ABSTRACT
In 2000, Jake Nickell, a multimedia and design student at the Illinois Institute of Art, and Jacob DeHart, an engineering student at Purdue University, entered an online T-shirt design contest, which Jake won. However, both of them went away with the idea that having someone else compete to design T-shirts for them could lead to something interesting. They kept in touch and worked together on a few projects before starting their own T-shirt company in 2001, with $1,000.1 Their company, Threadless, would make and sell T-shirts with colorful graphics.2 They were venturing into the colorful T-shirt-a so-called hit-and-miss product. Traditionally, to be successful with such a product, a firm needed to have the right distribution channels and its fingers on the pulse of fast-changing trends.3 A firm needed to have the right market research and forecasting abilities to do well. The two founders added creative director Jeff Kalmikoff later. They also took venture capital money from Insight Venture Partners, not so much because they needed the money, but because they could, well, obtain some insights from the venture capitalist firm.
