Both are great videos and he gets to interview the staff at both the Chicago and Boulder offices. You get to see some of your favorite Threadless personalities in both of these video, including mad scientist Charlie Festa! Threadless Founder Jake Nickell and Chief Creative Officer Jeffrey Kalmikoff even lead the tour of the Boulder offices. Definitely worth the watch!
Looks like the White House has requested the help of 25 of the countries top young entrepreneurs, and it looks like Jake Nickell, Threadless Co-Founder and Chief Strategic Officer will be there. It’s pretty exciting to know that our current government is tapping resources outside of their comfort zone, unlike previous administrations. Skaw (Nickell’s handle in InternetLAND) posted the following on the popular social networking site, Twitter:
1. Mark Zuckerberg (23) — Facebook — $700 Million
2. Andrew Gower (28) — Runescape — $650 Million
3. Chad Hurley (30) — Youtube — $300 Million
4. Blake Ross and David Hyatt (22) — Mozilla — $120
5. Andrew Michael (29) — Fast Hosts — $110 Million
6. Angelo Sotira (26) — Deviant ART — $75 Million
7. John Vechey (28) — PopCap Games — $60 Million
8. Alexander Levin (23) — Image Shack — $56 Million
9. Jake Nickell (28) — Threadless — $50 Million
10. Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith (28) — Tagged — $45 Million
11. Sean Belnick (20) — Biz Chair — $42 Million
12. Matt Mullenweg (23) — WordPress — $40 Million
13. Kevin Rose (30) — Digg — $31 Million
14. Aodhan Cullen (24)– Stat Counter — $25 Million
15. Markus Frind (29) — Plenty Of Fish — $23 Million
Well we wait to see the outcome of this meeting, check out this video of MSNBC profiling Threadless.
The first two 5 Things We Can Learn From… posts featuring Threadless and Johnny Cupcakes proved to be quite popular. This time around I dissect Seibei. Seibei is a one-man brand that was conceptualized and developed by David Murray. Murray is a 26 year old college graduate who majored in Japanese Literature. Lucky for us, he decided to focus on making cool art instead.
With such popularity and a cult following, Seibei must have done something right. Here I look at 5 things that we can learn from the Seibei story.
1. Your Website Should Be An Extension of Your Products. You don’t even need to click on the store, or see any of David tees or other products, and you already know what his style and what his goods will look like. His website is an extension of his products. He showcases many of the monsters that he prints on his tees throughout his site. And why not? The colors that he uses on his site reflects the colors often seen on his tees. Why would you have a sophisticated, modern and simplistic site design when your products are all about fun, humor, vibrant colors and monsters! Extend your products through your website design.
2. Take “Advantage” of Your Fanbase. In a good way, of course! David takes “advantage” of his fanbase through his Seibei Nation promotion. The Seibei Nation is his version of a street team. A lot of people consider word of mouth the purest form of marketing. Word of mouth is what a street team and esssentially the Seibei Nation is all about. And of course, remember that if they rub your back be sure to return the favor. Every time a Seibei Nation member brings in ten $10 or more sales they get a free Seibei T-Shirt. People LOVE free things so why not take advantage of that. BTW, use coupon code COTY for 10% off your next Seibei order!
3. Be As Transparent As Possible. If your company is a one-man show, and even if it’s not, it may pay off to be as transparent to your audience or customers as possible. David is as transparent as can be on his blog, often posting about things not related to tees but that show off the fun side of his life. David loves to make posts about food, by doing this, maybe he’ll appeal to other food lovers who will then be interested in his tacos and sandwich tees. By being transparent, you make yourself the face of your company. You are living proof that your company exists because of you and your hard work. People are able to relate with you much more when they see a face. When people can relate, they often are more prone to opening their wallets and spending their hard earned cash.
4. Make Art and Craft Shows Your Friend. David hits craft and art shows pretty hard. A quick glance at his blog shows that he’s attended a ton of these, including: Craftacular, Boston Bazaar, Renegade, and Stitch Austin. What’s so important about attending craft and art shows? Well, it helps to give you brand exposure in the offline world. Sure you have an online store, but when you attend a craft show, people can actually see your goods, they can touch it and purchase it right then and there. Secondly, attending a craft show will help you to actually see what demographics are interested in and are purchasing your products. This should give you an idea of what you should maybe do for future product releases – build on popular products, build on what your target demographic is interested in.
5. Trust Your Gut. When David submitted his Give Us A Kiss design to the Cornelius Hearts Threadless contest, he had high hopes and was quite excited about it. Things didn’t turn out so well for the design. Voters were quick to give it low scores and the submission was prematurely dumped from the voting process. Understandably, David was miffed about this – mainly because he was so enthusiastic about the design. He decided to go with his gut and have the design printed despite it not being seen favorably in the eyes of the tee loving community, Threadless. The shirt that Threadless once abandoned is now a staple of his online store and I don’t doubt that it is one of his top sellers. The ultimate vindication came when Jake Nickell, one of the founders of Threadless, stopped by Seibei’s booth at Renegade Chicago. Nickell loved Give Us A Kiss and even purchased one. Trust your gut. 95% of the time your gut is right, which is totally worth the 5% of the time it is not.
Wheww, those are my thought about Seibei – what are yours? Leave them in the comments section!
Jake Nickell also known as skaw to the Threadless faithful posted this picture of him in a tee with, well, himself printed on it! The shirt was printed by a company called Nodbod, that specializes in all-over-printing. I’ll surely have to review Nodbod in the future, maybe send in my own funky picture to use as an all-over-print, though, something tells me that if I did have a tee printed with my face plastered on the entire shirt that it would look unbelievably tacky.
Here’s an interesting interview of Jake Nickell (Founder and CEO) and Jeffrey Kalmikoff (Chief Creative Officer) of Threadless. The interview was done by Tara Hunt is actually part of a set of videos she has been posting on Viddler to lead up to the release of her new book, The Whuffie Factor. The book actually talks about how social networks can be used to build business. So it’s no surprise that Jake and Jeffrey talk about how Threadless has utilized the online community at Threadless to help build the Threadless brand.
I found this over at Jason Cosper’s blog, Preshrunk. Kudos to him!
