Revolutionizing Apparel, One Creative Design at a Time

How'd you like to make $2,000 to design a t-shirt?

gives you the chance. Once a niche site, now an apparel empire, Threadless makes cool and quirky Ts that go above and beyond the usual clones of Hot Topic

. In fact, it isn't a clone at all. “We invite anyone in the world to submit a design to our website,” Tom Ryan, CEO of Threadless, told Benzinga during a recent interview.

“Our community of 1.5 million users then votes on the design for one week and then we take the best design as chosen by the community (and ultimately chosen by us) and we sell them as t-shirts and other products and we pay the winning designer a cash fee.”

That “cash fee” amounts to the tantalizing sum of $2,000. “We pay them an additional $500 Threadless credit (or $200 cash if they would prefer that over the credit) and that's for the initial run,” Ryan said. If the design is popular and Threadless orders a reprint, the designer will receive another $500 “each time we reprint it.” Ryan said that while the $2,000+ payout is “well above the market rate” for graphic art on t-shirts, he has found that people aren't just submitting to Threadless for the potential profits. “[They do it] for the ability to advance their careers through submitting and getting critiques from their peer group, forming friendships online, and just the joy of creation and sharing their work,” he said. “There is even a function of our site called the critique section where users actually go and provide constructive feedback to an artist so that if the submission isn't quite as good as it could be, they can take the feedback in a constructive way and then resubmit their design for a better chance of winning,” Ryan continued. After 10 years on the market, how has Threadless been doing? “We have received hundreds of thousands of designs in the 10 years that we have been in business,” Ryan boasted. “The artist community is about 150,000 people and the entire registered member community [is at] 1.5 million, so about 10% of the registered are actually submitting designs and the rest are voting or are otherwise participating on the site.” In terms of the submission content, Ryan said that there is “definitely a diversity of artists that submit to us.” “They range all the way from complete amateurs to the sweet spot being art school students,” Ryan said. “Generally speaking, people tend to submit multiple times. There are people who have submitted many, many times and they have never won but they get a lot of value out of the process (like I mentioned earlier) besides the cash and the potential glory.” In short, Threadless became a social empire long before the rise of Facebook and Twitter. “Our artists, the first thing they do when they submit a design is tell their friends to go vote on their design to increase the chances that [they'll] win,” Ryan said, adding that users share their content across the Web. “I'd say that t-shirts are actually more social than you'd think.” To hear more from Threadless' chief executive, don't miss Benzinga's

with Tom Ryan.