Crowdsource your Designs

Bloomberg Businessweek ran an interesting article a few days ago about the website Threadless and how they select which T-shirt designs to sell. I thought there were a couple ideas worth considering when working with promotional apparel.

If you're not familiar with Threadless, the site mixes standard online retail T-shirt vending with American Idol-esque voting. Submitted designs are open to voting and commenting by users for seven days. After that period ends, Threadless will look through the top 300 or so designs and decide which ones they want to sell as tees or prints. So, not completely democratic, but still heavily user-influenced.