CUSP Magazine: Winter Issue 2014

A: Did you always want to own your own company? How does one even begin to get into the entrepreneur
business, especially in the fashion/art industry?
J: I always wanted to do my own thing but I wasn’t interested in entrepreneurship or becoming a “businessman”
... I went to art school, not business school. I’ve always had a multitude of side projects going
on through high school and college. Threadless started as a hobby, another side project. Then when
people slowly started to participate, uploading designs, buying shirts, etc, it turned into a business! My
background was more in web design and development and I was doing a bunch of freelance work for
companies building them websites and such. Threadless served as proof that I knew how to build an
E-commerce website. I think the best way to get in on this sort of thing is to just have personal projects
that you spend time on outside of work or school.
A: Between 2004-2006, the company revenue went from 1.5 to 6.5 million. What do you think played a
major role in that?
K: A lot of what drove Threadless’ success in the beginning was word of mouth and the way that this was
happening was that artists were speaking to other artists or promoting their own work. We have really
incredible artists on the website that make t-shirt designs that sell really well. We get artists that submit
from Asia, Australia, and domestically here in the U.S., all from varying backgrounds. We have artists that
don’t have any art background professionally, but they like graphic design and they do it as a hobby on
the side and Threadless is kind of their outlet to get that out into the world. Then we also have artists that
submit to Threadless and get printed that work other jobs as creative types in ad firms. There is a huge
spectrum of backgrounds for artists.
CUSP MAGAZINE WINTER ’14 ISSUE
49