Holy shit, it seems like Threadless and Designed By Humans are trading body blows, with a left, and a right, an upper cut. So yesterday Threadless announced that they would pay artists an extra $500 on reprints, and membership in the exclusive Alumni club. Today Designed By Humans fires back with Rockstar Residuals, where artists get cash bonuses for selling a certain number of t-shirts.
In conjunction with the daily, weekly, and monthly prizes being awarded here at DesignByHumans, artists will be paid an additional cash award based on the number of t-shirts sold over the life of the design.
These cash bonuses are nothing to sniff at:
I did a quick spreadsheet here to compare the bonuses:
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14 Comments
But is that accurate? You could also read it so that the total amount you get for 10,000 shirts is $5,000. So when you sell 1,000 shirts, you get $500, and when you sell your second 1,000, you get another $500 for a total of $1,000. Right? It’s kinda vague.
The other difference between the two sites is that I think you have a better chance of selling 10,000 shirts through Threadless. =-)
Totally agree that at this point you’re much more likely to sell 10K shirts through threadless, although I think even that is limited to designs like the communist party and flowers in the attic.
As for the rockstart residuals, I totally read it as a stacking prize, here’s a quote:
“These payments will be issued to the artist when their design reaches the following levels of fame”
Sorry for the confusion. Yes, it is a stackable prize.
So selling 10K shirts would get you $10,000 cash plus whatever else you earned from Shirt of the Day, Week, and Month.
We’ll try to make that a little more clear on the site.
oo wow thats some nifty prize thing they got over there at DBH, Threadless looks like they got themselves a challenge. The cool thing Threadless will always have though, are those special contest they hold, with cool prizes. Unless DBHs gets stuff like that, i think Threadless will be fine.
As has been said before, there is plenty of room in the t-shirt marketplace for a lot of companies. There will never be a Coke, Pepsi type duopoly in this business.
That being said, when your business is dependent upon consumer generated content you are in a battle for talent. My prediction is that both threadless and DBH are going to evolve their own cultures/communities and I think the designs are going to be quite distinct, and different.
I would like to know the % of artworks that have exceed 10,000 tees and over what span of time…. This would be interesting.
For sure.
Good question Toby, but DBH only launched recently so I don’t think they’ll have any stats like that yet. It’s certainly something they should publish though
Do you really think Threadless has tees that have sold over 10,000 per style/color?
I hear that the people at DBH are using their own designs as the “winners” and have not paid anyone a cent of prize money. They are just trying to ride the Threadless money train without giving back.
Stan,
You hear wrong. I am not affiliated with DBH. I am an art student and I have personally won a couple times with Designed by Humans. They pay real cash and their shirts are great quality. Threadless is a good site/company too. I feel the competition increased the quality and options in shirts as well as give more artists an opportunity to show off our work. Kudos to both and inform yourself a bit more.
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