Threadless: The Business of Community

Karim R. Lakhani; Zahra  Kanji

Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2008

Threadless: The Business of Community

Abstract

Threadless.com, the online, Chicago-based t-shirt company, was not your typical fashion apparel company. The company, run by Jake Nickell, Jacob DeHart, and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, turned the fashion business on its head by enabling anyone to submit designs for t-shirts and asking its community of more than 500,000 members to help select winning designs. Threadless encouraged community members to actively participate by critiquing submitted designs, blogging about their daily lives, posting songs and videos inspired by the designs, and, most important, purchasing t-shirts that have won the weekly design competitions. In 2007, Threadless was well on its way to selling more than a million and a half t-shirts. The success of Threadless has garnered significant media attention, the New York Times and USA's National Public Radio highlighting its unique community-based business model and has piqued the interest of large traditional retailers. Nickell, DeHart, and Kalmikoff were now faced with making a decision about a potentially lucrative offer from a major retailer offering to carry large volumes of select Threadless t-shirts in its retail stores. Should they accept?

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; Innovation and Invention; Product Design; Partners and Partnerships; Social and Collaborative Networks; Apparel and Accessories Industry;

Format: Multimedia

1 pages

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Citation:

Lakhani, Karim R., and Zahra Kanji. "Threadless: The Business of Community." Harvard Business School Multimedia/Video Case 608-707, June 2008.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

Advancing Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Research Through Open Innovation Competitions

Andrea Blasco, Michael G. Endres, Rinat A. Sergeev, Anup Jonchhe, Max Macaluso, Rajiv Narayan, Ted Natoli, Jin H. Paik, Bryan Briney, Chunlei Wu, Andrew I. Su, Aravind Subramanian and Karim R. Lakhani

Open data science and algorithm development competitions offer a unique avenue for rapid discovery of better computational strategies. We highlight three examples in computational biology and bioinformatics research where the use of competitions has yielded significant performance gains over established algorithms. These include studying algorithms for antibody clustering, imputing gene expression data, and querying the Connectivity Map (CMap). Performance gains are evaluated quantitatively using realistic, albeit sanitized, data sets. The solutions produced through these competitions are then examined with respect to their utility and the prospects for implementation in the field. We present the decision process and competition design considerations that lead to these successful outcomes as a model for researchers who want to use competitions and non-domain crowds as collaborators to further their research.

Keywords: computational biology; bioinformatics; innovation competitions; Research; Mathematical Methods; Strategy;

Citation:

Blasco, Andrea, Michael G. Endres, Rinat A. Sergeev, Anup Jonchhe, Max Macaluso, Rajiv Narayan, Ted Natoli, Jin H. Paik, Bryan Briney, Chunlei Wu, Andrew I. Su, Aravind Subramanian, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Advancing Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Research Through Open Innovation Competitions." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-097, March 2019. View Details

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Threadless: The Business of Community

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