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?

Similarities:

 Both the methods work on similar processes that aim to decrease cost, increase revenue,

expand market share, customer base and survive in market.

 Both the processes undergo design phase, production, marketing, sales and distribution

phase during product development.

 Both the methods aim at satisfying customer needs. To understand the customer needs they

conduct research, surveys in traditional product development and voting in community

method.

 Both the methods offer reward programs to satisfy existing customers and invite new

customers.

Differences:

 The time taken to produce a product in traditional product development is more when

compared to community driven product development.

 Community product development has the advantage of getting a budding product critiqued

during its design stage whereas Traditional development cannot do so until the product has

taken complete shape and is released into the market.

 The overall cost investment and maintenance is cheaper in community product

development.

 Consumers’ feedback is highly valued in community product development and can

tremendously help in the development process of upcoming products.

 In a traditional product development process, a company develops a product on its own

based on R&D so it’s difficult to determine the performance of the product until its

launched into market.

 The amount invested in Research and Development for Traditional product development is

more.

2. What motivates community members to participate? What is Threadless offering its community

members?

Threadless community members were motivated to participate in the following ways:

1) Voting - Members were asked to critique the submitted designs, blog about their daily life, come

up with songs and videos inspired by the design. The best blog earned the T-shirt of the week.

2) Increase in Cash Prize - Threadless increased the reward awarded to winning designers from

$100 cash in 2002 to $2000 cash in 2007 and $500 gift certificate.

3) Platform - Threadless community consists of diverse set of people with varied backgrounds. Students, Consumers, voters, bloggers