...Threadless: The Business of Community Case Write-up 1. What are similarities and differences between a community-driven product development process and a traditional product development process within a firm? Both community-driven product development and traditional product development processes within a firm focus on the following • Increase the revenue of the firm • Decrease costs of production • Expand the market share by increasing the number of loyal customers. • Meet customers’ needs There are certain aspects in which community-driven product development process and traditional product development process differ which are • A traditional product development process relies on the specialized knowledge of experts that the firm employs to accomplish the task which can be very expensive. A community driven process, on the contrary, relies on the knowledge of the masses which is free. • The success of a traditional product development process is dependent on one or couple of experts who will design and review the products. This increases its time to market. At the same time, a community driven process uses a community of experts who submits hundreds of designs a day. Also these designs are reviewed by the community thereby drastically decreasing it’s time to market. • In a traditional product development process, huge investments have to be made in the research and development of a product. Firms need to study the market, understand consumers’ needs, their...
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...1) What business is Threadless in? - Threadless is in the custom designed, user-created shirt business. - Threadless acts as facilitators for community-run business What is their competitive strategy? - Threadless’ designs are completely user created on Threadless’ website. - Online community of artists creates potential T-shirt designs, rather than Threadless creating them. - Ideas are voted on by the online Threadless community. - Threadless staff reviews highest rated ideas; chooses winner How sustainable is it? - Strategy has been copied by other websites (Design By Humans, for example). - However, Threadless is already massively popular/has established, loyal, talented user community. - Most competitors won’t be able to offer comparable financial incentives to user community. - As such, it is likely that Threadless won’t be seriously threatened by similar, community-driven companies. 2) What motivates various members of the community to participate? - Simple customers use website to simply buy creative shirts. - Designer-conscious students use website to generate feedback from fellow artists. - People have opportunity to interact with designers on company blog. - Monetary incentives include $2,000 cash and $500 in Threadless gift cards for winning shirt designs. - Each time a design is reprinted, the winning artist receives additional $500. - Winning designers have their art distributed...
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...levels of loyalty. The sense of pride and participation mobilizes the base of users to generate multi-pronged benefits including innovation and marketing advantages. It also provides the firm with an alternative to the market research problem at relatively low costs. This “wisdom of crowds” was coined by James Surowiecki (2004), in his book "The Wisdom of Crowds": “Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them’. This ‘wisdom of crowds’ is derived not from averaging solutions, but from aggregating them.” The advent of the internet provided us with a perfect platform to aggregate millions of disparate ideas into hugely successful enterprises. This is exactly what Threadless was able to accomplish. It harnessed the power of the crowd, resulting in reduced costs and increased loyalty. In addition, other “web 2.0” solutions exploit the same power of crowds that has proven itself in Wikipedia, delicious, YouTube,...
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...the year 2008, Threadless needs to make an important decision whether take their business to Retail partnership or not! Analysis of the Case Study Threadless had to carefully consider the perceived benefit of the users when changing its business model. In the way, users' perceived benefit from contributing to Threadless, constrains business model progress only to those solutions where the users still find it attractive to contribute. For example, Threadless would decide to sell only exclusive designs in big retailers due to considerations to their customers, who often like to think of Threadless as something exclusive. Thus Threadless would decide against the option of selling their bestsellers through retail partners. Similarly, users’ perceived identification with the firm and the community appears to constrain certain business models and opportunities that conflict with the shared values. For example, the users of Threadless did not want to see Threadless designs in Walmart, as it conflicts with their values. Furthermore, the findings suggest that users' perceived benefit of the business model progress would appears to be moderated by their perception of partnership, their sense of responsibility to the other users and Threadless, and their perceived identification with the firm. When the users a. perceive to be involved in Threadless, b. have...
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...the year 2008, Threadless needs to make an important decision whether take their business to Retail partnership or not! Analysis of the Case Study Threadless had to carefully consider the perceived benefit of the users when changing its business model. In the way, users' perceived benefit from contributing to Threadless, constrains business model progress only to those solutions where the users still find it attractive to contribute. For example, Threadless would decide to sell only exclusive designs in big retailers due to considerations to their customers, who often like to think of Threadless as something exclusive. Thus Threadless would decide against the option of selling their bestsellers through retail partners. Similarly, users’ perceived identification with the firm and the community appears to constrain certain business models and opportunities that conflict with the shared values. For example, the users of Threadless did not want to see Threadless designs in Walmart, as it conflicts with their values. Furthermore, the findings suggest that users' perceived benefit of the business model progress would appears to be moderated by their perception of partnership, their sense of responsibility to the other users and Threadless, and their perceived identification with the firm. When the users a. perceive to be involved in Threadless, b. have...
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...community to an online company? Threadless is one of the best example of an online communities , none of the other communities will be this busy . “It was not started as a brand, but now the the online community turnover is more than $10 million per year”. Threadless is today a phenomenally successful t-shirt company with million of tees sold from the time it began in year 2000. Threadless pioneered the online business model of community driven designs. Threadless is a Chicago based t-shirt company, came up with a new concept that employee and customers don't have to be two distinct groups. This online community asks its customers to submit shirt designs online that they have self created. this online community gets as much as 300 submissions a day and asks there huge fan base to vote for best designs. “The design that gains maximum number of votes gets a gift card from Threadless and cash prize of $2,000”. The best voted designs are then printed on t-shirts and made available to sale to public on there community, website stores. They screen all their best designs for copyright violations and obscenities, they aim to release a minimum of seven new designs a week and each design is sold for $18. The idea fragment for Threadless began when founder Jake Nickell began hosting t-shirt challenges on a design forum, he observed how much everyone who participated was enjoying the challenges and realized it could be a great model to start a community. “Threadless has 50 people working for the...
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...3.1 How does Threadless produce an appropriate rationale to persuade their stakeholders of the benefits of a creative and innovative management idea? (Learning Outcome: 3.1) Stakeholders are the people who takes interest in to the organisation and gets affected by its decision which could be directly or indirectly. It can be group of people or individual or any organisation or employees of own company. Vary from stakeholder’s power and interest, Stakeholders plays major role in the organisations in terms of innovation process and decisions as well. Threadless is an online community of artists and an e-commerce website based in Chicago, Illinois. Co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart started Threadless in 2000 with $1,000. Threadless produce an appropriate rationale to persuade their stakeholders of the benefits of a creative and innovative management idea when they began as a t-shirt design competition on the now defunct dreamless.org, a forum where users experimented with computers, code, and art. Nickell and DeHart invited users to post their designs on a dreamless thread (hence the name Threadless), and they would print the best designs on T-shirts. And he produced his business as just a hobby, a way for people to get their artwork out. By 2002, the hobby had surpassed $100,000 worth of T-shirts and attracted more than 10,000 community members, mostly artists in their teens and 20s. The user base has continued to grow from 70,000 members at the end of 2004 to more...
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...Decision: Threadless should not accept the offer based on the following reasons: Imperil Community-based Feelings: Although supplying T-shirts to a major retailer would potentially boost sales volume and increase awareness of Threadless, Threadless’ business model would switch from a community-focused to a revenue-focused model. Such a switch would weaken the relationships the company has with designers and customers, who drive its competitive advantage. Challenges of channel management: Supplying T-shirts to a major retailer would make Threadless T-shirts less exclusive, which would negatively affect existing customer relationships. Threadless shirts won’t maintain their “cool” image if too many are printed. Also, Threadless would face the challenges of keeping its brand image consistent in major retailer settings, making optimal pricing strategies for both its B2C and B2B channels and fulfilling big increases in orders. Plus, currently Threadless produces new items every week. Maintaining this turnover pace for a retailer would create much operational complexity. If Threadless wants to test the possibilities of working with a major retailer to further expand its awareness and thus potentially attract more designers and customers, Threadless should consider the following when choosing a partner: 1) Invite the Threadless Community to discuss the partnership. This action would reflect the importance of the Community to Threadless. 2) Does the brand equity of the candidate...
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...Threadless.com Clothing is a huge industry and a daunting prospect for a new entrant. On the one hand there are large players with scale economies, sophisticated logistics, low labour cost assembly operations and advanced retail and distribution networks. On the other there are boutique, fashion-led houses with an emphasis on design, quality and customisation – and with a clientele prepared to pay high prices for these attributes. Yet a small US start-up – Threadless.com – has confounded those skeptics who felt there wasn’t room for any new player, let alone one with no prior experience of the industry. Co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart started the company with $1,000 in seed money in 2000 although the idea was still more about building a web community than a major clothing business. "It was just a hobby, a way for people to get their artwork out," Nickell commented in a recent interview. By 2002, the hobby had surpassed $100,000 worth of T-shirts and attracted more than 10,000 community members, mostly artists in their teens and 20s. The user base has continued to grow from 70,000 members at the end of 2004 to more than 700,000 today. Sales in 2006 hit $18 million -- with profits of roughly $6 million. In 2007, growth continued at more than 200 percent, with similar margins. Nor was this a niche entry, trading on a specialised fabric or design or access to a boutique market. It has succeeded in one of the mainstream areas of clothing – the T-shirt. Amongst the most...
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...Blue Ocean Strategy MKT 421 Blue Ocean Strategy Description of Blue Ocean Strategy and its Significance According to Cham Kim and Renee Mauborgne (2004), the Blue Ocean strategy involves the description of how the organization should try and proceed to find some way to work in the marketplace that is not bloodied by the competition and also that is free of competitors. The strategy is against working in conditions such as Red Ocean, where businesses are fighting each other for some share of the marketplace. In essence, businesses are most often looking for ways that can better contend with their competitors, and that is the Blue Ocean strategy. According to the book, Blue Ocean Strategy, the leading companies succeed not by battling with competitors, but by systematically developing “Blue Oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for the growth. Such a strategy of Blue Oceans entails the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and also low cost, including the theory behind it not to outperform the competition in the on-hand industry, but to develop new market space or rather the “Blue Ocean”, in which case it makes the competition irrelevant. As such, the Blue Ocean strategy illustrates the opportunities of vast and untapped market spaces (Kim & Mauborgne, 2004). The Blue Ocean strategy is quite important. This is because it allows some business to sell its products with no or little competition from other firms. It is also significant...
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...Blue Ocean Strategy MKT 421 Name Date Instructor Blue Ocean Strategy Description and Significance According to Cham Kim and Renee Mauborgne (2004), the Blue Ocean strategy involves the description of how the organization should try and proceed to find some way to work in the marketplace that is not bloodied by the competition and also that is free of competitors. The strategy is against working in conditions such as Red Ocean, where businesses are ferociously fighting each other for some share of the marketplace. In essence, businesses are most often looking for ways that can better contend with their competitors, and that is the Blue Ocean strategy. According to the book Blue Ocean Strategy, the leading companies succeed not by battling with competitors, but by systematically developing “Blue Oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for the growth. Such a strategy of Blue Oceans the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and also low cost, including the theory behind it not to outperform the competition in the on-hand industry, but to develop new market space or rather the “Blue Ocean”, in which case it makes the competition irrelevant. (Brooks, 2013) As such, the Blue Ocean strategy illustrates the opportunities of vast and untapped market spaces (Kim & Mauborgne, 2004) The Blue Ocean strategy is quite important. This is because it allows some business to sell its products with no or little competition from other firms. It is...
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...1) What business is Threadless in? What is their competitive strategy and how sustainable is it? Business: * A fashion apparel company with online community of artists and an e-commerce website * Customer & Vendor involved Their Competitive Strategy – Customer intimacy strategy: * Collect data (crowdsouring), generate hypothesis, and do experimentation via market testing (and instant feedback) to learn more about popularity of designers (T-shirts) to small, price-sensitive niches market * Rapidly create customized products Sustainability: * Can be easily copied but take long time * Meanwhile, keep getting closer to their community, thereby sustaining their advantage 2) What motivates various members of the community to participate? They created customer involvement in the community by achieving following aspects: * Recognition & Prize * Winner will get $2,500 cash and gift codes * Democracy & Critiques * A channel to share opinion and get feedbacks * Passion * Evoking design’ desire to design & self-expression * Openness & Visibility * Freedom to share * No entry barrier: could be anyone who likes to design * The Sense of Ownership * The community’s opinions taken into consideration in decision making (in a short time) * Challenges & Fun * Website’ fast turnover keeps high novelty * Opportunity - To become an employee 3) What is the operational role of...
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...“Crowdsourcing” is a relatively recent concept that encompasses many practices. To a superficial analysis, it could result just as the outsourcing of tasks to a large group of people, instead of assigning such tasks to an in-house employee or contractor. But in my opinion, there is more to it. We have to consider it as a strategic model to attract an interested and motivated crowd of individuals, capable of providing solutions superior in quality and quantity to those that even traditional forms of business can. It’s community, involvement, empathy and transparency, are all made possible and facilitated by web 2.0. The new behaviors and new mental structures that emerged with the rise of social networks allow a constant interaction between "equals" (with no defined hierarchies) at a global level. The paper explores different kinds of crowdsourcing, describing differences and similarities between them. The first kind of crowdsourcing analyzed, is the “Contest”, in witch the sponsor (the company) identifies a specific problem or request, offers a cash prize and broadcasts an invitation to submit solutions. Google offers us a best case in this field: in March 2014 the company has hold a contest called "Pwnium”, in which hackers could put their skills to the test by trying to hack into either the HP Chromebook 11 or the Acer C720 Chromebook for a combined total price of nearly $3 million. At the end of it, Google profit from this action by discovering several bugs then being...
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...Activity Generic e-business sell-side strategies For each of the six generic sell-side strategies, identify a good example of a company that has successfully adopted that strategy and identify examples of each strategy that have failed. Generic e-business sell-side strategies Chaffey (2009) Chapter 5, Activity 5.3 lists six generic strategies, originally coined by IDC Research. 1) Attack e-tailing. As Chaffey describes this is an aggressive competitive approach that involves frequent comparison with competitors’ prices and then matching or bettering them. The more people use price comparison sites such as ShopSmart (www.shopsmart.com) the more is it important that companies ensure their price positioning is favourable. Good examples include shopping sites such as Buy.com (www.buy.com) and Evenbetter.com (www.evenbetter.com). In those stores people can now find the prices of all comparable items in a category but also guarantee that they will beat the lowest price of any competing product. These sites have implemented real- time adjustments in prices with small increments based on price policy algorithms that are simply not possible in traditional retailing. An other example might be Lowestfare.com which is a leading provider of discount travel products and services for the leisure travel market or Sunelec.com has the lowest prices in the industry Solar & Wind Energy Distributors, Dealers, & Wholesalers. 2) Defend e-tailing This is a strategic approach...
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...According to the WWF 2012 financial statements, WWF received over $24.2 million dollars in revenue in the 2012 financial year through various sources. The largest source of income being individual supporters (61%). followed by legacies and corporations (22%),. The WWF uses many fundraising techniques in order to promote the organisation and realise funds from individuals. These include community events, supporter status offered for monthly donations, endangered animal adoption programs, bequests,workplace giving and Business partnerships. WWF engages with various corporations to develop integrated marketing campaigns that enable companies and their customers to show their support and to contribute actively to conservation. These collaborations are specifically designed to increase public awareness about WWF and to generate revenue for WWF’s global conservation efforts. The WWF states that "We establish company partnerships to improve the sustainability of supply chains and promote sector-wide action, whilst also promoting sustainable commodity investment within the finance sector." The WFF is in partnership with many well-known brands such as AVON and Coca-Cola and has recently established an alliance with CARE. Bureau of statistics concludes that 53% of Australian adults are concerned about the environment, yet only 14% made donations to an environmental cause. This leaves opportunity for WWF to increase its marketing strategy and improve its public message. In support of this...
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