[mikepurvis]

I totally agree, but I bet it changed because the Old Way is worse from the perspective of Threadless. Specifically, each contest needs to result in a shirt that they can sell more and more of in order to maintain growth. That pushes you toward a bland, inoffensive, mass-market design. They think they can ultimately maximize profits by doing the etsy/cafepress model, where it's loads of vendors on the ground doing their own thing, and the marketplace supplier just floats above the fray collecting a slice every time money changes hands.

[vec]

Yeah, but why did Threadless possibly need to "maintain growth"?

They had a sustainable small business model. They could have consciously leveled off when they hit their natural equilibrium and remained a profitable niche vendor in perpetuity. Instead, it appears they threw out their existing succesful business model and a good chunk of their reputation trying to scale beyond their natural limits.

What's wrong with being small if you're good at it?

[technofiend]

>Yeah, but why did Threadless possibly need to "maintain growth"?

MBA disease: Every MBA learns their reason for existing is to grow the business and extract maximum value for shareholders.

[mikepurvis]

I completely agree with you, and there's nothing wrong with a successful cottage/lifestyle business. But it takes a certain maturity to see it that way, and they might have caught the startup bug and thought they could turn custom t-shirts into a billion dollar business... who knows?

[strebler]

I think you're right. It was probably a good bootstrapping strategy at the start to get good designs into the system and also some marketing benefits from promoting top designs from contests. The more I think about it, contest-driven marketing is likely not sustainable - contests are more of a novelty and very hard to keep fresh.