Threadless
A thriving Chicago tee shirt business that created an innovative fashion-sourcing method, Threadless.com relies on a community of online users for their designs. Four to six designs are chose every week from more than 600 submissions to be printed and sold from the site, with the winning designers receiving $2,500 in cash and prizes. The project was started in January 2000 by two Chicago-area designers and through 2007 had seen more than 60,000 T-shirt design submissions and sold an average of 85,000 T-shirts – sales of $1.2 million – per month.