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The skinny on Skinny Corp

One of our favorite Chicago companies, Skinny Corp, was recently interviewed by blog site HorsePigCow. In this brief interview, many salient topics are discussed around the success of the Skinny Corp brand, and building an effective community online.

The focus of the interview was around the most successful site Skinny Corp has out there, Threadless. A community focused t-shirt company where all the submissions for shirts are designed and voted on by the community. If you can’t spare the time to watch the interview, here is a breakdown of some of the most valuable topics they touched on.

Flexibility of Change

If you don’t like something about how Threadless works, just tell them. They are constantly listening to their user base and reacting to the growing and changing needs, being a relatively small and definitely nimble company allows them to turn on a dime if needed.

Participation

In the case of Threadless, it is more than essential that participation is top of mind. After all, this site doesn’t work without the support of it’s devoted followers.

Having a good time

They don’t focus on function, as much as fun. Threadless is a fun looking site, it uses casual language and never feels too heavy handed in terms of functionality. It’s easy to use and fun to experience.

Support Tourism as well as Residence

This was probably the most interesting point raised, Threadless while community based is also a huge tourist attraction on the web. Tourist in this case is used to describe someone who purchases Threadless shirts but doesn’t necessarily participate in voting or submission. Threadless is very interested in making these tourists feel at home, maybe even at home enough to move in and never leave.

Honestly, Trust and Transparency

These guys know the downfalls of hiding the truth online, especially when a large community of your peers (web workers and designers) is always watching you with a spotlight. Because of this, Skinny Corp has a huge focus on being honest and trust worthy. Also they try to remain as transparent as possible in communicating all their business dealings and shifts in the wind to their user base.

Love what you do

Last, but definitely not least, these guys LOVE what they do. Not only that, they love the friendships formed both in the company and with their user base. And to them, this is way more than a paycheck.