By Jake Nickell, Abrams, $22.50, 224 pages
T-shirts are a hard business to get into. Threadless explores the rise of a website dedicated to finding and printing the best new designs. Some of the designers are established, others are new to the site, but those presented have won over fans to win the right to be printed. Threadless.com allows visitors to vote on t-shirt designs, with those with the highest ratings and largest number of votes being printed. The company has a number of different lines, and has just started one for slogans only, but the one based on viewer votes is still the most popular.
The book itself is organized simply, broken down into different years with interviews from artists, winning designs, and a bit of history from that year. It makes for an effective method of telling the Threadless.com story. The designs are not only fun to look at, they also show how to create a great t-shirt design. It’s also a how-to book for businesses; the site has been sited as one of the best working crowd-sourcing sites due to its voting process. For anyone interested in t-shirt design or innovative business models, this is a great book.
Reviewed by Jamais Jochim