With its 10th anniversary just a few months away, Threadless, the Chicago-based crowd-sourced design Web site, has inked a deal with Dell to provide an exclusive collection of artists’ graphic creations for laptops.
Drawing from its base of 80,000 artists and designers, Threadless has put forward 11 designs for the new products, which will be sold through Dell Design Studio. More than one million Threadless community members are said to vote regularly on their favorite design submissions, and the most popular selections are then sold on threadless.com. Dell shoppers will choose one of the designs, which will be permanently infused on the cover of a laptop. Design options will be updated two to four times a year.
Threadless vice president of marketing Cam Balzer said the Dell initiative indicates the company is moving into a new business phase and now has an expanded palette for artists to sell their art in a new way and to a different audience. He declined to comment on how the brand’s anticipated sales growth from this venture might be used to build the company down the road.
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Dell, which also sells Major League Baseball designs, (Product) Red signature artwork and OPI nail-polish-inspired colors through its online design studio, is looking for companies that “really resonate with consumers,” according to Rachna Bhasin, the computer maker’s general manager for strategic partnerships and personalization. She and Balzer declined to comment on projected sales for the new venture, which will be unveiled today in San Francisco and will be available on the Dell Design Studio Web site starting Thursday. Threadless will plug the partnership on its Web site, as well as through e-mail and its social media efforts. Dell in turn will sponsor the Threadless Everywhere Tour, which just got under way and will stop in 15 cities in the U.S. and Canada in the next few months. The brand’s road trip in a customized Airstream trailer will wrap up with an anniversary party Oct. 9 in a Chicago nightclub. For the beleaguered Dell, the road trip might be a way to help win back consumer trust after a recent report in The New York Times that unsealed court documents in a three-year-old court case alleging Dell knowingly sold computers with faulty parts to institutions and businesses.
Threadless T-shirts will be showcased in “TechnoCRAFT,” an Yves Behar-curated exhibition that makes its debut Friday night at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Puma, Freitag Bags and Colour-in-dress by Berber Soepboer & Michiel Schuurman are some of the other apparel-related names featured in the show, which explores how the boundary between the role of the designer and the consumer is vanishing.
Through a new alliance with Havaianas, Threadless will unveil six limited edition T-shirts and flip-flops designed by its artistic community Thursday night at a Surface magazine-sponsored event in New York’s SoHo. Last month, Threadless bought “a significant stake” in Society6, an online artist community specializing in opportunities for them to sell their work. There are no plans to merge the two companies at this time.