Quickly, apologies in order for the absence of several LT personalities. Everyone seems to have been completely swamped with actual life all at once. These things happen.

Now then, Threadless is asking for people to bounce back what you think about them in their customer satisfaction survey. It’s important for them to stay hip, and boy do that know that. I do wonder if it’s not partly a response to some of the vitriol we’ve seen on the blogs to the latest print choices.

To which, I say Threadless is well overdo for a passed-over print week. 5-8 shirts from more than 2-3 months ago that rocked out hard but didn’t make the cut for whatever reason. My list starts with My Dog, The Lion.

Next up has to be Don’t Take Treasure Maps From Strangers. And you get the idea.

What’s on your list? What amazing shirts got the cruel, cold shoulder? Who should be honored posthumously, so to speak? Let us know.

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? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in my local pub tonight, eating lemon prawns and rice, writing about shirts. On the walk down, two hot air balloons were just rising up from the local airport into the sunset-dappled clouds, framing Mt Rainier as it rose up into pinkness a hundred miles to the south. It’s beautiful in Seattle this time of year: the highs are usually in the 70s, the lows are in the 50s, and it’s rare to get any substantial rain. Mix that with a friendly Threadless sighting yesterday (Quentin was wearing the odd coulpe’s Satan’s Little Helper, and an interesting set of shirts printed this Monday, and it’s been a good week.

Given the broad range of tastes in the Threadless buying community, and the fact that none of you are probably inclined to buy ten shirts a week, we have to start understanding the week as a “good shirt week” if each of us can find 2-3 shirts amongst the ten they print that appeal to us. Unlike some of the smaller shirt sites (which have to try to appeal to a smaller range of taste in order to develop a loyal clientele and a strong return business), Threadless wants to be broad enough to keep thousands and thousands of very different people buying their shirts. If any of us like all the shirts any given week, that means some other poor soul is loving none of them. Which would suck for them, and for Threadless’s hope for their business that week. So variety is success, and appreciating variety is the challenge. Here’s to it…. Read the rest of this entry »

(This is admittedly a bit long, but I have a lot to say on the subject. Skim, skip, read it all, comment or what have you. I’ve bolded for easy skimming, but I’ll be keeping this piece published in full.)

A lot has been made about the recent censorship on the Threadless blogs. Long story short, Steve Swartz, a beloved Threadless community member who has poured himself into the people that make up the Threadless community, wanted to express his interest in a new site featuring some of his favorite artists. Since Yabbos is a t-shirt retailer as well, Steve was informed that Threadless was no longer allowing posts of that nature and his post was subsequently deleted.

I follow a general rule of thumb: Censorship is almost always (as in, 99% of the time) the wrong way to go, and almost always done for the wrong reasons. Limiting people’s ability to express themselves in any capacity is a very slippery slope with far-reaching ramifications and something that shouldn’t be taken lightly in communities of any size. The internet represents an interesting and emerging dynamic: Communities can be formed and grow to enormous sizes. Communities like Threadless benefit Threadless immensely. Threadless is no longer a simple online retailer—they are a content provider and a home on the web for a lot of people. These people, subsequently, will not only occasionally buy Threadless products, (which would happen anyway,) but will ravenously tell their friends, family, and anyone that likes shirts about the product and, more importantly, the brand.

Building a community is vital to maintaining repeat customers. The Threadless community itself is clearly responsible for a great deal of return sales, as users have another reason to visit the site every day than just shirts. When people only visit your site once a week for new product, they can easily forget to, first just one week, and then for a long time. They’ll miss designs they would have liked, and the sale and momentum quickly goes downhill. When they’re visiting every day, you have a pair of eyeballs on a screen, ready for your product. If stock levels are maintained appropriately and the product is intriguing and something people want, the community will eat it up. (This is clearly something Threadless understands and has pioneered, as it was their impetus in creating the blog and street team system in the first place.)

All of this comes back to the ostensible reason Threadless has banned posting about other t-shirt sites: In theory, they don’t want people linking to their competition. This is a very 1980s business mindset. Practically speaking, since Threadless is simply not offering the same product as any other site out there, any people already on Threadless have already bought what they’ve wanted. Now why not allow them to use the site as a resource for finding more things they’ll like? It’s not as if the extra $12 they would have spent over at Yabbos might have been spent on Threadless in a few weeks—things just don’t work that way. There is an additional value-add provided by offering this service. Think back to Miracle on 34th Street. (Yeah, yeah, I know.) Mr. Kringle began telling people that they could find the product they were looking at across the street, at a competitor. The management was furious at first, until they realized that customers were thrilled with the company for providing such a resource to them, and vowed to always consider them for their purchases.

A single pissed-off customer is amazingly damaging. You don’t lose the simple $12 you would have made on their sale. Instead, you lose the five to ten sales they would have made over their lifetime. It gets worse if they happen to have friends who frequent your store and word gets out that you’re not worth doing business with. This isn’t quite the case with Threadless, since again, they’re offering a different product. But whenever you open up a forum on the internet, you should be expected to take your lumps. Occasionally people will tell folks about a new site or idea. But the community isn’t ever in danger: people won’t abandon the community you’ve established so long as you treat them right. You run an incredible risk not just by censoring people who “dare” post about other sites that sell t-shirts, just because you disagree with their business model. That’s perfectly fine, and it’s the reason you run your own t-shirt shop the way you do. But online communities have completely disbanded and self-destructed when their once benevolent, easygoing leaders started to flip a few switches and censor some people’s expressions.

Ironically, the post where all of this has been discussed in earnest has been dramatically more damaging to Threadless for myriad reasons, and secondly, remained untouched. Perhaps, fearing the wrath of the collective, the Threadless-deities have decided not to stir the pot any more than necessary. But the Threadless community has lost a terrific contributor, while damaging the collective impression people have of Threadless—other users have stated that (in conjunction with the updated submission rules) they’ll definitely be less inclined to post submissions. These are some of your best artists, Threadless. The t-shirt game/battle/war is won on quality of product and not on stifling awareness of competition. Closing links to competition doesn’t sell you any more shirts and it doesn’t make you any more money. It doesn’t even really keep the competition from making money, because of how the community reacts, and it’s a childish thing to do when you’re the top of the heap.

With that, I’d like to welcome Steve to our little community here, and praise him for his dedication to the community. He still very much wants to have a venue to interact, but Threadless has made some decisions that go against the principles the community was built on.

We have some great ideas on broadening what Loves Threadless is and really making this a place people can come to enjoy and relax.

The last time I tried to build a model space shuttle, I was seven. And it ended in bloodshed. It wasn’t a good day, all around, since my friend ended up discovering that tiny plastic pieces hurt more on the way out.

Regardless, I still love this idea. It’s a perfect Threadless Kids design, but works across the board. It makes me want them to include an actual plastic set.

Tasty.

While some have pointed out that it bears a certain resemblence to Glennz’s foray into a similar idea, I have to ask if it’s possible for two people to have and execute similar ideas completely independently. It’s true that some people will rip off anything that’s convenient, but it seems a lot more likely that Mr.Yankee really hadn’t seen any of the other attempts—Threadless is a big place. Moreover, I’ve seen “OMG, I was working on a sub just like this!” a *lot*. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t think lambasting every psuedo-similar design is worthwhile. (Though some situations deserve a good scolding.) At least we can always count on bananaphone to never be accused of the same, while reminding us of Raffi lyrics.
Verdict: 4 (View Submission)

Despite having some professional capacity as a web developer, I rarely view LT in Internet Explorer. I don’t use it as my day-to-day browser, though I’ve been enjoying IE 7 in the Vista beta.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that my sidebar was being completely disregarded and thrown to the bottom of the heap, so to speak, appearing at the very bottom of the page. While being bad for usability and convenience, this is also bad for what meager ad-click-throughs LT pulls through. Plus, it just looks off.

I thought there was perhaps an errant unordered list, left unclosed. Something that Firefox was able to handle, but at which IE was failing. Of course, all of my developer tools exist within Firefox, so elements used to outline blocking elements and identify parts of the page weren’t available in the browser with which the site was having troubles. Chagrin. Read the rest of this entry »

Any time I’ve ever seen a submission with any form of text on it, there’s always at least one person crying out that they could “do without the text.” Very few designs require text to make their point. (Notable exceptions that come to mind include Cookie Loves Milk.) Even more designs are absolutely trashed (in many people’s opinions) by the presence of text displayed in an awkward typeface, bad position or with weird, misspelled verbiage. We’ve seen them all, and it’s rarely adventagious to include it.

That said, would artist’s just be better off submitting their primary design sans text? I think that having an alternate would be a great idea, because it’s hard to tell what the reaction would be, but flexibility is key, and no one (least of all Threadless) is keen to see you submit a duplicate “without text.” Take Tin Opener, by idro51. It features an illustration of a sardine can (tin) concealing a cassette tape, with a treble clef twist opener. Beneath it is the quote “Music is the tin opener of the spirit,” by Henry Miller. Setting aside the concern that, apparently, in this piece, music the the tin opener of the… cassette tape, could the design stand on its own? Will people be more or less drawn to purchasing it because of the text? I ask this, because I wonder about designs like this, where the text isn’t outright ruining it or anything like that. I’m interested in your opinions about the text-on-a-shirt concept.

What makes or breaks the text? Is it just the content? Not witty enough, pass-veto? Or will placement and typeface and the other elements I mentioned above significantly impact your decision to pick up a shirt? Do you find that you usually prefer a shirt withOUT text?

I think for the sake of this argument, we should exclude the Joy of Text-style designs: Designs built explicitly around the text itself, and its layout. The point I’m looking to clarify is people’s outlook on designs accompanies with text.

What do you think?