If you’re not sure what makes a business social, or why, then you could do a lot worse than look at Threadless, the Chicago-based T-shirt company.

Ten years ago its founders decided that staff and customers weren’t necessary distinct and separated groups. So it set up an internet site and asked its customers to submit their own T-shirts for sale. And not just customers – anybody can put up a T-shirt for consumer consideration. Today, up to 300 designs a day are posted and the ‘community’ votes on its favourites.  The winners get $2,000 and Threadless then picks out the best of the top-voted clothing designs to print. In addition to printing, it provides services for the designers such as ensuring that their T-shirts aren’t stolen by other people, and the identical service is provided for buyers: Threadless checks that the shirts it plans to print are not copyright violations of other designs already on the market. They’ve turned wholesale clothing into a bespoke business.

Threadless success

It now employs around fifty people, many of whom are focused outwards on the community that it has build on the web, on Twitter (1.5 million followers) and on Facebook (around 100,000 ‘fans’) and on engaging with them, not just selling to them.

Community Engagement

The business works because it’s not predicated on ‘random strangers’ buying the clothing Threadless creates. The customer base is close-knit and engaged with each other, as well as with the company: buyers and designers can talk to each other on the Threadless forum, comment on designs on display, be rude about the music that is playing in the Threadless offices (which is tweeted pretty well hourly) or just gossip about things that are nothing to do with the ‘business’. It’s not known if there have been any Threadless weddings yet, between people who’ve met through the company’s virtual community, but sales resulting from their Twitter stream are in six figures, so they are clearly getting lots of conversion from their socially adept marketing.

Future planning based on feedback

They also use their community to shape their future – at present Threadless is talking to its customers and designers (who are often one and the same) about where they would be willing to see Threadless products being sold retail, rather than online. And they’ve moved into new areas of merchandise based on what they’ve learned from their interactions – they are one of the world’s biggest vendors of iPhone cases, because iPhones are one of the most popular accessories in their customer base.