Welcome to my second installment of ‘Threadless Numbers’; if you missed the first (on submission scores and comments), you can still read it here.
Professional designers account for a greater total number of printed designs than do amateur designers. On the other hand, the number of designs printed on average by a member of either group is pretty much the same.
Even though the mean number of designs printed by professional designers (out of the 102 most recent winning designers as of May 6, 2007) is slightly higher, that difference is not statistically significant. Which means that the above graph is pretty much pointless… but whatever. It’s nice because it illustrates one point: it’s really hard to tell who on Threadless is a professional!
I judged whether each winner is a professional designer by whether or not they had a link to their professional design website in their profile. That data point at 14 printed designs is Glenn Jones, a.k.a. Glennz; even though he didn’t link to a website as of my research (and it still isn’t clear from his site that he is a professional), Glenn is the creative director of Dashwood Design, a graphic design company in Auckland, New Zealand.
Why, yes they are! In fact, professional designers play an even larger role in Threadless’ community than do their amateur counterparts! Why might this be? I have several theories concerning this fact: that both a) professional designers are a welcome part of the community (I will return to this point shortly) and that b) the community is composed largely of professional designers!
My support for a comes largely from this Threadless blog post asking about opinions on professionals submitting to Threadless: only 15 responses (which is pretty meager), all of which are positive. And within those responses, eskimokiss a.k.a. Pascal Hoayek hit the nail on the head (I believe) as to why b might be the case: Threadless began with ‘a group of “professional” designers releasing some creative energy by designing t-shirts’. So Threadless may not be exactly ‘by the people, for the people’, but more ‘by designers, for designers’. With its growing popularity, however, (and the pool of non-professional designers who might be interested in Threadless is greater than the professionals) it seems to be partially shifting toward ‘by designers, for the people’. Threadless Select and their recent decision to let ‘winning designers select a certain number of shirts to be printed every month, regardless of the voting results’ (Walker 2007) may be responses to this trend.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering who scored 55095 submissions… it’s Ronin60 a.k.a. Cameron McEwan, member of Threadless number 7007 since June 20, 2002. He’s scored over 3000 more subs since May 6, 2007.
It will be interesting to see how things change; whether the printed designs will start to lean more toward either professionals or amateurs, or whether it will stay relatively balanced. I’m even more interested in whether more professional designers will show up who just submit entries and don’t do much else. On the other hand, participation in the community may well improve a designer’s chances of getting printed, so non-participatory profesisonals might not have as high odds of winning as do participators.
It wouldn’t have surprised me to find a significant difference between the mean number of designs printed for professional designers and those for amateurs, whether because professionals are just ‘better’ at designing (and so each of their designs is more likely to win) or because they design more prolifically (and so they have more chances at winning). Neither of these factors seem to have any affect, whether by the intervention of Threadless or by the will of the community. My guess is that it’s a little of each.
There is a big problem with my measurement of ‘participation in the Threadless community’. I chose to use ‘number of submissions scored’ simply because it is the easiest metric to record from the Threadless site that seems reasonably to be related to participation. And it is reasonable, because voting is participation, and a form that is displayed publicly, at that. Whether voting is participation in the community, and not just in Threadless’ business model, is open to debate.
That professional designers account for a greater total number of printed designs than amateurs cannot be explained by the fact that professional designers have on average been members of Threadless for a longer time than amateurs (586 days for pros compared to 364 for amateurs, p< .001), even though this time advantage might give professionals more experience with the community's preferences. Nor can professional designers submitting more designs (as I mentioned above, though I don't have the data to test this hypothesis) explain this discrepancy. Rather, instead of there being a difference in the nature of professional and amateur designers, there must be an imbalance in who actually submits winning designs: simply, more professional designers submit designs that get printed than do amateur designers.
Threadless Numbers #1: Is it possible to predict how well a design submitted to Threadless will score?
Threadless Numbers #3: What kind of t-shirts don’t get printed at Threadless?
Threadless Numbers #4: Does being a Threadless ‘alumnus/a’ give your submissions an advantage?
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Yes, I’ve noted that professional designers have the edge on Threadless. That’s why we are seeing all these other services show up, like Design by humans and Bountee. Interesting read.
I like your research, i have the feeling that threadless as being the biggest of them all, also creates some room for the smaller fishes that print good designs that where on vote on Threadless but didnt make it because of the quantity of even better quality.
But I like your research, are you allready in conversation with Threadless people? Sure they are happy to be the subject of research
Pedro: I think you’re right that Bountee has a different mission that Threadless. It seems more like an outlet for artists who may not be into t-shirt design at all to juts get some t-shirts of their work printed and available for sale. Design by Humans, on the other hand, it seems harder to see as anything but a potentially direct competitor to Threadless.
Sjors: I do like how Threadless has led others to start creating t-shirts independently. And no, I haven’t talked to Threadless about my research. I’m sure they have continually-updated numbers about the kind of data that I recorded, and much more that I don’t have access to. It would be really interesting to have a chance to look at some of that!