A few years back, Karim R. Lakhani created a case study about Threadless which is taught to Harvard Business School students and is also available for other schools to use in their own classrooms. Last week, I joined Karim in 3 classes to discuss the case.  The first two were with HBS MBA students and the third was with a group of chief level executives taking a 3 week crash course at Harvard and Stanford.  Each class had about 60 people in it and lasted a couple of hours.

I learned A LOT about Threadless that day!  It was amazing to sit in a room of incredibly smart people and hear their own perceptions of what Threadless is about and what we should be doing as a company.  I was delightfully surprised at how well everyone understood the brand and what we are all about.

The case starts out looking at what is innovative about Threadless… this talk usually resulted in how involved our community is in what we create and how fast we move.  The discussion then turns to how our “funnel is flipped” … that is, rather than the company coming up with product ideas and pushing them to our customers, we involve our customers in creating and validating new product ideas.  After that’s all agreed upon, we move into talking about motivation.  We spent a few minutes on what motivates artists to participate and then another chunk on what motivates customers, voters and bloggers to get involved.

Then, the question “Why should Threadless exist?” is asked.  If the community is so involved in everything, why do we need to be here?  Everyone gets it right away… we are the aggregator.  Connecting the artists to the customers.  We’re the platform.  It’s kind of funny that it took us so long to really realize this and embrace it.  This is what we are working hard on with Threadless Atrium … and so far implemented with Threadless Causes and the Steven Alan Pattern Challenge.  While we’ve applied it to t-shirts 99% of the time over the past 10 years, what it’s really about is providing really great opportunities for amazing artists, creating cool products from the artwork they make.

The case ends with a question for the students to weigh in on.  Should Threadless sell their t-shirts wholesale via a big box retailer?  It ends up being a bit of a moot point.  Maybe in some instances it would make sense, in others not so much, but what these types of decisions really need to be driven by is what Threadless is all about.  Providing more cool opportunities for more artists.  So in this case, it’s not so much about distributing the same products with the same designs in more places, the more exciting opportunity to me is more and more different designs by more and more artists printed on more and more different products.