For this week’s interview I was lucky enough to catch up with Jake Nickell. Jake is the founder of Threadless, a t-shirt design community where users submit designs, community votes, and staff choose between the most popular design
Adam: You had an extremely successful partnership with Jeffrey Kalmikoff, how did you meet?
Jake: We met about 2 years after I started Threadless. Jeffrey ordered a poster and it arrived damaged. In our communications with him to get him a new one, he invited us over for dinner. We went and met a lot of local designers. We started working with Jeffrey as a designer first and then we later merged our companies and he began working with us on Threadless full time.
Adam: What do you think are the benefits of starting a business with a partner?
Jake: For me the #1 benefit is simply having somebody there that can listen and discuss ideas with you. It’s very important to have at least one other brain to help you with your thoughts when you are starting a business.
However, I feel my case was a bit different because it was really more like 2 friends building a tree fort than building a business. We never intended to make money, it was all just a hobby.
Adam: Your partnership is very successful why do you think that is?
Jake: Our business model is incredibly unique. We are almost 10 years old as a business right now and I don’t think anyone else has really figured out how to replicate what we are doing. I feel like our model is so successful because it really only works when you can legitimately think of your customers as your friends. The whole dynamic changes then and in our case, it is crucial to our business model.
Adam: Threadless is almost 10 years old now, what have been the milestones that were most important to you?
Jake: The first milestone for Threadless was in 2004, when it was given our full time attention. Before that Threadless was a side project and we were an agency creating websites for clients. In ’04 we fired all of our clients and began focusing on Threadless full time. We grew the company a lot in the next few years. Come ’06 and ’07 we had a lot of changes take place to help us with our growth. First, we sold a minority share of the company to a venture capital firm to get somebody invested in helping us with the hard stuff that we didn’t understand too well. During our Christmas sale the previous year, it took a month for us to fulfill everyone’s orders. Clearly we need some help there. Most recently, we have been focusing more on partnerships and our international growth.
Adam: You started a collaborative business from day one, which has proven itself to be very successful, what are the key strategies in your business model?
Jake: The key for me is to try not to think about it as a business. It’s more about what would be cool, what would be fun, what would your friends want to be doing, what would be exciting and awesome. So that is the way I think about most of the decisions we make. In the end it has worked out for us – since we are such a community based business, we are just all about doing stuff to keep our community happy and to excite them. As long as we continue doing that, we believe the rest will follow.
Adam: Threadless now has some “bricks and mortar” retail stores, how big a decision was it for you to take this step?
Jake: We decided to do it because we thought it would be awesome. We felt like we needed a real place where you could touch and feel what Threadless is about. It was more of a flagship branding type move than to actually make money from it but our stores are profitable. We don’t plan to open any more of them in the near future but it was a lot of fun and I think they are a great part of the Threadless empire.
Adam: Have you learned any lessons from opening up this new channel?
Jake: Almost everything I know I learned in running this business. I was 20 when we got started and had a few years work experience beforehand but really Threadless is everything I know. If I were to do it again, I think the main thing that I learned is that a company can be started with very little money. In my case, $500. And you don’t have to grow quickly, take your time. I would also be sure I am doing this because it is what I want to do with my life, not to make a bunch of cash. It’s funny, my wife is a chemical engineer and when I started Threadless we had a money discussion. The plan was for her to be able to make enough money doing what she loves to support our family – I was always the one who just had this crazy hobby that could never support us. So that’s really what it was about for me. Sure, I ended up finding financial success but that wasn’t even a piece of why I began this company.
Adam: Your business was mature prior to the start of the current recession, what impact has Threadless seen from the recession?
Jake: We have seen a slow down in our growth but we are still growing substantially year over year from ’08 to ’09.
Adam: Design is obviously your passion, do you think that this passion is a contributing factor to the success of the business?
Jake: It has everything to do with it. As I said before, Threadless wasn’t even meant to be a business in the first place. It was a hobby – a hobby as a designer to make cool stuff with other designers.
Adam: You do not hold the copyright on the designs submitted to your website, the designers retain them. What do you think about sites like Facebook who do not follow the same ethos?
Jake: They have their reasons, we have ours. We feel that in order to really build a trusting community where members are interacting on such an in-depth level (it can take days/weeks/months for some of our artists to create one design), we need to create an environment in which no one is taken advantage of and we are very open about our intentions to our community members. I don’t know the details of what Facebook is doing so I’d hate to speculate about that…
Adam Toren
Wow I’ve never heard some of the details behind the threadless story until now, it’s really remarkable. I love Jake’s obvious passion and humility. I think the world would be a better place with more companies operating like threadless. One piece that really stuck out to me was that this was started as more of a hobby with no real intention to make money. Great story.