In 2000, two young t-shirt enthusiasts wanted to make their own online t-shirt design competitions. But instead of using a focus group, they would let the designers themselves pick the winner. They founded the online community of Theadless.com, which is based on the democratic principle of letting the users decide what should be produced.

On Theadless.com, designs can be submitted by anybody. Threadless.com receives about one thousand designs every week. Then, community members (now numbering around 600.000) vote for the best design. The company picks nine shirts from the top 100 to print.United Stationers built a project called “marketopia” the goal of which was to understand the unique needs of each one of the retailers (N=1) and help them tailor their operations to serve their customers better. Each retailer can have a unique product portfolio, focused promotion programs and the ability to respond quickly to their customers’ demands. United Stationers sources their products from a large network of manufacturers who also provide a significant portion of the advertising and promotional budget (R=G).

In the beginning, the winner would get a free t-shirt with his/her design. Today the winner is awarded with a price of $2000 plus a gift certificate of $500 – while Threadless.com keeps the property rights.

The new business model became a great success with sales of US$ 17 million in 2006.

Source: Howe (2008) Crowd sourcing