While this is an interesting model, I must say that it also has its downsides.

For someone without a lot of time (a.k.a. myself), who does not want to sift through 379 Tee-shirt designs, I find it very unappealing to not know which ones are more popular than others. It would be helpful to know which are the top hits – and then spend the 5 minutes or so, clicking through those. However, honestly, while there were some really innovative and exquisitely designed Tee’s in the store, there was also a lot of crap, too. It would therefore be useful for threadless to either:

1. Reveal the composite (average) score on T-shirts, or
2. Do some of design prioritizing so that viewers can view just the top 25 or so.

Nonetheless, threadless has created a flourishing marketplace with thousands of interesting and unique designs. The best of the best are produced and sold, and I believe they are the first of many on-line (e-fashion) stores to emerge in this kind of market paradigm. Expect to see more such stores, and likely beyond fashion as well.

Photo source: www.threadless.com