Jake Nickell (Threadless.com)
For this interview, we pried into the mind of Threadless founder, Jake Nickell. We asked him a bunch of questions about the early days of his company and of course the Midwest. Yeah you’ve heard the name before, Threadless sells around 1 million tees a year and get this…they’ve been featured on everyone of your favorite movies and tv shows (Scrubs:). Anyhow, it gives us a great deal of pleasure to present our Q&A session with this amazingly awesome Midwestern kid and his equally as dope company.
words: mg! / photos: threadless
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What’s Up?
Nothing much, Just got done eating two double robbles from mcdilson’s..
Location?
Approximately right here
You all are best known for your t-shirt company Threadless and it’s submission based approach to making t-shirts. How did the idea come about?
Well it is funny that you should ask me that question. I was a member of a forum known as Dreamless.org. That is when i met the wonderful Jacob Dehart.. We started throwing some ideas around and came up with this idea for a t-shirt company after I had won a t-shirt design competition.
What was the startup process like for SkinnyCorp & Threadless when you guys started? Would you say that success was immediate? How difficult was it getting the company up and running?
We started about 6 years ago.. As for startup Jacob and I still worked at our regular jobs and on the side worked on threadless. We started very small in a studio apartment but kept up the hard work, Once the site started taking off we quit our regular 9 to 5’s and started full time on threadless. We each put in $500, got a few tees printed up and started selling them through the site. It was pretty slow starting out, for the first couple years we didn’t take any profit – every dime that we made just went in to printing more tees.
What are some of your favorite designs that have come through Threadless or Naked & Angry?
I like Upso’s Threadless tee … and a ton others. I have a new favorite every week. As for N&A, definitely the Blueberry tie, whoever made that is a genius. And the new heavenly scales wallpaper is SMOKIN.
SkinnyCorp is definitely a company of the people. Why are user-driven, submission based companies like yourselves, YouTube, and MySpace so popular?
It does seem to be really popular right now doesn’t it? We were around a lot longer than YouTube and MySpace… we don’t have creeps like Harper Reed just browsing around MySpace all day looking for naked girls and searching for tags on YouTube like ‘boobs.’ Threadless was built as an art project, it was really just a hobby for us. We were just 2 members in the community trying to help people find a way to express themselves and get their work shown to a large audience.
With as successful as you guys have been, how have you dealt with failure? Has SkinnyCorp even experienced any?
I wouldnt say we have faced faliure but we have run into some roadblocks. Jacob and I have no business experience. We’re both college dropouts that came up with a cool idea. We’ve never had a problem attracting large audiences of people ready to design and vote on tees, but we have had problems in handling that growth as far as order fulfillment, HR, all that good stuff. I’d say we’ve done a fairly good job so far and love the problem solving of issues like how to properly run a warehouse.
Threadless collaborated with the Red Cross not too long ago and made a donation of more than $100,000 for hurricane relief. First, I just want to commend you guys on your dedication to a worthy cause and secondly could you tell us about how the project happened?
Thank You… basically we had just hired Ross Zietz from New Orleans a couple months before Katrina happend and when it hit, a lot of his family were affected. He came to Jacob and I and pitched the idea of designing a tee shirt and selling it, donating the proceeds to Katrina. We one-upped him and said we would not only donate the proceeds, but we would also double it. For every $10 shirt sold, we donated $20. It blew up, we had raised $50,000 in less than a day. So we raised another $50,000 on an even $10 match and that’s how we raised the $100,000. Since then, we did another promotion with Red Cross to design their 75th anniversary t-shirts that are now sold in the Red Cross store, raising more money for good causes
What can we do as midwesterners to make the region more supportive of the efforts of our entrepreneurs and creative types?
To be honest, we have never had much of a local edge to our projects, but we have noticed that Chicago has been really supportive to artists lately. We are hoping to get more involved in the creative community around here by throwing events and such in Chicago.
Any new SkinnyCorp projects coming up in the future that we should know about?
Keep your eyes on Naked & Angry, new products ABOUND!
Do you guys have any words of advice for other young entrepreneurs and designers out there?
Everyone has their own way of working. For me, it’s all about staying passionate about what your doing. If I don’t want to be doing what I’m doing, I don’t do a very good job at it.
What’s your favorite thing about the Midwest?
Charlie Festa is here.
Words of advice for midwesterngoodness.com?
There’s more than corn in Indiana!
Any last words/shout outs?
Kent and Nance, I love you!
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For more information about Jake Nickell, SkinnyCorp, and Threadless:
http://www.jakenickell.com/
http://www.skinnycorp.com/
http://www.threadless.com/