Threadless began as a T-shirt design competition on the now defunct dreamless.org, a forum where users experimented with computers, code, and art.

Shortly after the first batch of shirts was printed, the founders built a website for Threadless and introduced a voting system where designs could be scored 1 to 5.

"Threadless completely blurs that line of who is a producer and who is a consumer," said Karim Lakhani,[9] a professor at Harvard Business School who was quoted in the article.

"The customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting.

In 2010, Abrams Image published Threadless: Ten Years of T-shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Online Design Community, written by Jake Nickell.

Bucketfeet similarly produces on-demand products and has their own network of artists and its net worth was 50 million dollars.

[citation needed] Originally Threadless offered a $2,500 prize for artists that won a weekly design challenge.

With the introduction of new terms and a shift in the company in 2014, the weekly design competition awarded a $250 gift code and artists retain all rights to their work and receive royalties on each sale.

[16] In October 2010, Abrams publishers released a ten-year retrospective of Threadless T-shirt designs and the company's history.