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The Art of Business and the Power of Community: 25 Years of Threadless With Founder Jake Nickell
Today we have a very special guest on. He founded a company at the dawn of the internet age, and it is still going strong, celebrating its 25 anniversary. So we are going to talk with him about his journey, so stay tuned.
Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with another FUTR podcast.
I have with me Jake Nickell, he and Jacob DeHart started Threadless in 2000 in Jake's apartment as a T-shirt design competition that has now grown into an online community of artists where designs are created by and chosen by an online community. It was a 2006 Wired article about Threadless that coined the term crowdsourcing.
So we are going to talk with Jake about how Threadless has evolved and how the Internet has changed the world over the last 25 years.
Welcome Jake
Threadless: https://threadless.com/
Artist Shops: https://www.threadless.com/artist-shops/
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Today we have a very special guest on, he founded a company at the dawn of the internet age, and it is still going strong, celebrating its 25th anniversary. So we're gonna talk with him about his journey and how the world has changed in the last 25 years. So stay tuned. I have with me Jake Nichol. He and Jacob DeHart started Threadless way back in 2000 in Jake's apartment as a T-shirt design competition that has now grown into an online community of artists or designs are created and chosen by an online community. It was a 2006 wired article about Threadless that first coined the term. Crowdsourcing. So we're gonna talk with Jake about how Threadless has evolved and how the internet has changed the world over the last 25 years. Welcome, Jake. Hey Chris. Thanks for having me on the show. Threadless is. Old school, when we talk about OG internet companies, it's like Amazon and Threadless, you know? Right. We're gonna have to just bucket you guys together. But, I mean, but seriously, I mean, like, you know, there was a lot of companies that started back then and, and, and very few survived to this day. True. And, um, and I, and I, and I, I, I wanna highlight how, uh, difficult it was to do that. How innovative you had to be at that time to, to do that. Because like all the things that we take for granted now, just were not there. I mean, the very concept of crowdsourcing didn't exist before. You know, you guys were out there doing it. So I mean. You, you are kind of revolutionary, um, at the beginning. And, and, and the fact that you've been able to maintain it and continue and grow and evolve and do new things, um, is, is very cool. But why don't we start with like, what were the origins? Where does this all start?
Jake Nickell:I've always had kind of like both left brain, right brain kind of interests. And you know, as a kid in high school, I would write a lot of graffiti, but I also got a job at our web developer, you know, our local I legal graffiti or, or illegal graffiti. Mostly illegal graffiti, but I never really did it on people's property. I would go in the woods and find like an underpass and you know, I never really went too crazy with it, but. Then on the side I would teach myself how to code and, you know, view source and web browser. And I think I got my first job as a web developer when I was 14 years old, building websites for like the local plumber and stuff.
Chris Brandt:Yeah. You're you're the, you're the, my, my neighbor kid knows how to build websites.
Jake Nickell:Yeah, exactly. And I would build 'em for my friends. Like I had a friend really into Star Wars. I would build like a Star Wars fan site. I was really into the band corn, so I would build like a corn. Actually, I was number one. Uh, search result for bunions because I had bunion surgery on my foot when I was like 15 and made a website about it. And so all these older women would email me asking if I, if I should, if they should get bunion surgery
Chris Brandt:and what's the recommendation, yes or no on that.
Jake Nickell:I said wait until it's like you can't bear the pain anymore because the surgery's not really fun either. You heard it here first and then, yeah, I guess Threadless, I, you know, I, when I was, um, choosing where to go to college, it was kind of between going down like computer science or going to art school. Um, and I was kind of already, I was working as a web developer in high school, so I decided to go more the art side, do something different. And so my degree was like multimedia web design. I was learning director for like CD ROMs in the back of encyclopedias and stuff like that. Right, right. Um, and so Red List was really just a hobby I kind of built on the side. So, um, I was a member of this forum called Dream List that was mostly digital artists creating art on their computers. But they were never, you know, there was never anything physical that we could have and I, I was literally spending every waking moment I had on this forum and I had nothing to show for it in my real life. So started like printing some of the cool designs on posters and t-shirts and then set up Threadless as a website where people could order them and I'd chip 'em. But really just a hobby for the first few years.
Chris Brandt:I, I know you were operating like out of your apartment initially, right? Yeah. What was the, what was that sort of tipping point? You're like, wow, I can make this a business.
Jake Nickell:So there's like intersection of this hobby where I was spending my free time, I was going to school and I was also working a full-time job. So my full-time job was back in web development. Um, school. I was learning this web design. And thread list was this side project. And I think my junior year in school, I hired my first couple employees and I hadn't finished schooling yet. Um, and so I kind of like tried to see if I could test out of some of the final classes.'cause funny, funny story, I actually wrote a chapter for a book called Action Script Studio five Action, script five. And it was from like the programming language within Macromedia Flash. I wrote a chapter for that book, and that book was in the, was used as the textbook for a class I hadn't even taken yet. And the school would not let me test outta that class. And that was when I was like, screw it. I'm, I'm dropping out. And
Chris Brandt:well, that, that, that is so the early days of, of computing and the internet, because like those computer science classes, I, I remember them back in, you know, the nine. Nineties and you know, like they were just like so full of irrelevant information and it was changing so fast. It's kinda like the world of AI right now where it's changing so fast, like nobody can kind of keep up with it. I think, I think the art school was the right choice and uh, you know, just by, you know, I can see in the back corner there like a, a blue dogs, you know, statue there. I, you know, like. Art is core to your existence. Absolutely. And like, you know, you have artwork everywhere in your life, so it seems like that was the right choice to make.
Jake Nickell:Yeah, I think so. I'm happy with that choice, but I think, yeah, I was learning, I remember learning director seven in school while using Director 10 in my job. Yeah. In terms of like keeping up with the latest versions and the, with AI and stuff, it's. Hard to, hard to do that at school sometimes.
Chris Brandt:Well, and I think that, I think that's the, the fundamental thing about a career in tech is you have to be passionate about it. And if you're not self-motivated and passionate, it just doesn't come together. I.
Jake Nickell:Yeah.'cause you really need to always be wanting to learn and, and continue your, your education like on the job. I mean, I learned a lot more on like, just playing around with my computer than I ever did in front of a, a computer in a classroom. But
Chris Brandt:yeah. Yeah, no, I can imagine. And I that I think the same is true of AI now nowadays too. So, so, alright. Tell me a little bit, like, so you, you started off and this kind of came out of a, a, a, a, a competition, um, to, to find good designs like, like. You literally invented crowdsourcing. I'm, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna make that bold claim for you. You know, you don't have to, um, you, you, you invented crowdsourcing, so like, what, what was the. What I mean, did you know that's what you were doing when you, when you, you, you created it or is it like, you're like, wow, that that's kind of a great idea. Let's just do that. I can,
Jake Nickell:I thought of it more of just making cool stuff with my friends. Not like a, um, there, there are all these like, um, kind of academic terms for what we were doing coming out around the time, like crowdsourcing was one, but. I think Jeff Howe was his name, the editor of Wire to came up with that.
Chris Brandt:Yeah.
Jake Nickell:Um, he also talks about going on Warp Tour and seeing kids like tattooing each other, writing poems and um, and then like turning some of that into their jobs. And, um, I don't know, it, I think it comes from a more casual, just doing cool stuff together place, but then it's been kind of commandeered by academia and then also bastardized by. Corporations where they see it as a way to almost take advantage of these communities of people. But there's mass customization, user innovation. Um, we're a case study in Harvard. I've spoke at MIT, Stanford, I mean, all these groups that were like really curious about how we're using the internet to kind of revolutionize product development and stuff. Where, and it, it, it had an impact on me where I started taking myself almost too seriously where. Oh yeah, look at me creating all this technology to, but then after a while, you know, realized, no, we're just making cool stuff together with friends. That's, that's what I like to, especially when you start to see other companies compete in this space completely, completely, and clearly. Taking advantage of, of these communities. It made me feel better about the origins of it and setting aside the seriousness that it came about.
Chris Brandt:Well, so you, you, you're kind of mentioning it here now. One of the things that really was a big deal early on in, in the internet world was the idea of exploiting communities with crowdsourcing, right? Yeah. I mean, could you speak to that controversy and like how that impacted you and, you know, like your, your, your perception of all that.
Jake Nickell:So there's a concept called spec work that I think a lot of it falls under where, you know, say there's websites where you can pay like $5 and get a logo for your company, right? And 500 people, um, submit ideas and only the one that's chosen gets paid the $5. And all the other pieces are useless because they're specifically made for this purpose of this company with their name and all that. Um, I think it's a little bit different when you're talking about art. So we don't really have a brief and, um, you know, people in, in the early days, we only printed the top one out of every thousand designs uploaded, but none of the designs were to like a brief or a spec, you know? Right. It's, it's more like. The, I would ask like when it comes to spec work and what we do, I would ask like. Should a artist not paint a painting until they've already sold it, right? Or they paint it and then sell it, um, they're gonna create the painting either way. Um, and this is one way to monetize it. And we're non-exclusive too. So you still, you know, the artist retains the rights to that work and they created the work and they're looking to make some money from it.
Chris Brandt:In the early days, did all that artwork stay on there with, I mean, 'cause now you have the concept of the artist shop and so the like, which is was cool and I'm sure we'll get into it in a little bit. But, um, I mean, did, did that art stay on there with them having the opportunity to make money or just it, they just took their art and went. Went somewhere else with it. Originally,
Jake Nickell:most of the art still exists, even on the website. You could find it all, all those old submissions, but it's up to the user if they want to. Just like, if you post on Instagram, you can delete your post, um, you can delete your work from from thread list. So it
Chris Brandt:wasn't becoming a a a t-shirt, but it was a a, an area for the artwork to live and, and, and exist.
Jake Nickell:Yeah, it kind of lived digitally. And then we would only print the best ones. And at the time it was kind of an innovative business model because it overcame minimum order quantities. Like at the time, if you were gonna buy a T-shirt, you had to buy 120 of them minimum in order to make screen printing. You know, cost effective 'cause you have to burn the screen and there's a cost for each color in the graphic and all that. That all changed with print on demand more recently, um, which kind of made our whole business model almost irrelevant. But, uh, yeah, that those early days, it's now the industry is kind of going digital with, with print on demand.
Chris Brandt:Commerce in general has changed so drastically. I mean, back in those days. Everyone was, was trying to convince people that you could actually purchase things online and that it was secure and that, and then, you know, there's all the issues about, you know, the card companies and how much they were charging. And it was, it was, it was really just a greenfield kind of. Application. Could you talk about how that all e-commerce came together?
Jake Nickell:Yeah, I mean, now you can just sign up for Shopify and like start selling immediately, but back then we had to build it from scratch. And um, you know, even the infrastructure around charging credit cards wasn't there. Like our first version was built on cold fusion with a Microsoft Access database, where we would store the credit card numbers in raw. Text in the database and every day at the end of the day, I would literally call a one 800 number to type in people's credit card numbers on the phone to charge them for their order at the end of the day. Um, and then yeah, taking my lunch break to s sip the orders, you know, package everything up. All the T-shirts were just kind of under my desk. And, um, my, my wife would, my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, uh, would come up from college. We had a long distance relationship for a while, and she, like, we would spend our time together shipping orders for this thing.
Chris Brandt:That's, it's a miracle you guys ended up married, right? You know, after all that.
Jake Nickell:We, luckily we started dating like six months before I started Threadless, and so she's basically a co-founder.
Chris Brandt:Well, and she still, she still works with you there too, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so that's
Jake Nickell:pretty, she took some time off when our kids were first born, but yeah, she's been working there really most of the time.
Chris Brandt:Being able to work with your spouse is, is, uh, a, a tricky thing and Yeah. You know, the fact that you guys have pulled it off, that's another, another miracle. You guys are kind of a, a charmed company over there. Yeah. Let's kind of start. Fast forwarding a little bit here because I mean like there's a lot of like interesting innovations that came, kind of came outta what you were doing, and I think it's hard for people to really understand, like considering the state of where we are today, just a mere 25 years ago, like how different the world really was. I mean, it's like, you know, wait six to eight weeks to receive this. You know, thing. Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope, you know? Now, now it's like online. Um, you know, we went from catalogs to all this, so where are we now?
Jake Nickell:Well, I think another big transition between then and now is, uh, social media had a huge impact on our business because in the early days we were on forums. You know, artists would, um, upload their designs, there'd be comments, people would go, you know, spend a lot of time. Uh, with each other on our website and with social media, people started to move where they connect with people to those areas. Right. Um, and it's also hard now for artists to really promote themselves because even if you have. 50,000 followers. Your followers are being shown like videos of somebody diving off of a hundred foot cliff and not necessarily the content that you're like, it's just weird curation and algorithms that, um, make it really hard for people to get in front of their own audiences. Um, but Print on Demand is probably the biggest change that we've seen to where we are today. Um, yeah, we built artist shops about 10 years ago. Um, so. I don't know if you, I, I find it helpful to think about other industries that have gone digital, like, um, music that have moved from analog formats to, to digital formats, photography. Um, and so it's kind of happening in our industry too, where, and, and really I. All of these, all the companies that are doing really well, like say digital photography, even the iPhone, the first iPhone's camera was terrible. Right? Right. But it would've been wrong for Apple to wait until the camera got really good to start investing in that technology. So we've always thought I. You know, the early days of on-demand printing would be like you go to Office Depot and get a iron on sheet of paper for your inkjet printer that you can print out. And then like iron on that was not good enough, you know? No, but there are companies that started with that technology, like Cafe Press and Zazzle and stuff. Yeah. Um. But there's still, to this day, I think people think of the quality being that, you know, right. For those types of platforms. And so for us, it, it was kind of a matter of, of getting the cost and the quality to a point that was maybe not on par with screen print, but just about ready to hit. You know, to, to get it. And so I think we timed it well. We start, we started doing print on demand in 2008. Okay. And then in 2015 is when we transitioned the entire business to print on demand. So it was like a seven year kind of r and d process of getting that, um, print method to, to the place we wanted it to be. Um, and we still do a lot of screen printing for our retail partners. Um, a lot of people probably don't know, we sell more t-shirts at retail than we do on our own website, and we sell more t-shirts at on artist shops than we do on thread list.com. So if you go to thread list.com, that's like tip of the iceberg of what we do for artists. So artist shops basically was a way to leverage print on demand to give every artist their own white label store for their brand. And so with artist shops, we, Threadless is just behind the scenes. Like we do the manufacturing, we do the fulfillment, but it's the artist brand that's front and center there.
Chris Brandt:Yeah. Well, and and, and I think the thing that that's really cool about Threadless is you have that like 25 year back catalog of like literally. Every, you know, piece of art you could think of or one. I mean, it, it's an incredible ca I mean, like, how much, how much is in your catalog right now?
Jake Nickell:Well, we've had 600,000 artists send us designs. We have about 3 million published designs that are available for sale. Um, across that, those designs, there's over 6 billion SKUs. So skew being like, size, color, garment, you know, like a small red T-shirt. Um, so. There's a, there's a huge amount of content and then we, any artist that publishes on our platform, we moderate them to, um, categorize it, try to figure out does it make sense in the marketplace? Can we work with it on this retailer? All that kind of stuff. Um, and so within the moderation, we, uh, take different tactics to try to find the best way to get each shop to. Out there in the world.
Chris Brandt:Like I know you curate, you know, there's like sort of a big feed of like most popular and things like that. Are you individually curating that feed for, for individuals,
Jake Nickell:not so much individuals, but more for like retailers. So, okay. You know, this, these designs would work really well at Kohl's. These designs would work really well, Spencers, stuff like that.
Chris Brandt:So as an artist you could, you could pub upload your design and it could end up. Selling at Kohl's.
Jake Nickell:And some of those we sell into the brick and mortar stores, like mass produce stuff, but we also have e-commerce integrations with them for print on demand, so Oh wow. If you buy from kohls.com, the, the, um, products that are listed there, there's a wider variety and it's made to order just like on our site. And then the ones that sell well online are sometimes brought into, like rolled out in the stores.
Chris Brandt:Being an artist is a very difficult. Gig, you know? Yeah. And that's usually, usually to some extent, a life of poverty. Right. Um, so I mean, like what kind of like, how, how, how do, how do the artists get paid out of all this? And like, what does that look like?
Jake Nickell:So, in the early days, we would pay like a flat fee of, I think in the beginning it was like literally 50 bucks in a free t-shirt. Um, and then that grew to a hundred bucks, 200 bucks, 250, 500. And then I think we were up to about $2,500 for a flat if anybody won the challenge before we, yeah. But then when we switched to print on demand, we, that's when we switched to a royalty based model. So now it's like per unit sold, the artist earns, uh. It, it varies because on artist shops, you can actually set your own pricing. So say our base price is $15 to actually produce and ship the order of the customer. Anything that artists, uh, prices at above, that is what they earn. Um, so, but on average, artists make between like 10, 20% of the retail price on. On those products, which is pretty good. Like Disney for example's, license royalty rate would be like usually between 12 and 15%. So some artists are making more than Disney. Yeah,
Chris Brandt:yeah. Right. Yeah. Um, but, and, and you're not just, it's, this is not just t-shirts anymore. I mean Right. You've, this is really like art on demand.
Jake Nickell:Yeah. Right. Yeah. We've opened up like so many categories. I mean, um. Like iPhone cases, skateboards, wall tapestries, art prints, mugs, all that kind of stuff. And it that, that's a really exciting thing about the industry right now is like what can be made to order, um, you know, make on demand. I always use neon signs as an example because like I. Most neon signs are made for a specific, like, it might have a phone number on it where it's, it's made to order, right? It's made. Um, but then, man, we almost did a partnership with like Dunking Donuts to, um, design the pattern printed on the icing on the donut. Like, I mean Oh wow. It was just like weird stuff. There's a company in Israel called Corne that makes the printers that we use. It's an amazing company, and they're like. So innovative. I mean, they're just on the forefront of any of this technology and they created a roll to roll fabric printer that can like cut and dry in line. There's still the sewing that has to be hand done, but once I think truly cut and sew, make on demand apparel is very close to getting. There. And at that point you could imagine like anything, dresses, board shorts, you know, like any any
Chris Brandt:apparel product you can imagine with a full pattern across the whole thing.
Jake Nickell:Yeah.
Chris Brandt:So you're, you're actually making the fabric
Jake Nickell:and there's companies that have dabbled in the idea of like, trying to get rid of this, of, of, um, universal sizing. So, you know, like small, medium, large, extra, if everything's made to order, it should be made to fit us Exactly too. Wow. And you know, that might be 10, 20 years off, but. This is what this, that'd be pretty cool. Yeah, that'd be pretty cool. It's like the Implica. You don't really think about what these make on demand implications can have. But also sustainability is a huge one.'cause something like 40%. I read the stat 40% of all apparel. I. Just goes unsold.
Chris Brandt:Well, and there's, and because there's a lot of plastics and things like that and fabrics, I know that's contributing to like, you know, microplastics and the ecosystems and, and things like that.
Jake Nickell:Yeah.
Chris Brandt:Like, I mean, polyester is fabric is plastic. Right. Essentially. Right. Since we're talking about sort of the economics of how it all, all, all works out, uh, I wanna take it back to like the first.com crash.
Jake Nickell:Mm. Yes. You know, like
Chris Brandt:around 2000, 2001. Right. You know, like. You guys weathered that Not many companies did. You know, I, I had a company that was a victim of that crash myself, so I I, I know how brutal that was at that time, but like, what? What do you, what do you think it was that allowed you to survive that, that first crash and then like when it crashed again and again, you know, like what, what was it that gave you the wherewithal to survive those?
Jake Nickell:Well, I think the first one was so early. I mean, I wasn't even taking the salary yet and being a developer myself, you know, I was. I think I remember building this website for deep discount dvd.com at my job, and it was like, uh, they, the client paid like $300,000 for us to build this e-commerce website. Here I am a developer getting paid like 40 grand a year, building it in like three months. And I'm just thinking, man, if I had something to sell, I could build the website myself and wouldn't have to pay this $300,000 feed, build it. Right? And so, yeah, I, I think just being like super. Early, super lean, scrappy, lean. Yeah. Um, helped a lot and nothing to lose. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a hobby. I'm still working a job on the side, going to school during that time, um, I think around 2007, 2008, we actually grew through that crash somehow. I, um, I think, you know, we still kind of had the wind into our tails and our product wasn't really, um, high cost. In fact, a lot of people who were maybe buying. Higher cost products more expensive. Have they?
Chris Brandt:It's like instead of the button down shirt, they, they went to a T-shirt.
Jake Nickell:Yeah. Let's just scoop a $10 tee from Threadless instead because the economy sucks. Yeah. Um, so I think that may have helped us through that time and, but I think I. Even going back to that first 2000 crash, I mean, we've always been very just nimble and scrappy and lean and, um, we're, we're able to make, we make the hard decisions quick and early. Um, when we see inevitable issues coming up. Like, I mean, even with COVID, um, like, you know, shit really hit the fan in March of, uh, right, what is it? 2020? 2020?
Chris Brandt:Yeah.
Jake Nickell:And, um, by. By April, may. I mean, we had, we had made some pretty tough decisions at the company to, we did a furlough and such. Um, but it was by June that we, um, got masks up on our platform and all of a sudden we had the best year we've ever had that year and brought everybody back. But just in the face of uncertainty, we, um. I feel like that's when I work the best, to be honest. Like, um, when there's a problem to solve, like when things are going well, I feel like it's easy to sit back and just, um, coast. Yeah.
Chris Brandt:Well, I I, I think the thing that's interesting about problem solving is, is like there's a finite goal. Yeah. And a finite timeline to solving that problem, you know, which is appealing. Whereas like big open-ended projects, you know, for somebody like me with a little bit of the A DHD going on, I'm, you know, like, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. Right. You know? Yeah. It's nice to have someone to focus the energy on. So you, you, you say that you make those hard decisions quickly, like that is not an easy thing to do. Like what, like what goes into to, to doing that and what makes you. Good at it.
Jake Nickell:You know, I think the first like eight to 10 years were really just a lot of growth years. And then we had a, um, really hard time in 2011, 2012 about, um, we were kind of like just starting to learn advertising.'cause for our first eight years we didn't do any advertising. Wow. Um, and then we figured in 2012 with, after a few years of experience there we're like, let's really go all out this holiday season. And we bought a ton of inventory. I. And set aside a huge ad budget and, um, it completely failed. And we were left like, you know, having spent a ton of money and now we're stuck with a bunch of inventory that never sold. Um, and so that was the first time I had to make a really tough decision the hardest year of my life really. And, um, never wanted to end up in that again, you know? Right. So. Learnings from that helped me foresee it more in the future. Um, and then also act at the right time.
Chris Brandt:I think it's the acting part that's hard because it, that takes a lot of, there's a lot of emotion involved and, and you know, when things don't go right, the right direction, you know, and it's hard, hard to, the, the tendency is to continue to walk down that path until you're just forced to make a change. Yeah. Which is obviously not the right way to do it.
Jake Nickell:You know, I've hired a lot of friends. Like I said, I work with my wife. Um, I've had a lot of other family that have come in and outta the business and, um, try to always make sure that this is, uh, you know, business is business and friendships or friendships and, you know, tomorrow is promised to no one. Whether in, you know, in, in any way of reading that quote. I think, um, yeah, family, friend or stranger. Yeah. But, uh, you know, I think I, what, what's helpful is being, um, just feeling confident in. That I'm doing the best I can, you know? Right. And that I'm not like purposefully trying to screw anybody over and we're all in this together. And, um, I'll be grownups about it. I mean, I've hit so many people leave the company, whether it's um, they quit, um, they get fired, there's a layoff and you know, that's never why you wanna hire somebody is for them to leave. Right, right. Um, but I think. Seeing what some of those folks have gone on to do later is so amazing to watch their trajectory and how they, I mean, the CTO of Obama's campaign used to work at Threadless and, you know, see, seeing stuff like that is really fun.
Chris Brandt:Yeah. Sometimes. Sometimes, you know, like that. Change in your career is the thing that launches you into the, the next great thing. And you know that's true of some of people too. I mean, like, they sit, yeah. They sit in a job that they know is not right for them and mm-hmm. They're not happy, but you know, they just don't make that change. And sometimes being forced to make that change can really jettison'em in the right direction.
Jake Nickell:Yeah. It can be definitely very hard for a few years, but sometimes works out for the better.
Chris Brandt:You talked about, um. You know, custom clothing, you've got, you know, you're making fabric and, and stuff like that. I mean, we're living in the age of ai. There's so much new, you know, commerce opportunities and things like that and, you know, you're sort of expanding the reach of. Art and selling art and what that means online. Where, where do you go from here? What's next on, on the agenda?
Jake Nickell:Yeah. I mean, I think that the software for connecting the dots between, um, all this make on demand production and all these creators out there, I think AI is, um, something that we're. Our community absolutely hates right now. Um, and I too, like I, you know, I'd much rather buy, um, you know, art created by an actual artist and not Yeah, through a prompt. Um, but I do believe that there's ways that the, this. The, the software can be helpful to artists too. Um, but it is a kind of like controversial time right now there. Um, you know, I think one thing is a lot of artists when they upload to our platform, they don't often tag their designs and they don't write a very descriptive product description. And that stuff's really important for search 'cause, right. Um, you know, like the search engines aren't looking at the image. They need to be able to, um, scrape some words, right? So, um, you know, there's stuff like that that could be helpful for artists just for describing their work. Um, and then I think it could be fun for, um, just prompting inspiration like, um. We haven't built anything like this and we don't have plans to. But, um, when I see a retail trend come through, like, Hey, um, like furries are really popular at Spencer's, um, what if the AI knew your art style and just created a couple of designs? Not to actually sell, but just to get your, your mind going. Inspiration. What, what could be done. Yeah.
Chris Brandt:Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, when we talk about ai, one of the things that's interesting is the comments often made that, like, for some reason we've got AI doing all the fun creative work that we were promised. I. We were gonna have time to do, because AI was gonna take away all the mundane stuff, but we end up doing all the mundane stuff and they end, end up doing all the creative stuff. Yeah. But it sounds like there's opportunity there for, for like the especially descriptions and tags. That is the definition of mundane stuff.
Jake Nickell:Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's inevitable and we've gotta figure out where we are gonna, um. Where, where we live in this space, I mean, it's, it's coming so we can either fight it or be a part of it. Um,
Chris Brandt:you guys now are, are outsourcing the fulfillment of your or, or the production of your, your wares. Do you, do you envision bringing that in house at any point? I.
Jake Nickell:Yeah. Even in the screen printing days, we outsourced it, but we did do our own fulfillment back then. Right. Um, and I loved having that warehouse, that space that we would have bands come play. And it was just like a really great energy for our culture. Um, and then when it comes to production, um, there's all these innovations happening, like I was mentioning that corn Israeli company. Um, but it hasn't really been brought to the front end like consumer side. So I feel like. I would love to try to figure out a way that we could start doing our own production, um, and start leveraging some of those, uh, those innovations. Because I mean, you can print, I mean, back when we would screen print, we would do metallic inks, we would do puff inks, we would do glow in the dark, we would print on the sleeve. You know, like anything you can imagine can be done in scale. But with print on demand, you know, we have. We've integrated with 30 different suppliers over the years, and to get one of them to do it is a chore. But then to get all of them to do it is like impossible. And so if we owned that, the full like supply chain, I think, um, we could, I. Offer a lot more really fun decorating methods to our artist community. Like already on print, on demand, you can do puff ink. They call it like high density ink where they layer on more. You can even do like lenticular and stuff and Wow. Um, yeah, I think that kind of stuff would be really fun, but it kind of, I. Can't be done without us just doing it ourselves at this point.
Chris Brandt:Well, and I gotta imagine, I mean, you said you talk about integrating 30 different partners over the years. Like this has gotta be a field where a lot of them just kind of come and go too. And so you find, probably find a good one and you're like, oh God, now I gotta Yeah. Find something else.
Jake Nickell:I think a lot of that has to do with how early the, um, how early it is in the in print on demand where there's kind of new, just the equipment. Like say you buy. Uh, 50, like a hundred thousand dollars printers, and then all of a sudden a new printer comes out that makes them all obsolete. Like it's really hard for a, for a company to then transition. So we end up just working with a new group a lot of times and stuff like that happens, unfortunately.
Chris Brandt:With all this, what is your favorite piece of art that is on thread list right now?
Jake Nickell:I, um, have been really loving this artist, burger baby. Um, she has. Some of the weirdest designs I absolutely love. One of 'em is like. Um, it says, follow your dreams. And there's this girl that's like a hamster habitat, and so her dream was, she always wanted to be a hamster habitat. And then there's a little bird next to her that says like, how the hell did those hamsters get inside you? It's just weird. I, I like, I like the weird stuff like that.
Chris Brandt:Kind, low brow art. I mentioned the, the statue in the, in the back. And I, and I think the thing that's interesting about you is you're a big fan of art and the artists and one of the things that you've done Yeah. Is collect a lot of. Artists work over the years and actually commission a lot of art too.
Jake Nickell:Yeah. I mean, my favorite thing to do is to go to the cons, go to artist Alley, talk to the artists. Like I love going to Designer Con in Vegas Collected Con. But yeah, I mean, um, we commission artists, whether they're part of Threadless or not. I mean, all the time. We have a whole room in our house that's all like family portraits that we've commissioned from different artists. One was like. Um, my favorite comic book artist, Jason Howard, we commissioned him to do a, a cover of a fake comic that's like our family. And we also, both my kids got to choose what their superpowers would be for the cover, and they got illustrated that way. And, uh, Shandy, my wife commissioned this artist to do like pluses, um, like little felted pluses of our family. Oh, that's fun. Um, yeah, they're pretty cool. And then this artist with the statue behind his name's Jeremy v. And Jeremy Ville is just incredible. He does like a daily drawing that are very inspirational, and he, he made that statue for us. Um, and it's meant to be like a stereotypical threadless artist. So he's carrying a little sketch pad and a pencil next to him. Yeah,
Chris Brandt:that's, that's, that's, that's a great way, I mean, like, the thing I think that's cool about it is, is as somebody who's, you know, been in this business now for 25 years, I love that, that you still have the passion for the art and that's, that's sort of the cool core piece of what Threadless is, I think.
Jake Nickell:Thanks. Yeah. Thank you for saying that.'cause yeah, that is. I don't see that a lot from our competition. I don't see that love for the art. And there a lot of the artists that decide to go exclusive with us. That's why 'cause they see it not just me, but like Lance, you know, our head of VIPA, our whole team. I mean, one of our company values is be an artist. And I mean that I have, we made like little posters of all the different company values and be an artist. Uh, there's this guy, Seth Godin, who describes artists as, um. Like a nurse is an artist when they go out of their way to fake, make you feel more comfortable when you're going through like a challenging mo. I mean, they don't have to do that as part of their job. So, um, yeah, like bringing a piece of yourself to, to your role that's not just a cog in the system.
Chris Brandt:That I think that's a great piece of advice for any business, any person. It's like, just make your life better by just. Nourishing the artist than you.
Jake Nickell:If I was just selling t-shirts for 25 years, I think I'd be out of this business a long time ago. But helping artists make money is a really fulfilling job.
Chris Brandt:Well, that's awesome man. Well keep up the good work. And I just wanna say thank you so much for coming on. It's been an awesome conversation and, uh, good luck in the future. And, uh, I gotta go dig around 'cause I, I need some, some t-shirts so I'm gonna go, go find some stuff on there and, and oh, and last, last but not least. Yeah, where do people go? Thread list.com. Right. And yeah, anywhere else. Dot
Jake Nickell:com is the best place. I think if you go to artist shops.com, that's where to sign up if you're an artist that you wanna start working with us. Okay. Um, but yeah, threadless.com is the best place to shop. Awesome.
Chris Brandt:Well thanks so much. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thanks for watching. I'd love to hear from you in the comments and if you could give us a, like, think about subscribing and share this with a friend, and I will see you in the next one.