T-shirt Seller Threadless Rolls First Summer Tour
To commemorate its tenth anniversary offering crowd-sourced T-shirt designs, e-commerce retailer Threadless.com has launched its first mobile tour, taking an art-filled Airstream trailer from its Chicago headquarters to both coasts this summer.
The tour, which will make stops at design shows, music festivals and other high-traffic venues from now through early October, will be thoroughly videoed, blogged and tweeted on the Threadless.com social network pages at www.facebook.com/threadless, where the company has 132,000 likes, and on twitter.com/threadless, where Threadless has 1.5 million followers.
The Threadless Everywhere tour will first head west to San Francisco to the TechnoCraft design exhibition opening July 9 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The 25-foot Airstream trailer, pulled by a panel van designed for the tour with a collage of the most popular T-shirt designs from Threadless’ decade, will then work down the pacific coast and reach San Diego in time for Comic-Con July 21-22.
Threadless will operate a pop-up shop in the outlying areas around the convention, giving away T-shirts, coupons and other paraphernalia to the crowds using its patented “prize wheel”. Visitors will also be invited into the trailer to contribute their own art.
“We might get some ideas for new shirt designs that way,” says Threadless marketing vice president Cam Balzer. “You never know.”
Brands partnering with Threadless to sponsor the Everywhere tour include Dell computers, Griffin Technology—with which Threadless has partnered on cell phone cases and peripherals—and Sharpie pens. “We mentioned our tour and they just provided a whole pallet of Sharpie with the Threadless logo on them,” Balzer says. “It was great, because they’re such an organic fit to our design approach.”
In another innovation, members of the Gowalla mobile social network will be able to use their cell phones to check wherever the Threadless tour trailer stops and earn a badge that will entitle them to free rewards from Threadless. Gowalla has designed a special badge for the Threadless tour, and for the first time has also worked with a satellite GPS provider to enable Gowalla mobile users to track the Threadless trailer not just when it comes to a stop—the usual procedure in location-based networks—but even when it’s on the road.
Located in a large Chicago warehouse, Threadless.com brings together designers and customers by selecting a handful of graphics every week and asking its fans which ones they would like to see turned into T-shirts. The company recently took a large stake in Society6, an online artists’ community that uses social media to promote design in much the same way Threadless does.
The Threadless Everywhere tour will be run in-house by company employees, but agency The Marketing Arm was instrumental in helping to plan the logistics of the campaign, balzer says.
