Pie Palace

I recently bought a t-shirt from threadless.com, and I’ve been getting compliments about it ever since. The t-shirt, titled Robot Derby Girl has anime-style content (girl with robot), but drawn in an american style (relatively small eyes, HUGE mouth).

Threadless itself is one of those ventures that fills me with admiration: it’s a server that sits in a corner somewhere and generates income. It doesn’t require any kind of interaction to generate income, it solely acts as a middle-man; kinda like ebay. The Threadless business model is to attract graphic designers who post t-shirt designs, and suckers who rate them. The suckers put in untold hours of work classifying designs as good or bad. Designs that rack up enough good points get printed, and then consumers buy them from the site, at which point Threadless makes money.

That isn’t how it works, of course. There are probably a number of marketing people, and a coder or two responsible for adding features. But it’s still a nice model.