This week’s Threadless email brought me one shirt that I like quite a lot, and several items where I question Threadless’ judgment.

I like this shirt a lot. The colour scheme is very appealing and it’s also a very neat concept.
Verdict: 5$

I think this is a nice design, but I’m not going to buy it because of the placement. While I definitely support breaking out of the mold, I don’t really enjoy calling attention to that particular part of my body. Maybe it’s just me.
It’s also expensive - close to $25 with shipping. That’s a lot for a shirt.

This one’s a reprint, and I like the design a lot - I think it’s pretty clever. However, I definitely agree with a lot of the commenters on the original submission that it looks good until you see its placement on the shirt — it’s too big and unflattering. I wish they’d taken those comments into consideration on the reprint.

And in this week’s “Why the *&$^ did Threadless put that on a print,” I bring you:

I think jar_bombadillo said it best: ‘why would I pay $35 for something I could print out myself for $3?’

Don’t forget to use our totally awesome coupon code, lovesthreadless, to save $3 on your next Threadless order!

In case you haven’t already seen it, I was quoted in this month’s Inc Magazine cover article on Threadless’ success and awesomeness. It’s a quick one-liner, but it was satisfying to have them come to me for some background and to see them use a line from me. Congrats, Threadless, on the profile piece. You guys deserve it and it’ll be fun to see what happens next for you!

The Article | Threadless.com

It looks like Threadless is having a Summer Blockbuster Sale between now and June 8 on almost every product they have in their catalog. Some shirts are as low as $5 and their newly released prints are as low as $30. I’m wondering if Threadless has a 30 day price guarantee to protect those customers who just bought shirts.

I’m not sure what to make of this shirt. It looks a little ninja to me. I see the multiple face concept as well. Pretty cool, but I just have too many blue jean colored shirts.

This is a great reference to the old Pac-man games. It’s an oldie but goodie. Not many left in most sizes. Hopefully a reprint of this will occur in the near future.

A new shirt that deserves a little love for being really cute. I do wish that Threadless gave more shirt color options since every other shirt in my closet is some off green color. I understand the operations task would be very heavy, but a suggestion.

If you’ve been sleeping on some shirts, go get them now! Some of these shirts are limited in size. Additionally, at $5 off ($30 during the sale), you can give one of the prints a try and build up another collection of cool Threadless stuff for your room.

It looks like Threadless is expanding their product line beyond the traditional t-shirt by taking a page out of the recipe book of the comic book industry. I remember during my days growing up collecting comic books. Individual artists would create limited edition lithographs of their popular work and sell them to their fans at conventions or by mail order. Let’s see if that formula works here with Threadless as they have introduced 3 high quality 18″ x 24″ prints on French Paper Co. paper. Each print is $35 and is limited to a run of 220 (the homepage headline says it is a limited run of 250). All three are exact representations of their t-shirt counterpart. It also appears that each print is created by their own respective printer: Sonnenzimer, Screwball Press, and The Post Family.

I’m excited to see Threadless’ expansion into limited run prints. They are affordable and they look great. I’m a little surprised that they went with a reproduction of a past design and create a piece of work based on the current week’s prints. From a sales perspective, why try to reinvent the wheel and sell something that may not work. Threadless took a successful design of the past and are trying to push it ever so more.

I’ve been a big fan of the weekly graffiti art, but with only 1 print each and at $250, it’s relatively high barrier to entry. These prints allow me to get a great piece of artwork on my wall at an affordable. I wish Threadless gave a framing option for these, so that I can pay a little extra and have them wall ready rather have to go down to the store and pick up a matted frame set.

I’d like to know a little more from the community if they have any additional information as far as designer involvement. Additionally, if you do pick one up, please comment here and provide us your feedback.

I received the weekly Threadless newsletter and former CEO Jake Nickell announced they have brought in Tom Ryan as their new chief executive officer. Ryan’s previous experience comes from eMusic, Virgin Mobile USA and EMI Music. From my web research, it’s hard to find Ryan’s detailed background, but working with the aforementioned companies it dictates that he’s well versed in the web and media markets. I’m surprised that Threadless did not go with an experienced executive in the clothing and apparel industry especially one that has worked with brick and mortar stores. In my opinion, Threadless is a t-shirt company first and a web company second. Given their model of high volume, low pricing and quick inventory turnover, you need a chief executive that can increase the company’s overall margins without having to change their successful formula and alienating their strong user base. I hope Ryan’s the one to take Threadless to an even more exciting level.

Threadless is a private company, and figures are not publically available, so it’s hard to guess where Ryan and new CSO and co-founder, Jake Nickell will take Threadless. I have a few predictions as to what will be accomplished over the next few months and years.

My gut feeling is that Threadless will continue to expand their brick and mortar presence. Threadless is unique in a sense that they require their inventory to most very fast. The brick and mortar leaders such as Macy’s or Nordstrom would love to carry Threadless, especially given the brand loyalty of the customers. However, it would be hard for these stores to consistently move the inventory on a weekly basis given Threadless’ new release every Monday. I see the Chicago store as the template for further expansion to a mall near you within the next couple of years.

My next prediction is that Threadless will look into becoming more Dell-like from the inventory perspective. From my experience with Threadless, they are the king of process and operations. That’s why they can sell you great t-shirts at an affordable price. Dells inventory sits on their floor for 2 days or less. Threadless has recently gone from the Fruit of the Loom and American Apparel stock to their own Bangledesh made shirts. This is an indication that if they haven’t already controlled their entire supply chain process they will do so very soon. In addition to controlling the supply chain, order fulfillment can be outsourced to a cheaper alternative. The video footage of watching their employees go through their shelves to fulfill orders will be a thing of the past. Threadless will then film a new short called “Just In Time (inventory) Gone Wild”!

My last prediction under the leadership of Ryan is that he’ll introduce additional products beyond the shirts. We’ve already seen the baby wear and hoodies in addition to their popular shirts. I wouldn’t be surprised if they go beyond this and introduce tank tops, jackets, gym bags or some other crazy item that will capture my disposal income.

Congratulations and best of luck to Tom and Jake in their new roles. I see the MP(3) shirt below as a representation of Tom, Jake and Jacob leading Threadless to new ideas, innovation and an even better product and brand.

Hi everyone! My name’s Tonei (not Torei, although it’s an interesting idea!) and I’m going to try to write a bit while Chris is off on his adventures. I’m a high school senior in Alaska, and I have I think twelve Threadless shirts.

A few of my favourites:

I bought BEarth at the Chicago retail store back in October. It was my first Threadless tee, and I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on it. It’s been out of stock for a while.

Penguins on Holiday is an adorable shirt that I picked up during the holiday sale. There is only one left in all of Threadless, so if you like it and you wear a guy’s medium, go pick it up!

Damn Scientists is a witty tee that also gets lots of comments and tons of people stopping me to read my chest. There’s still some girly Smalls and Mediums left for just $5.00 right here.

I’m waiting to get Liberty in the mail – we’ll see if I like it as much as Chris does.

I’ll post another entry shortly about this week’s releases. Feel free to leave questions, comments, or snide remarks in the comments!

Threadless has just announced their 2007 Bestee Award Winners!

Some very expected and very unexpected choices, including Flying Mouse for three awards (Most Printed, Newcomer and Best Concept) and a bunch of other great picks.

Threadcakes, our cake-shirt-design contest was also selected as the winner of the Best Independent Blog Contest Award, which I’m particularly thrilled about. Many thanks to Threadless for giving back a little something extra to the community.

Threadless has at last announced a date for their Bestee Awards: Monday, March 10th, all our Bestee questions will be answered. Who had the most designs printed? Who had design of the year? Who was the People’s Choice? Just how many Bestees will flying_mouse walk home with? And other assorted categories.

In case you missed it, Threadless has switched all prints from here on out to use their own branded shirts instead of American Apparel or Fruit of the Loom like they were using before. This includes a few minor size changes and you can see the old sizes and new sizes on their handy size chart available here.

Threadless also announced some pricing changes to go with the new shirts. All shirts will now be priced based on what the design consists of, from a printing process perspective. (Alliteration for the win!) Basically, if a design makes use of special inks or any of the other cool printing processes they announced awhile back the prices will be shifted to reflect that. The prices will also outline exactly why they’re more than the $15 baseline price.

Good news for girls as well: Girly, “regular” tees are now $15 as well, so cheers to that. And no longer are Selects a flat $25, but rather have a price also based on design elements.

On the flip side of things, every print released this week costs at least $17. It’s unclear if all new prints will be taking on the “plastisol ink and a chino additive” method as the standard, but that would make sense and simultaneously mean that, practically speaking, the new “baseline” is $17. Still, if they feel as soft as my older Threadless Select does because of the additive… well, I think that’s a fair compromise instead of paying $25 for it.

It’ll be very interesting to see how these pricing changes affect the way they move their product, especially on more expensive shirts.

Get Shopping

Hey kids,

What with the immensely huge holiday sale and some CES travel, I hadn’t been able to get a handle on my errant Thriftee AIM/SMS notification script.

Well tonight we spent some quality time and I found my server was giving it the business but that’s fixed now and happily the Thriftee Notifier is rocking it hard again. For you.

Sign up for email, SMS or AIM Thriftee ($10 shirt!) alerts on your favorite shirt designs or sizes | Or browse their catalog of awesomeness and pay the $15 before your fave gets gobbled up

Use Threadless coupon code FACEBOOKCOUPON for $3.00 off *any* order and watch as you end up with a wicked cool shirt for just $7.00!

Just think: you can get all sorts of holiday shopping done now if you know how your friends like it.

The sale lasts until December 16th which is just nuts, but Threadless rocks that way and treats us right.

(EDIT: Whoopsie, this one deactivated just today. Jake from Threadless mentioned sometimes it takes a day or so. You can still use COUPONITDOTCOM for $3.00 off any purchase of $15 or more. Woo.)

What more do you want? Get shopping!

I’ve just launched Thriftee SMS alert capabilities. Head over to the Notify Me page and enter your email address and mobile number. If you don’t want to submit a new alert, pick one you’ve already done and it’ll add your phone number anyway.

I’m close to having the maintenance page up where you’ll be able to see all of your alerts, turn off email alerts and change your other settings.

Set Up Thriftee Notifications | Thriftee History Log

Threadless announced today several new changes to the print submission process. More colors and a variety of inks and print methods mean we’ll be seeing some *very* creative shirts coming out. Foils, embroidery and more coming to a shirt you’ll buy.

Read the full announcement here.

See today’s new shirts. 

Based on ytrozs’ suggestion earlier today, I’ve gone ahead and created an iGoogle Thriftees Gadget. This will greet you with the current Thriftee anytime you’re on your Google homepage.

I’ll be adding a few more features to it when I get the time, but please let me know what you think or if something doesn’t display properly.

Add it here:

***UPDATE***
Back up and running.

I noticed a blog on Threadless with users trying to record in real time all the Thriftees coming through. As luck would have it, I just finished my parsing engine for the sidebar Thriftee checker and I figured why not log all of them and automatically check every two minutes? And let users see how long it’s taken for a given Thriftee to sell. I give you: The Thriftee History Log. IE users will have to click through to the ugly version as I pass out, but I’ll fix that tomorrow.
Cheers, and happy Thrifting!