Threadless and Polaroid Case

THREADLESS

What are the advantages of this business model for Threadless?

- The model is extremely innovative and will lead to word of mouth publicity

- Low entry barriers

- No need to setup expensive retail showrooms, world is your market.

- The model focusses on what people like to wear rather than forcing your own designs.

- That’s a nice way to engage the consumers and study their preferences.

- The model helps in completely avoiding the heavy investments and expenditures in doing market research to study consumer preferences, and then arrive at a solution that is stale and obsolete by the time you come out with designs.

- For those who don’t know about threadless, the company is already connected to facebook, flickr, last.fm, del.icio.us, my space, twitter and other feeds. This will attract more people to jump in the competitions and participate in anticipation of winning a big $.

- You don’t need to hire a dedicated and expensive creative team, world is your creative team.

- Cheapest way to get ideas, instead of paying hefty salaries to creative directors.

- The company can immediately roll out new designs on the basis of highest votes received by slogans and tee designs, much before the competition realises what’s selling in market.

What disadvantages do you see for the company?

- Because of low entry barriers, Threadless can face stiff competition because everybody may enter the market

- The model can be easily copied by competition and Threadless may lose its competitive edge.

- Need to invest heavily in IT infrastructure to protect its privacy and data security

- It needs to spend heavily on advertising the website on other online media to attract page hits.

- Company may get into trouble of copyright infringement.

- It would be hard for company to keep people coming back and contributing regularly.

Can this model be extended to other companies? Why or Why not?

- The model can be easily extended or copied by companies who want to get...