This week's Featured Buyer is Jake Nickell of t-shirt site Threadless.com. Wait — "t-shirt site" does not do it justice! Threadless is made up of a vibrant community of designers and people who love their original work. The concept: post your original t-shirt design and people vote on it. Pay off: Threadless produces and sells the best designs — by popular vote. There's a beauty in constraints — take one t-shirt, one fabric color, and one designer's creativity — and the resulting catalog is pretty astounding.  We invited Jake to share his keen eye for good design with us and to talk a little about the allure of the t.

Before the 1940's, tee shirts were underwear.  Now they are pretty much the core piece of upper-body arm-hiding clothing in everyone's wardrobe (well, especially guys.) When starting Threadless in 2000, we thought printing on tees made for a nice, simple way to display what you're about to anyone who cared to look at you. We set up a system for artists to submit their art, members of the site to rate it and we print the highest scoring designs, selling them from the site.  In 2007 alone we received over 100 submissions a day, paid artists over $1.2 million dollars and printed about 400 designs.

That is a lot of unprinted designs.  There are so many talented artists out there creating amazing tee shirt art.  A ton of it can be found on Etsy.  There are a lot of folks here that either print their own work, print small batches with local shops or even hand decorate tees.  It's the perfect spot to find original art in tee shirt form.

Lets get started...

Slow Loris Shirts is a good story to get things rolling. Back in 2002, Jessica Lynch submitted a design to Threadless that was chosen for print. She has been printing shirts on her own since '97 and currently continues to do so out of her home on an island off of Washington. Her Etsy shop is slowshirts. My favorite thing about Slow Shirts are the test prints, like the one shown above.

Next up: enferno. This 18 year old from Utah taught himself how to screen print, designing and printing all of his tees himself.  He has put together some really interesting designs. I'm impressed. 

I think timberps has been mentioned before in the Etsy spotlight, but there is some serious talent there. The print quality looks super soft and nice and the designs translate really well to tees, such as the corporate machine featured.


These tees by troubletease make me smile.  They consist mostly of these huge, trippy, fine-lined designs with crazy-colored gradients. They are hilarious. I especially like the they've been following me since I was little shirt.

I must admit I have a bit of a thing for really odd, somewhat creepy tee designs that make people think "WTF?". When I saw this shirt by TrillPress, it was right up my alley.  There is a nice black on black unisex version, too. Gross.

Sticking with the odd theme a bit, this Hotel Hell shirt by Luchaworkshop rules, too.

CubistLiterature has a different take on what a tee shirt design should look like.  I especially like the handwritten text tees and the sweet teeth tees.  Some of the appliqué stuff is pretty awesome, too.

This is a bit off topic, but tinymeat (who sells various products like wallets and ipod cases) works with a lot of tee shirt artists on creating graphics for their products, some of which submit to Threadless. Some pretty cool stuff is available from them, like this Dinoclasm wallet!

In May, we started creating limited edition, screen-printed art prints.  We work with a range of small printers in Chicago.  Dan Grzeca is one of the guys we work with on creating this prints, and his Etsy shop jetsah is filled with some AMAZING prints, like this Low poster. Check it out.

To close things off, I'd like to give a little nod to all the Threadless bloggers with Etsy shops. Check them out, they make a lot more than just tee designs.

Thanks for having me, Etsy!

Are you a t-shirt hound? Leave a link to your favorite t-shirt artist in the comments! And check out the rest of our previous Featured Buyers!