Crowd Pleasers: Threadless Gives People What They Want

Changes Ahead

As it approaches its 10th anniversary, Threadless is contemplating some changes in both its marketing style and its product lines.

For one thing, the company is interested in finding product extensions that are an organic fit, like the partnership with Blik that makes Threadless designs available as oversized wall decals. In mid-November, iPhone case maker Griffin licensed and produced cases with some of Threadless' most popular graphics. The first two items in that line are now for sale in Apple stores and on the Griffin Web site, and Balzer says more are in the works — as are other possible licensing deals.

“We're really picky about who we work with,” he says. “It's about whether the artists would be proud to have their work shown on that product.”

Internally, Balzer and his team are working to add some formal metrics to their new marketing efforts. “Over the last six months here I've been building a metrics foundation and an investment model that we can use to understand the value of customers over time. It's been interesting to marry that science of marketing metrics to a business where it's really about making people love you.”

For example, Threadless' e-mail communications are undergoing some adjustments due to comments and complaints detected through social channels. The brand has had some deliverability issues, so it's testing new formats. Where Monday e-mails announcing the week's new tees had a model shot and a large block of copy for each design, the new version offers fewer model shots, more close-ups of the designs, and slimmed-down copy. The change, Balzer says, has improved both deliverability and clickthrough rates.

However, this drive to measurability will have to add to the impact Threadless has already had with its community-based approach, not undercut it. “We're interested in acquiring new customers,” Balzer says. “But it's never going to be boiled down to a spreadsheet operation.”

How Threadless Handles Crowds

STEP 1

Each week, a thousand or more designers submit graphics to the Threadless.com Web site.

STEP 2

Threadless checks them for copyright and to assure a level of quality, narrows them down to about 100 and puts that selection up on the Web site.

STEP 3

Registered users can rate the designs from 1 to 5. They can also check a box that says “Yes, I'd buy that!”

STEP 4

The week's top 6 to 8 vote-getters go out for production and on sale on the Web site.

STEP 5

Designers whose ideas were selected get $2,500 in prizes and a chance for more rewards as best T of the month or the year. Threadless gets a license to print shirts.

Selling in the Social Net

AS MARKETING VICE PRESIDENT, CAM BALZER EXPLAINS THAT Threadless is just beginning to test the waters of paid marketing and wants to explore channels that will integrate best with its already-successful word of mouth efforts.

But just because those efforts are exploratory doesn't mean Balzer can afford to overlook ROI. “Because we've done so well without spending on marketing, we're starting from an infinite ROI,” he says. “Any dollars spent comes directly out of our bottom line.”

For that reason the company opted to buy cost-per-click (CPC) Facebook ads against a “Summer Heatwave” sale of its T-shirts last June 1 through 10. Working with digital agency Performics and Facebook's self-service ad platform, Threadless placed small display ads on the right side of members' profile pages, targeting users 18 and up. The ads linked to a landing page for the summer sale where visitors could order shirts.

Performics is part of an alpha test for a new Facebook advertising interface, so the agency had access to some advanced pilot tools for managing and optimizing ads, says Craig Greenfield, Performics vice president of search and performance media. The graphic-and-text ads were optimized to make more use of the images that produced the most clicks.

As a result, the campaign earned an average clickthrough rate of 0.07% and created a three-to-one return on ad spend. “We see a lot of promise in Facebook ads,” Balzer says. “The ability to reach our core demographic of online actives is tremendous.” And for this and subsequent Facebook CPC campaigns, 80% of the users clicking through the ads to buy are first-time shoppers.

“The ability to keep tapping new audiences every time we go out is huge for us,” Balzer says.

With that experience in mind, Threadless is now considering paid ads in another social medium, the social news Web site Digg. The attraction there, he says, is that users can vote the Digg ads up if they like them or bury them if not, just like its news stories.

“That takes the core idea our business is built on and filters it out into the ad world,” he says. — BQ