I recently stumbled upon a site that’s been around for awhile. It’s called Threadless.

What is Threadless? Well, it’s a place for artists of all kinds to submit designs that might – if accepted – get printed on t-shirts and more. Most of the designs are a bit out there, so it was right up my alley.

I decided to have some fun with it and signed up (it’s free to do) and submitted some art earlier this week. So far, I have two that were accepted (which I guess isn’t quite as easy as it sounds, according to their forums).

Now, the catch is, once accepted, the general public gets to vote on them by using a 1-5 scale for 10 days. Voting doesn’t do much but help your chances of getting the shirt actually printed and part of their clothing line (which is pretty successful). To me, it seems like a popularity contest once you get a bunch of followers on there, but what do I know. I know that even if the votes aren’t high, if they like it, they’ll print it anyway.

And after 10 days you get to see how people voted and I suppose a decision is made from their creative team if they’re going to pursue your design and make it printed on t-shirts and elsewhere.

Above: One of my recent designs, ‘The Naked Penguin’

I like the site as an artist because they actually pay-out pretty decent for work that is picked-up. It’s 20% royalties based off of sales and they have other contest and stuff where you can win decent money. If that tells you anything, I make roughly 9-10% royalties off of my greeting card sales in major companies. So, I think that’s a fair rate for t-shirts.

Now, again, I’m doing this mostly for fun. We’ll see what happens. However, as a person who gets a lot of his paycheck off of royalties, it wouldn’t hurt having a few designs actually being sold (and hopefully sold well). I’m not counting on anything – yet.

I’m usually weary of sites like this, but again, they’ve been around for awhile and it is kind of fun to rank other peoples work and see how mine does. It’s different than print-on-demand places where you can choose your own royalties because they actually promote them for you by “getting them out there” instead of me having to do all the marketing myself. Plus, the shirts are high-quality (I guess). I’ve seen some pretty pathetic quality stuff in regards to print-on-demand.

The best part is I own 100% of the images if accepted, so there’s no worry of giving up any image rights or anything. There’s no way I would’ve participated if that were the case. I can use an accepted design/comic anywhere.

I know this sounds like a sales-pitch for Threadless, but it’s not (unless they pay me, of course). It’s just something new, so hey, I wanted to tell you about it via blog post. Cool?

So, if you create funky designs, images, comics, etc., you might enjoy it. I recommend it so far. And I know some of you out there that read this blog have some good material that could work well.

I’d love to hear from you about your experience on Threadless (if you have any, obviously). I just hopped on board this week so I’m a rookie. And if you’re on there, let me know. I’ll follow you (not in a stalkish way, either).

If you liked to see my latest accepted designs check them out (click here).