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Mum’s The Word
As Steve mentioned in his latest entry, there certainly is a lot of negativity spewing from the Threadless blog forums these days. Obviously, you can’t please everyone and when it concerns art and clothing, people can become quite disgruntled fairly quickly. Complaints and occasional discontent have no doubt been an integral part of the blogs for as long as they’ve existed. But even Steve can’t deny that it appears to be somewhat of an epidemic at late.
Apparently one of the reasons Threadless users are becoming seemingly more annoyed and discontent is due to the shift in the types of designs being printed. A week of new prints hasn’t gone by in recent memory where at least a handful of users aren’t saying something to the effect of “What has happened to the old Threadless?! I hate all of these designs! They’re crazy for printing this type of crap!”.
The change is subtle, but noticeable. Let me be quick to say that there’s nothing at all wrong with change and with a company attempting to reach a broader audience. (It’s true that if you’re not growing, you’re dying.) The problem seems to be, however, that nobody really knows if this is what Threadless is really trying to do. Are they attempting to broaden the appeal of Threadless and reach other clientele? Will they sacrifice the interests of their current members, or are they seeking to find a common ground and a balance of old and new? Or, are voting patterns simply evolving with the current trends and wave of new users?
For a community based company, Threadless certainly doesn’t seem too concerned with enlightening their own community with what’s happening. Obviously, not every tiny decision or change warrants a news post. Yet with such an uproar of discontentment lately, one would think that a little explaining should be in order.
Take Nintendo, for example. (And if you’re not into gaming or a fan of the big N, just bear with me for a moment.) It’s no secret that they’ve launched a campaign to bring non-gamers into gaming. We’re talking the type of people who have never picked up a video game in their life and have no interest to do so. At first, Nintendo fans were skeptical to say the very least. Most worried that Nintendo was going to abandon traditional gaming, focus solely on attracting a completely new audience of gaming illiterates, and leave the hard-core-RPG-lovin’ gamers high and dry.
I’m sure there wasn’t a gaming forum online that wasn’t buzzing with concerned Nintendo fans outraged at the prospect that the company was about to turn against them and ruin their most beloved franchises. I believe that the Nintendo community would still be in an uproar of skepticism and confusion if the company hadn’t so quickly and clearly stated their motives and vision. They reassured their loyal customers through all levels of communication that their interests in attracting non-gamers would not jeopardize the more traditional games and their fan base of hard-core gamers. Nintendo then preceded to feverishly market their “touch generation” series of games which relied solely on the DS handheld’s simple stylus controls to attract their new target audience. They simultaneously stayed true to their word of continuing the franchises and types of game-play that appeal most to their more seasoned gamers reassuring fears and making everyone happy.
If Nintendo had been less vocal about their plans and not as obsessed with convincing the gaming community that they would stay true to their roots, perhaps many would have become discontent and left the company long before Nintendo could have proven otherwise. As a Nintendo gamer, I’ve felt reassured by their openness in expressing their wishes to expand their clientele yet still remain faithful to their current fans. This honest tactic has allowed me to become more accepting of the new breed of “non-gamer-games”. I realize that they won’t become the only focus of the company as Nintendo has continued to stress the fact that they don’t wish to change their community of gamers, just that they wish to expand it. The plan so far has proved incredibly successful. Old gamers can continue playing the same types of games they know and love, yet now have the option to try something a little different. Non-gamers are at the same time discovering that there’s another whole world of entertainment now readily accessible to them.
The question once again presents itself then. Is Threadless doing the same type of thing? Are they trying to broader their appeal and reach a new audience of consumers? Their lack of explanation, either way, seems to prove their greatest enemy right now. Members such as myself are going to continue wondering what the deal is and either endure until everything smoothes over and returns to how it once was, or leave the community altogether after no apparent answer is given and the goals remain fuzzy.
If a company wants to invoke change and explore new angles while simultaneously remaining committed to it’s older-generation of consumers, it will take some time for their vision to come to fruition and to ‘prove’ that a happy medium is trying to be reached. Thus enters some tactful explanation. Most people aren’t going to wait around and ’see’ what track a company is on, they’re going to want a general idea of which direction that company is heading before devoting anymore of their own time.
I could be wrong about this and I could be acting a bit paranoid. Personally, however, this is how I feel and I know at least a few other Threadless users are expressing their discontent for similar reasons. I want to know where the company is headed, if anywhere, and I want the decency of some company-to-user communication on the broadest levels. (Such as with news posts and in newsletters, not just inconsistent comments in user’s blogs by random staff members trying to reassure the masses.)
I don’t intend on becoming one of those people convinced that Threadless has a hidden agenda. I truly love the company, that’s why I write for a blog titled Loves Threadless. I don’t think they would purposely turn their backs on their current community of users and what appeals to them most, so I’ve explored another area of reason. Perhaps Threadless themselves isn’t at fault for the shift in what types of designs they’ve been printing. After all, a community based company is only as good as its participating members. Threadless may not purposely be choosing different types of designs but, in fact, have fewer designs from which to choose on a weekly basis that match the types of designs they previously offered. Simply put, people aren’t submitting the types of things they used to.
Anyway, that’s enough speculation and rambling for one night. I apologize that this entry has become painfully lengthy. I’m just very interesting in hearing what others think about this situation, fellow LT bloggers and Threadless users alike, so please comment if you’ve managed to read this far.
Should Threadless become more vocal about their plans? Or should users just go with the flow? Time will tell what lies ahead for our beloved t-shirt community, yet a little reassurance and clarification from the company which runs it would prove mighty nice.
Tags: blogs, community, discontent, explaination, Nintendo, threadless
professorzan said,
August 19, 2006 @ 12:26 pm
I think Threadless is kind of in a place of limbo. On the one hand, any business wants to grow and expand. And they’ve been doing so, what with the Threadless Select shirts, and the Type Tees, and the children’s shirts. And, yes, it does seem fairly obvious that the types of ideas being submitted are changing from what they originally were. Which leaves Threadless in a bit of a quandery: how do they print the types of shirts older-generation members remember when those types of shirts aren’t being submitted? Threadless can only print the shirts the majority of the members say they will buy.
But on the other hand, obviously Threadless isn’t getting as many designs to print, or they wouldn’t be reprinting so many old designs. Just my two cents.
Steve Swartz said,
August 19, 2006 @ 4:13 pm
This is a very interesting post, Bree. Thanks.
I think there are actually several different interesting “changes” to think about: changes in the types of shirts being printed, changes in the community, and changes in the relationship of the contest to the print decisions.
You don’t have to spend much time studying http://www.threadless.com/all to see that the taste behind the print decisions has changed radically since the early days of threadless. Of course it’s impossible to say exactly when things changed, but the first shirts that look like they might be printed today start showing up in the fall of 2004, and by spring of 2005 the new look is more or less completely established. I think it’s hard to find a really substantial change in the quality of shirts since early 2005: there have been little subtrends and shirt genres that have come or go, but as compared to the larger change those things seem quite minor. The old look had a edgy quirkiness that I often find really attractive (there are dozens of retired or seldom-reprinted shirts I’d buy in a heartbeat if they were available); the new look has a much broader appeal. The change had to happen if threadless wanted to go from 200 to 2000 shirt print runs (or whatever they are today), but it’s not surprising that many people mourn it. I don’t think they print the sorts of designs they print today because they aren’t getting the other kind of designs; I think the print the sorts of designs they print today because they want to sell more of each print.
I’m sure the threadless online community has evolved continuously since it began, as all online communities tend to do. Things changed dramatically last Christmas-time: the community is much larger now, it’s much younger, it’s less artistic and more commercial, and it’s less respectful and coherent. You can see evidence of that on the blog, in the submission comments, and in the “group aesthetic” as reflected by the voting.
I don’t believe threadless ever constrained itself to printing the highest-scoring designs. Even back in the summer of 2003, you’ll see ‘em printing a shirt like _Beat BT Music_ that scored 3.20 right alongside a shirt like _Reaching for he_r that only scored 2.53 (given one shirt scoring 3.20, I have to imagine there were other shirts available that scored better than 2.5). As the community has grown and the group taste has gotten worse, more and more shirts go unprinted that were beloved by the voting public (akita’s design with the marshmallows cooking their friend Ted, which went unprinted after scoring 3.61, is an early example of that). That’s just good sense on threadless’s part: the voters’ taste is increasingly bad.
WHile there might be people out there who really long for the old skool shirts, and while there might be designers confused about the contest process, I think that most of the negativity on the blogs comes from the change in the community. Partly, people are pissed that the community is of lower quality than it used to be; partly, the community itself is more negative, so you’re more likely to encounter grumpy people complaining about shirts than happy people loving shirts. I guess that’s the price of success: you could imagine a restricted/moderated threadless blog recapturing some of the interest of the older community, but the price of opennness and popularity is what it is….
MrDomino said,
August 27, 2006 @ 1:21 pm
I don’t know if I qualify as “old threadless” I heard about it a couple months before the $2005 contest. Oddly enough Moss linked it on another forum that we used to post on. Regardless, I still feel that transition. A part of me has accepted the fact that they are making a business decision, and really as a “professional” designer I can’t fault them for it. Design has an uncomfortable place in the “real” art world because it is fairly fundamentally commercial and for many classical artists that automatically relegates it to sell-out status.
But, for me anyway, it’s the designer part of my persona that is frustrated the most with this transition. I love to be bested. I love to see someone make work that blows mine away despite my best efforts. In part because it motivates me to be better and in part because it opens new avenues of creativity. That’s why I have a love/hate relationship with the Loves Threadless competitons. There’s a real sense of community learning there. We all approach the same problem from different angles and usually a variety of very clever and well executed designs that I would NEVER have imagined come from it. Then to my great disappointment something mundane wins the competition. Or something flashy and completely superficial.
So the greatest difference I feel is that lack of challenge, with notable exceptions. The vast majority of work I see now is just not compelling in any fashion. That is to say that I feel the grotesque stillness in the quality of work. Design, or any art, is always in motion. It’s the result, I feel, of an eternal internal struggle that every artist faces to constantly improve, expand, and evolve. What I see now has the feel of desperation, of people trying incredibly hard to find the magic formula that makes you money.
I miss the challenge. Increasingly it seems that people are less motivated to create something meaningful and more tempted to find that trend that sticks.
Personally, I wish that the Select Tees were open to everyone, not just people that have been printed a certain number of times.
Bekki said,
August 27, 2006 @ 1:50 pm
They have changed… I submitted a few designs on the same level of “cuteness” as the before-Threadless and they were all rejected. They weren’t poorly designed either. But now all I see is the random images that are thrown together.
On in particuclar that really bugs me:
http://www.threadless.com/product/447/I_Wanna_Dance
…