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Need To Build A Community? Learn From Threadless

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This article is more than 10 years old.

Threadless, a Chicago T-shirt company, sprang to life a decade ago with the idea that employees and customers don't have to be two distinct groups. The Internet-based company asks consumers to submit shirt designs they've created--it gets as many as 300 submissions a day--and allows its large fan base to vote on the ones they like best. It pays winners, more than 300 each year, $2,000 for their creations. The company picks the best of the most popular T-shirt designs, screens them for copyright violations and obscenities, and sells them on its site within three to eight weeks for $18. It aims to release seven new designs a week.

The business model works beautifully for this 50-person company, which brought in close to $30 million in revenue in 2009. Threadless, with 1.5 million followers on Twitter and 100,000 fans on Facebook, is also masterful at using social media to promote its designs and designers--and to keep its community engaged.

Cam Balzer, the vice president of marketing at Threadless, shares more on the company’s community-building strategy.

Forbes: You stress "community" over crowdsourcing. Why?

Balzer: Crowdsourcing is antithetical to what we're doing. That's because crowdsourcing involves random sets of people who suddenly have a say in how the business works, but that's not how Threadless operates. We've got a close-knit group of loyal customers and have worked hard to build that. The people who submit ideas to us, vote and buy our products aren't random people, and they aren't producing random work. We work closely with our consumers and give them a place on our site, the Threadless forum, where they can exchange ideas with one another--ideas that go beyond designing T-shirts. We have consumers who have voted on 150,000 designs, which means they've spent hours interacting on our site. People who do that aren't jumping into a random crowd. They're part of the community we've cultivated.

How does Threadless use social marketing to promote its business and to generate sales?

Like other businesses, Threadless launched before Twitter and Facebook. We've embraced both sites by injecting our personality into them. We send out news to people when new T-shirts are available and information on new sales when they start. We also tell customers about the music playing in our warehouse and about the interesting people stopping by our office. The investment in Twitter has bumped our traffic. Sales from Twitter alone are in the high six-figures.

What advice do you have for other companies looking to build their social media strategies?

The secret isn't growing a huge fan base. We have 100,000 Facebook fans, but those fans have all come to us organically. We believe the more organic the growth, the more loyal the fans, the more likely they will be repeat customers.

The other key is that we act like humans on our own site and social networking sites. We act like we're interacting with our friends, posting videos of our employees talking about their favorite bands. It's not all direct promotion; it's human.

How do you keep your consumers engaged?

For us, the idea of fostering creativity is a key one. We offer design challenges. A timely example of that is that we ran a design contest around the Las Vegas consumer electronics convention, CES. The challenge we posed was to get consumers to submit designs that highlighted innovation. We looked for a theme that we knew our consumer base, who tends to be interested in tech and the Web, would love. We've done other challenges asking people for ideas on zombies and monsters, because we've seen from the forums and other popular T-shirts that our customers are interested in monsters.

The takeaway: Know what interests your consumers and build on it.

What are limitations for the business?

The community anchors us to a certain extent. They've got perceptions of who we are and how we'll act. They determine our future. With that said, they are receptive to seeing Threadless grow. We've been exploring retail distribution and we've asked our designers (who are the employees and customers) where they would feel comfortable selling and buying the T-shirts. We thought the options would be limited based on their answers, but we've found a sincerely open-minded group that is eager to see growth.

We've also learned that an important part of expanding is giving credit to our community members. We started selling specially designed iPhone cases last year and were very deliberate about our packaging. Each case gave descriptions of the product and its designer.

What was your best-selling T-shirt design last year?

It was a design called "The Communist Party" that featured Communist leaders, including Fidel Castro, in party mode. The designer was Tom Burns of Murfreesboro, Tenn.