Introducing Twitter Tees by Threadless
I'm excited to announce a new project we launched today - Twitter Tees by Threadless. We've brought the Threadless crowdsourcing model for t-shirts to the Twitter community. Twitter Tees will feature notable tweets submitted and voted on by Twitter users, with art direction and design of each shirt by the in-house creative team at Threadless. We've already gotten some nice coverage by Mashable, BrandWeek, and O'Reilly.
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, originally reached out to us in early January regarding some Twitter logo tees they were interested in producing. Here at Threadless, we had already been refining a strategy to bring crowdsourcing to other vibrant communities, so the timing was perfect. In February, Biz invited us to speak to the Twitter team at their San Francisco office about Threadless and crowdsourcing. It was great to exchange ideas with their team and they really liked our idea for enabling any Twitter user to submit and vote on tweets to make the best Twitter Tees. Once we decided to move forward, our team here at Threadless did a great job taking this project from concept to live site in a very short time. The Twitter API provided a great platform for developing a richly integrated site, and Biz Stone and his colleague Maggie Utgoff were incredibly supportive.
Here's how it works. After logging into the site using your Twitter credentials, you can instantly access your own tweets and submit them for consideration. You can also nominate others' tweets for consideration, and you can vote on any tweets submitted to determine if they are worthy of being printed as a Twitter Tee. Importantly, in respect of your privacy, you must approve any tweet of yours that someone else has nominated before it is eligible for voting. Also, in respect of your time/messaging preferences, you can choose to approve all, deny all or review each nomination on a case-by-case basis. Tweets from protected Twitter accounts are not eligible for nomination or submission. Each week we'll print two new Twitter Tees, based on community vote. If your own tweet is selected you will receive $500 and if you are first to nominate a successful tweet you will receive $140.
We launched the site with four great Twitter-themed tees from existing tweets:
"I'm huge on Twitter" by @xenijardin
"140 is the new 420" by @mutgoff
"In space no one can hear you tweet" by @LouisTrapani
"The messaging system we didn't know we needed until we had it" by @biz
I can't wait to see which tweets the community submits and votes up in the coming weeks, but I expect them to be as diverse and varied as the conversations happening constantly on Twitter. Please check out the site and submit, nominate and vote on some tweets! I'd love to get your feedback.





