Joe from Fantastic Blognanza wrote two nice posts of research he did for a paper on Threadless. While the results are not exactly what you’d call conclusive, they are interesting starting points for discussion.
Part 1: Can we predict from n.comments how well a design will score
Part 2: Who wins most, professional or amateur designers
If anyone has similar research I’d love to read it.
Yeah, quite inconclusive..
If I had had more time and less other final papers to worry about, I would have followed up on my initial research to get some firmer numbers. I have at least one more, and probably two, entries worth of data. I might just do one each Monday until I run out. Anyway, I’m glad you liked them and I’d be very interested in hearing your own thoughts on what I wrote.
It would be interesting to see how he defines ‘professional’. I’m a designer/editor by trade and have a small t-shirt site which I run as a hobby but it’s not my main source of income by a long stretch. Am I a professional then? I expect that a fair amount of the amateurs are involved in the creative industries to some degree. Basically, the line here is quite blurred in my opinion, but it’s good to see someone doing some real research into the online t-shirt industry.
My definition of ‘professional’ is more of a heuristic than anything else: if their Threadless profile links to their external designer portfolio website (or something similar or related, like their own t-shirt site), then I classified them as a ‘professional’. Thanks for asking for clarification! I think I mentioned that one time somewhere in the post, but I’ll go back and try to make it clearer
And I definitely agree with you that my current classification isn’t satisfactory, but it’s a start.
very interesting !
I just posted another one of these, Threadless Numbers #3: What kind of t-shirts don’t get printed at Threadless? if anybody’s interested.