Threadless excels in customer involvement
I was pointed to this site by a post by “Church of the Customer Blog”http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/the_facebook_le.html, contrasting Threadless with Facebook, who made a blunder that aliented thousands of fan-users by not listening to them in the development of their site.
Threadless sells T-shirts. They don’t produce anything without getting positive feedback from their users. They never have a flop. At the top of their home page, the most prominent thing is a big “PARTICIPATE”. You can go on and rate the T-shirts.
You can submit entries to be made into T-shirts. If you own an T-shirt of theirs and you don’t yet have a photo of you up there wearing that T-shirt, you can get a $1.50 credit for uploading a photo of you in the shirt.
Each shirt has its own, cool-looking page. One page I saw had a song about the shirt on the page (an mp3 you could play)!
You can rate the designs.
There are currently 42,669 photos of people wearning their shirts on the site!
These guys are really thinking about what works; what’s fun; what is visually appealing, but also useful.
