Holiday Gift Guide: Threadless.com

The Skinny: Threadless combines an online art community with a highly successful e-commerce business model. They invite anyone in the world with an idea for a t-shirt design to submit artwork, which is voted on through our community of over 1 million registered users. Each week the company prints and sells the highest-scoring t-shirt designs and rewards community members thousands of dollars for their designs, slogans and reprinted favorites.

There are shirts for men and women, hoodies, and even onesies and shirts for infants, toddlers, and kids.

Our Opinion: Well, first let’s talk about the shirt we received to review – Space Race. J thought it was really cool with all the “rocket ships & Star Wars looking things.” The shirt was great quality, printed on an American Apparel tee, and the fabric was really soft.

Now, on to Threadless in general – I have to say, we are HUGE fans. Brian discovered Threadless years ago and has amassed a collection of around 50 shirts. Which he has organized by color in our closet. I kid you not. Threadless has a great program – if users submit photos of themselves wearing their shirts, they earn credits that can then be used to buy more shirts. Here’s just one of Brian’s photos from the site, for a shirt called Gaming Revolution:

When J was about 18 months old we bought him his first set of Threadless shirts – at only $5 each. Threadless often runs sales (and are running one right now, actually) that make shirts really affordable. I always got compliments when he would wear his shirts. They’re different than what you find in the big stores locally, and they have a playfulness to them that’s perfect for kids and grown-ups alike. Here’s one of J’s first Threadless shirts, called Boynado:

At the time I was pregnant with C, and we went ahead and bought him his first shirt too, called – appropriately – Hey, Let’s Go Do Fun Stuff:

I even have several Threadless shirts myself! I can’t recommend Threadless enough, honestly. Their selection of shirts is vast, their staff is amazingly nice (both online and in their Chicago store that we got to visit once), we love that the community is involved in both designing and voting on shirts, and the prices are affordable (especially with the ability to earn credits by posting photos).

Buy It For: Infants, toddlers, kids, and any young adults on your list. We’ve gotten my college-aged brother several shirts and he loves them – and you can do gift cards, too. If you’re looking for a bigger gift, Threadless also has the 12 Club (which I’ve gotten for Brian before a couple of years ago), where the recipient gets a new shirt every month for, well, 12 months.

Note: I received a shirt from Threadless for review, but all opinions in this post remain honest and my own. I was not compensated monetarily for this post.