Are you familiar with the US brand Threadless? Threadless is a t-shirt company started out as a high school project in 2000. It’s basically an online community of artists and an e-commerce website based in Chicago, Illinois. For its operations it uses principles of crowdsourcing.

Threadless designs are created by and chosen by an online community. The concept is very simple: anyone can submit a design idea that gets ranked by members of the community. If the design gets enough votes, it makes it into the store and the designer gets a reward ($2,000 in cash and $500 in Threadless gift cards).

Co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart started the company with $1,000 of their own money and Forbes found out that Threadless made around $30 million of revenue in 2009.

Threadless is also known for placements of its T-shirts in various TV shows: Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, Scrubs …

In the sixth episode of Modern Family’s fourth season we could see two Threadless designs worn by Luke Dunphy.

The two T-shirts were Funkalicious by Christopher Golebiowski and Doom Regatta by Blair Sayer and Ross Zietz.

As I mentioned Threadless’ appearance in the last episode wasn’t the first one. There’s a special section on Threadless website called Modern Family Tees – As Seen on TV.

Frequent appearances in popular TV shows (Modern Family has 16 Emmys and around 12 million viewers) can help brand’s visibility and enhance its value. Threadless is doing a very good job.

I want one of those tees ;)

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