The viral-marketing geniuses at online T-shirt purveyor threadless.com, whose T-shirt design competitions has somewhat of a cult following, opened the doors this week to a new store in Lakeview. On the site, seven new styles and two reprints, on average, are released every week. More than 750,000 votes are cast every week, and around 100,000 T-shirts are sold each month, according to Threadless.
So why bother with a store? “We’ve been noticed by big-box retailers like Target, and we worried that if we did that, it would be just another T-shirt and it would lose the story,” says Jake Nickell, the 27-year-old CEO of Threadless’s parent company, Ravenswood-based Skinnycorp. “But we realized that didn’t mean we couldn’t do retail. We could just do it on our own terms.”
The store has 20 monitors that display information about the rotating T-shirt selection, such as prices, the designer’s name, and comments from the Web site, scrolling across the screen. Each design stays in the store for only two weeks, with nine to 10 designs replaced weekly. Another perk for devotees? The new designs appear in the store on Fridays, before they are posted online on Mondays. Find short-sleeve T-shirts ($15 to $25), long-sleeve T-shirts ($25), and hoodies ($40).
