Yclick.it - A Blog Exploring Persuasive Website Design

Create a Community with Simple but Powerful Ideas

Threadless is, well in fact it’s difficult to pin down exactly what it is. It’s a bit like myspace but based on t-shirts. It’s a community based on designing, rating, buying, modelling, blogging and making music about t-shirts. Brilliant!

Ok, deep breath. The official statement is that it’s an ongoing t-shirt competition. Budding designers can submit their designs and win $2000. And then the community rate the t-shirts and decide which ones win. And then you can buy the winning t-shirts on the site. So it’s an ecommerce store? Well yeah, but no. It did sell $6.2 million worth of merchandise last year by the way.

I thought about taking this yclick.it to look at the the purchasing call to action and design. But that’s not what makes this venture so successful. It’s little things like the gallery for each t-shirt. When you submit a photo of yourself wearing your newly purchased shirt, you get $1.50 towards future purchases. Or you could get $15 if your photo is featured. It’s so simply done - ‘No photos yet! Own it? Earn $1.50 credit!’ and the call to action ‘Send us your picture!’ And it works.

37signals has some interesting thoughts on Why Threadless Rules. Of course, here in France, La Fraise has been doing something very similar for some time now.