Thursday, October 18

Threadless - predictable?

my rules t-shirt by Christian Einshøj from threadless Viking Bird t-shirt by Graham Shephard from threadless
Royal Intrigued Series 1 t-shirt by Chalermphol Harnchakkham from threadless Playground Joust t-shirt by Jillian Nickell from threadless
Here's the latest bunch of awesome tshirt designs dropped this week by Threadless, who continue to release and sell a massive amount of tshirts at a great price.

However, I have a small gripe - I think Threadless are becoming a bit of a one trick pony. Ok, a two trick pony. The cutesy puns and prettiness are becoming a bit predictable. By no means am I taking away anything from the amazing work of the artists, but the designs that win week after week all seem to be of a similar style and are very "Threadless."

Sure, some may argue that this is a good business plan - Threadless becomes known for their style, and obviously they are getting a lot of traffic and doing extremely well.

Threadless's competition may benefit from the apparent reluctance of Threadless to stray to often from their preferred style. Sites like Design By Humans and A Better Tomorrow, whether conciously or not, are releasing some bolder, sharper designs (admittedly some look similar to the stuff Threadless used to put out).

Don't get me wrong, I still love Threadless and think it's a great community and a great platform for emerging artists. Perhaps it's just becoming a great platform for a certain type of artist...

What do you think? Agree? Think I'm full of shit? Let us know in the comments.

Oh, don't forget you can get $3 of your purchase by clicking here and using the code rubberdanpants at the checkout :)

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

When the emo kids got ahold of threadless and kicked out all the nerdy webdesigners, my heart sank.

I think they've been a one trick pony ever since (for a few years now), which is why I stopped shopping there. The only one of those four I like is the purple one on the bottom left. That bleeding heart design from a while back was the last straw for me.

If I want shirts with puns, I'll go to the mall. I miss the days when they put up tees like the ones done by Niko Stumpo, Prate, and Tokidoki.

Anonymous said...

Correct. I gave up on threadless a few years ago for this reason. Sure the stuff they put out is neat and all, but it doesn't really float my boat. That said, not many shops do any more. Strong modernist type and basic geometric forms you fools, it's all I ask!

Anonymous said...

I have to agree. A friend of mine and I were actually discussing this a few weeks ago. I still order the occasional Threadless shirt, but discovering Designbyhümans was a great experience, simply because the designs DBH are selling give me that "wow" effect that Threadless used to. I enjoy the Threadless puns, but the artistic depth if kind of suffering as of late. That said, I'll still order there, but I will probably be spending more at DBH the next months.

Anonymous said...

"Strong modernist type and basic geometric forms"

THANK YOU!

Anonymous said...

mate, i cant agree with your any more, my heart sank and cringed when this week's design's were released. there is soo much quality talent at threadless going to waste. perhaps its due to the users of threadless - all they want is cutesy, thus threadless must provide cutesy.

i have money to burn on threadless tees but cant because i pledged not to buy any more 'cutesy tees'. DBH are slowly gaining momentum, but not fast enought for me to buy much of their tees!

Kolbe Maisòn said...

I agree. Another problem is that designers now adapts to this style to make $ instead of trying to change the Threadless trend.

Btw, check out our blog at
http://bevelandboss.blogspot.com

Best,
Kolbe

Michelle said...

I thought the same thing about this week's shirts. And looking at the early word on next week's shirts, it looks like there's more of the same. The main thing that makes Threadless worthwhile at this point is the Selects- and even most of those are barely breaking even with the quality of Design By Humans. Unless they evolve quickly, they're just going to continue losing talent to other competition sites.

Anonymous said...

wheres all the TokiDoki tees.