Threadless Tshirt Company – the Spirit of the Brand
The spirit of the brand
Threadless is an online t-shirt company which consists in enabling anyone to design t-shirts and submit them on a platform so that the members of the community vote to select the winning designs which will be produced and sold on the website.
Communication, hard work and fun are the key principles of the brand. The customers are real artists? who belong to a specific sphere of influence. On the other hand, thanks to this new concept, Threadless promotes the voting experience as well as the built-in motivation.
The risks associated with a collaboration between Threadless and a major retailer
This possible collaboration between those two brands offers a lot of advantages for Treadless. First, it would enable to attract new customers, who do not know the website but who are used to buying clothes in the major retailer. On the other hand, Threadless could work with the suppliers of the major retailer and thus reduce the costs by benefiting from the economy of scale.
Financially speaking, this collaboration could increase the turnover of Threadless.
However, the founders of the brand could fear that such a collaboration could lead to the loss of the spirit of the brand. Indeed the t-shirt may become one t-shirts among thousands of others in the store and the customer will not know where the t-shirt comes from. To avoid such a problem, the major retailer could set up a computer kiosk that allows shoppers to score designs and read about the artists. The t-shirts could also be gathered in a corner of the store and the major retailer could create a new environment to emphasize the t-shirts, i.e. a decor with contempory arts.
On the other side, the usual customers of Threadless.com as well as the talented designers can be offended by this collaboration as it would prove that Threadless wants