Get the most out of your Inc. online experience by registering and joining the Inc. community today. Get access to all Inc.com content and priority invites to free Inc. networking events in your area.

Login using:


Or login directly through Inc.com

Turn Followers
Into Creators

 

The company: SkinnyCorp, which owns online T-shirt retailer Threadless. Based in Chicago and founded in 2000, Threadless sells an estimated $30 million worth of graphic T-shirts a year by soliciting designs from a community of hundreds of thousands of amateur designers, who then vote on their favorites. Threadless bases production on the shirts that get the most votes and pays the winning designers $2,000.

The idea: Threadless CEO Tom Ryan and founder Jake Nickell thought that Twitter messages, because they are pithy, might work well as T-shirt slogans. In May, Threadless created a website that made it easy for the company's Twitter followers -- at the time, there were 490,000 of them -- to turn their favorite tweets into shirts. Users log on to a Threadless website,enter their Twitter username and password, and then submit tweets for consideration or vote on other people's tweets. The winning slogans get printed on T-shirts and sold for $18 each. "We figured if we built something on top of Twitter, we'd drive participation really quickly," Nickell says.

The result: Nickell was right. In its first five months, the Twitter experiment attracted 100,000 submissions and 3.5 million votes. So far, the company has printed and sold 23 designs -- "I'm huge on Twitter" and "Iowa: Cooler than California Since 2009" are the two most popular -- resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue in the first five months. The promotion also helped Threadless add one million Twitter followers. "That's not bad for a brand-new product," says Ryan, adding that the Twitter Tees program also provided a revenue boost to Threadless's core business, as Twitter followers often stick around to buy other shirts.

How to get retweeted, Part I: Ask your followers for help -- and give them prizes when they comply. Nickell says one of the company's most successful tweets came when it offered Twitter followers a chance to win $100 if they passed along the news of a $9-per-T-shirt sale to their friends. The contest became one of the most popular topics on Twitter that day.

Read more:

  • 9 Most Common Start-up Mistakes
  • Accelerator vs. Incubator: What's the Difference?
  • How Pinterest Really Makes Money

    • Max Chafkin

    Senior writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.


    Sign-up for our Technology Newsletter