Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Threadless for Art?

No doubt you've all heard of Threadless, the Chigaco based T-Shirt website.

Threadless works like this: Anyone can submit a design for a T-shirt. Users can then score the T-shirt designs, and the most popular T-shirts are then printed and sold. Each week the team at Threadless print about 10 new T-Shirts, which are quickly snapped up by devoted fans of the site ... which include me. I have a quite a few of their T-shirts, including my favourite, "The Communist Party".

Their business model is simply a great idea. The community creates the T-shirts, the community votes for what T-shirts get sold.

There doesn't seem to be anyone doing this in the art world, but I think it could work really well. Artists could submit their pieces, and the artwork that gets the highest rating gets sold in the gallery.

This has been one of the ideas floating around in my head for a while - to start an art gallery that is "the Threadless for Art". Does anyone else think that this is an idea that could work?

2 comments:

Daydream Lily said...

I never knew this site existed. Seems to me like your doing your research.

I love your blog cause I'm finding all these new links.

Ive been seeing everything from more a frankie mag point of view.

Michael said...

I think this is a pretty good idea, I know one of the threadless founders, I print a lot of their art that hangs in their store now... I manage and co-own an art printing business.

Contact me, we'll chat.

-Michael