SkinnyCorp creates communities
SkinnyCorp’s business plan is simple: “SkinnyCorp creates communities.” In record time Jake Nickell, Jacob DeHart and Jeffrey Kalmikoff have created a conglomerate of websites which allow users to participate actively in design, conceptualization, and product development.
The following is an excerpt of an interview in preperation for CustomerMade 2006.
What’s the difference between DIY in 1956 and 2006?
- In spirit, absolutely nothing about DIY it has changed. It’s about working with what you’ve got - by any means necessary. What changes DIY as time passes is resource. Now there are a lot more resources to support DIY. The internet has really helped this. If you need to learn how to do something yourself, you can usually find someone who has already done it and wrote about it online. There are also differences in what people are doing. We weren’t around in 1956 but we would imagine DIY mostly meant creating physical items from scratch. Now, while the term still pertains to such things, it is also used to describe things people are doing in business and with services. Nowadays, with enough motiviation, you can learn how to do a lot of things on your own.
- Also, because of the internet and the wider range of available resources DIY projects can be achieved much more rapidly. For us it’s meant that there’s almost no project that we wouldn’t consider doing ourselves. Virtually every aspect of skinnyCorp and Threadless is DIY from the computers we built to the fulfillment system we use to ship our shirts, even down to 16 wooden desks we hand built. We’ve found that though we don’t always get it right the first time, doing it ourselves has enabled us to create the exact tools that we need to run our business and not having to rely on a third party to tell us what we need.
Why are companies such as skinnyCorp, companies that empower and integrate customers in design and product development, increasingly successful right now?
- Our feeling is that more and more recently people get turned off when decisions are made for them. For example, popular music seems to be less and less accepted by people. People like to go out and discover new, independent music on their own. By making it easy for customers to really have a part in figuring out what it is they want in a product or service, it makes the decision to actually purchase or use that service that much easier. In fact, it does more than that. It gets the customer excited and proud of the discovery - so much so that they want to share the feeling with their friends. This is why companies like skinnyCorp are so successfull right now.
- We’re beyond the era of companies even being able to get ‘under the radar’. Consumers don’t even look at the radar anymore. Big businesses have so far oversaturated culture with their presence that there isn’t a clever enough marketing scheme in the world to disguise big business from what it is. People are craving small. Consumers want to feel connected to the companies they choose to let into their lives. They want to feel connected to the products they buy from these companies or the services they choose to utilize.
What do you see as the customers main motivation to participate?
- The main three reasons are ownership, pride and rewards. Ownership has to do with simply being a part of the initiative. This pertains to everyone who is a part of the community, no matter what level they are participating. Pride and rewards have to do with the actual content creators. For example, with Threadless - a designer is motivated to participate and share their partipcation with people they know by their pride in the design they’ve created and the chance to be rewarded with the $1,000 prize.
What’s the first thing a company should do to involve customers in their business?
- They should become the first members of their community. In our case, the 20 Threadless employees are simply 20 members of our 300,000 member community. We participate on the site and are real people that the community are familiar with.
What’s the last thing a company should do, if they want to involve customers in their business?
- Forcing the growth of a community. A community is a very delicate thing. You have to let it grow at the speed it is comfortable growing at, let it turn into whatever it turns itself into and remember never take anything from it without giving back in some way.
What are your thoughts on established corporations trying to do what you have done, integrating customers in design and product development?
- I think that this would be an extremely hard thing to do, though not impossible. Trust is a huge issue with doing this sort of thing and it is important for the participating customers to not be taken advantage of. This is why it is so important for the people at the company to be involved in the community and love their product so much so that they use it just as often as their customers.
What products/services/content wouldn’t work if customers/users were co-creating it?
- There are plenty of such products. I don’t think this kind of model is right for everyone. It’s obviously a lot easier to co-create when you’re talking about design of a product rather than technical aspects of product development such as engineering or coal mining. However, at some point in the creation, there is usually a place where it would be extremely beneficial to have your customers involved.
What have you done to create communities around your business? Which have been the biggest challenges in getting a site like Threadless.com to take off?
- The hardest part in creating a community is realizing that it’s a slow, steady process that cannot be forced. We’ve seen many companies try to copy our business model without realizing that the company wasn’t created yesterday. Many companies copy Threadless without realizng that it’s “model” wasn’t a preconceived idea. We built Threadless in a way that made sense to us, and have made moves in regards to its growth that have felt right to us. The misconception is that adding community aspects into your business will equal profit, yet most don’t realize that its not a quick or guaranteed payoff. Think of it as if you asked a waiter for ketchup to put on your french fries and they returned with tomato seeds and a pot of dirt.
Your three favourite examples of co-creation?
- Threadless.com 15MegsofFame.com and Extratasty.com of course!