Threadless.com is an American community centred T-shirt store that was started in January 2000 by two Chicago based illustrators, Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart. Threadless’ press pack mentions that “They came up with the idea after Jake Nickell won the NMUF London tee shirt competition. It felt good to win a tee shirt competition and we thought it’d be cool to extend that to the level that Threadless has become,”.

After winning this competition, Threadless was born, taking on a community feel where people submit t-shirt designs, with the Threadless community rate each design on a 1-5 scale and whether they’d buy it or not. The highest rated each week are then turned into limited edition T-shirts, which are available for 15 US Dollars a T-shirt, which are periodically reduced down to $10 for seasonal sales.

Just having the guts to take the plunge and set up such a radical idea as this gets my full kudos to the guys - I’ve more or less got my whole collection made up of Howies or Threadless Tees. Howies tees feel better, but Threadless’ are cheaper and have funnier designs, and more available.

They’re not setting out to be uber-ethical, or uber-hip. They’re just Threadless, and they’re great.

Some of the research of this entry came from an assignment I did as part of my course, available here. It is a 1.6 MB PDF file and got 70% (A first - just!)

Howies sent me their new catalogue recently, and I’ve been really impressed by them recently. Much like Innocent, they’ve been doing business both ethically and successfully for some time now, growing slowly and largely doing well via word of mouth recommendations. My mate Dan mentioned them in passing about 3 years ago, and since then I’ve got each of their catalogues which offer a bit more than pretty pictures of their clothes.

Each catalogue has a theme, with the last two chronicling the making of a new environmentally print shop where they can make their own T-Shirts, which they funded by not undertaking a foreign photo shoot. Is it just me, or is this how business should be done? Sustainably, fair, and not just for the benefit of fat cat shareholders.

It seems to me that they’re in the business to have fun, meet people and not just to make money. Nice to see for once, and coupled with Innocent, they’re both companies I really admire: not straying from their ethics (yet) or selling out.

Like Innocent, they have a humorous streak to all they do. Their blog is light hearted, and yet never far from dealing with the bigger issues in life (like how to make a decent cup of tea (in their latest catalogue) and letters to David Beckham amongst others)

Whilst their products aren’t at all cheap, they’re made well and reliably: I bought two t-shirts in their sale (organic cotton – so soft it’s unbelievable – even after being worn virtually every week for six months!) and they’re still as good as new. I haven’t yet had enough cash to get their Jeans or hoodies, but trust me I will. I’ve seen mates with them who still haven’t worn out the jeans – in the time I’ve had Gap jeans die a death on me.

Visit Howies online.