There is something about Threadless just incredibly cool. Everything from the way they silk-screen their tees, to the brilliance of their designer community, the outrageousness of the employees and slickness of their site; I'm willing to say, that they're one of our biggest inspirations. We already highlighted them as one of the leaders in what Wired Magazine branded as The Next Revolution in From Stitching Shirts to Assembling Cards, the Next Revolution. But kudos where kudos is deserved, they recently partnered up with Griffin Technology, a leader in iPod, iPhone and iPad accessories, to offer a new platform for designers to collaborate on, and that's the iPhone cover. You can check out a couple of examples below, but as you can probably imagine, with such a massive fan base, these are selling out quick. But beware, similar to wearing identical tie and cuff link sets, matching tee and iPhone is still probably a little uncool ... so don't ruin it for everyone else!

This is a really interesting 4-min vid on the collaboration between Threadless and Griffin, what their respective teams think about it, and just more coolness ...

Threadless + Griffin = one awesome case! from Threadless.com on Vimeo.

They say that Venture Capitalists are some of the most innovative people, they're supposed to understand what's just around the cusp before everyone else. Now this blog post isn't supposed to agree or debate the 'innovativeness' of the venture investment community. This blog post is to give brief highlight to the co-creation, open innovation and mass-customization companies that are getting attention and money, and here's to hoping that the VCs know what they're doing, are innovative or at least supporting the innovation, and the #CCCR momentum continues.

Spreadshirt

A real inspiration to us is Spreadshirt. What started a few years ago by Lukasz Gadowski, a Polish immigrant, in Germany as a site for people to upload designs of their own tee shirts, as now become a multi-tiered online platform for apparel merchandising that allows individuals and businesses to create their own online shops for free and sell customized products.

Much like blogging has allowed anyone passionate and creative to share a voice, Spreadshirt has empowered anyone with an internet connection and a knack for design and logo aesthetics to start a micro-business. Spreadshirt handles everything from production, shipping, payment processing, customer service and other merchandising tools.

Spreadshirt raised a second round of investment February 2009 totally $12.7m

Gemvara (formerly Paragon Lake)

Started out of Babson College dorm rooms in outer Boston by Matt Lauzon and Jason Reuben, Gemvara is a leading online jewelry destination that gives shoppers the ultimate custom jewelry experience. Feeling a little insecure about our own design-it-yourself application, Gemvara really leads the way with gazillion ways to be completely unique.

Under its former alias, Paragon Lake raised $5.8m in Series A funding back in July 2008.

Local Motors

With the world’s largest community of car designers and engineers embracing open collaboration and developing innovative cars, you can’t help but believe Local Motor’s mission to lead  the next generation of automotive manufacturing, design, and technology in order to revolutionize the industry with game-changing efficient vehicles and an unprecedented standard of customer service. It’s core values are a creating must-have products, community, profit, environment, safety, seductive simplicity, and customer first. And if that sounds like a mouthful, John Rogers is a beast and we have every confidence that he is going to change how cars are built.

In the spirit of open collaboration, Local Motors has raised about $4million from 30 different investors.

Etsy

One of my personal heroes is Etsy CEO and Co-Founder, Robert Kalin. The guy’s just so freakin’ cool, and his company’s doing $100m in rev. A little bit of a man-crush, yes. Etsy’s a website that allows users to buy and sell handmade products, anything from accessories, clothing, art, etc. It’s user-design centric, with a really slick Flash interface and intuitively cool widgets.

After raising an angel round from the founders of Flickr, they've raised $32m over three rounds of venture funding.

You should check out this on-the-spot interview with Robert Kalin.

You might also notice that the respective founders of these companies are all young rebels, and if you go to our Team page, you might notice why we like that ;)

Before I go explaining why the Co-Creation Custom Revolution is actually greener than it may first appear, I want to introduce you to a very cool clothing-exchange company, ThredUP. They've called themselves the Netflix of Clothing, more interesting because the CEO of Netflix sits on their board. After I met Founder and Chief Knitwit, James Reinhart, I felt like I was wasting space, not being green, and not loving life. Haha. Not because James isn't an awesome guy (because he really is, he helped build one the nation's premier public schools in the Bay Area), but because ThredUP solves a real problem, that we don't wear 25% of our clothes in our closets, and there's a really inefficient $2bn used clothing industry out there that could be a lot better. 

This photo isn't of James. It's actually by brymo, maybe it's of him.

James and his team have built this really cool network where you can exchange stuff that's sitting in your closet, that you know you're probably not going to wear again. Now you're wasting closet space, you're probably going to waste more money, more material, more production 'stuff' on buying more clothes, when you can really and quite simply exchange it. And shouldn't we love the clothes that we wear? ThredUP helps us in keeping a wardrobe of clothing that we actually feel good about. I won't go on explaining more about it, you should just check it out.

Now besides the fact that it's always good to give shout-outs to friends, we also want to highlight why the two companies are uniquely related, more than the fact that we're both Boston-founded apparel-related online-based startups. Blank Label, and more importantly, the #CCCR, is about the importance of consumers having more choice in what they choose to buy and wear, and feeling better about it. It's addressing the dress shirt that is 80% decent, but is nothing special. Between buying it at the store and getting home, you've alread y seen 8 peo ple wearing the exact same one. So you wear it maybe to work. You get to the office, go into the lift, and there's someone wearing the same shirt. That's kind of awkward. 

The #CCCR is about creating self-expression you can wear. Similar to ThredUP, it's about you having the clothes you really want, not having to buy new clothes all the time because your newest shirt has fallen out of favor. There is a terrible problem of over-production of clothing, stuff either sitting in warehouses that'll never get worn, or clothes in closets never to be worn again. We keep buying, and buying, and manufacturers keep producing, and producing. No-one's the wiser, no-one's the happier, and definitely not Al Gore, or the planet. That's why we've updated our new green logo. It's only in small part related to the fact that green's my favorite color. ;)

One of the founding fundamental principles of the Co-Creation Custom Revolution (that makes it sound all serious, when it's actually a term I came up with in the shower), is CHOICE. CCCR works because it's about choice. Ah yes, the fulfillment life brings to us when we have choice. One of the world's great thinkers and writers, Malcolm Gladwell, popularized from his writings in The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers.

In a story about the evolution of spaghetti's sauce, and how and why we arrived at so many different levels of chunkiness, salt content and richness, he explains the fairly simple logic that all people have different preferences and that we shouldn't just conform to something we're not quite satisfied with. He urges businesses to innovate, to better understand consumer tastes and preferences. Sound like anyone you know?

The CCCR is all about innovating a new form of choice, that isn't just about providing products that try and better understand consumer tastes and preferences, but shifts the focus to the consumer, and allows you to co-create something for yourself. Now we think you'd be pretty happy with that ;)

The video is a TED talk Gladwell gave a few years ago, it goes for about 18 minutes. If you're looking for something that's genuinely insightful and thought-provoking, and quicker than reading one of Gladwell's books, we'd recommend it.

This article was inspired by Wired Magazine | In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits, an article by innovation evangelist Chris Anderson, published on January 25, 2010. It details how the world is going to change, again, but perhaps not the way you think.

ong>Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content - all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world. In short, atoms are the new bits. 

Back in January of this year, in Dell, Subway, Mini: What's Next in the Co-Creation Trend we highlighted how large companies have been revolutionizing and democratizing the relationship between consumer and producer for years. Well the Wired Magazine article completely trumps our Mini article. I mean, look at that car. It's a beast!

 This beastly photo is courtesy of Adrian Gaut, and was included in the Wired Magazine article. We keep mentioning it because we're serious in saying that it deserves a read! It's a photo of Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers, who combined the power of crowd sourced design and professional experience to develop the 'Rally Fighter'. The car's body was designed by Local Motors' community of volunteers. You can design a car, be a part of the 'build experience' at one of their local assembly centers, and you can by one for $50,000, and it's street-legal.

The article goes on to say ...

Here's the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models o the web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world. 

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they're ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequences was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital - the long tail of bits.

Now the same is happening in manufacturing - the long tail of things.

Co-Creation Custom Revolution? Whatever you want to call it, DIY Boom (for Wedding DIY you can use this nifty online wedding planner), Fashion 2.0, it's about changing the relationship between producer and consumer, it's about leveling the playing field, and it's been coming for a while. There are a couple of apparel companies that are levering this power and doing tremendous business. Depending on who you are, you're most likely have heard one of these two.

The first is Threadless, a user-designed, user-submitted, crowd-selected t-shirt e-commerce company. They take submissions from their community, they take votes from their community, they then sell the t-shirts with the top votes back to the community. The other is Polyvore, a site that lets users mis and match complete outfits by dragging and dropping images found on the web. It's a mix of social networking and designers' club with the net result being a place users can put together their dream outfit of learn about the latest fashion trend from other users.

Blank Label lets you design your own dress shirts. Start designing and support the revolution now.

Back in 1943, Mercedes Benz New York Fashion Week wasn't Mercedes Benz New York Fashion Week, it wasn't even New York Fashion Week, it was Press Week, and it was organized by Eleanor Lamber to showcase designers to journalists who were neglecting their INNOVATIONS. It wasn't about the largest tent, or scammering to get on the exclusive invite list. Lambert's goal with fashion week was to show off innovative strides with indigenous materials and techniques. It was not until the '70s and '80s that designers began staging their own shows in lofts, clubs and restaurants.

We are also not a fashion house. We're almost the anti-fashion house. So much of what happens today at Fashion Weeks around the world represent things the Co-Creation Custom Revolution are looking to change. Insane spending and over-indulgence has not only had an impact on people going into debt in a time when debt is least available, but also our consumer behavior has had a hefty impact on the world we live on. Yet Fashion Week stipp promotes elitism under the guise of aspiration, and excess disguising inspiration. Now we are not a tree-hugging company, nor do we claim to have any expertise in finance, but these are observant and logical, and possibly a little over-zealous, and stick to what we know.

What we do know is that when people have a closer interaction with the product they experience, they're overall emotional reaction is far more positive. That's what the #CCCR is all about. It's about bringing people closer to their products (we're starting with men's custom dress shirts), having a higher emotional payoff, but not at a higher cost. Sure there is some self expressiveness being able to wear a handbag designed by some guy in his expensive Manhattan apartment, supposedly roaming the great cities of the world for inspiration. But it's not just for you. The #CCCR is about expressing your own tastes, your own preferences and your own style. Not something that's predetermined for you, and not something that's quite frankly absurdly expensive. Now in the world's current state, that's something we're pretty excited about.

We'd like to credit Ruth Finley, Valerie Steele, Caroline Evans, and Fern Mallis for their piece, How the Runway Took Off, for the background to New York Fashion Week

In a week of crazy Chinese New Year Celebration, I can confirm that in fact the celebrating is still going on. This was on the 5th evening of Chinese New Year only a couple of days ago. We love our Chinese tailors, they make awesome custom dress shirts, and pretty good dim sum also =) I make the joke because I can ;) but this is just really distracting!

One company cannot stand alone in order to inspire the movement for co-creation.  That’s why we applaud other companies that are taking on this new trend of working directly with you guys to create the best products possible. One company that is capturing every aspect of this trend is Me and Goji with its make your own customizable cereal and granola products. Check it out for yourself!!

Me and Goji is all about serving the customer.  They have many different organic and delicious cereal ingredient options to help you make tasty morning treats.

i) You first choose a base, goji oats or golden granola or even samurai wheat, move onto what they call 'base enhancements' like choco peanut if you feel like treating yourself or wheat germ for the health conscious.

ii) Moving onto the dried fruits, our favorite was goldenberry and of course goji (which actually turns out to be a Tibetan superfruit from the Himalayas packed with dizzying amounts of nutrients and phytochemicals).  There is also awesome stuff like mulberry, coconut, cranberry and cherry. Finish this pairing, 'Fruit and _ _ _'. You guessed it, choose from pecans, chia, pine, amaranth, soy, flax and a lot more.

A great personalize feature is every cylinder of Me and Goji cereal comes with your name on it and even your own pic! What's yet more amazing is as you choose your ingredients, the nutritional facts (like you'd find on on most foods, i.e. with the calories, fat content, sodium, potassium, carbs, protein, etc) are updated in real-time.

Their tagline, designed by you, handmade by us sums up the co-creation movement pretty well. Let’s keep pushing this co-creation movement. It’s a good thing. 

What's your favorite co-creation company, tell us about them, why they're awesome, and why everyone should support their revolution!

This post was written by Danielle Bentz, a avid co-creator of custom men's dress shirts.

We're pretty big on being transparent here at Blank Label. We want to have an honest relationship with you, we want to tell you when we're screwing up or gloat when we've done something well, it's just more interesting that way.

In honor of our three months from launch on Halloween, not so much in celebration of Scotch Tape's anniversary, but that's still cool, we thought we'd share some earlier versions of our site from the vault. Be warned ... some of these are pretty ugly

Main Site

What www.blank-label.com was on 30th of October 2009, the day before launch. Ha. Definitely makes us laugh. Honestly we're not exactly happy with our current site, hence still the BETA tag. We might keep it up for a while because it leads people to give us a lot of feedback, which in turn helps us improve. You'll see quite a few site improvements we hope you'll like in Feb.

 A design we toyed around with back when we thought selling custom suits online would be a good idea. It was a good design for your straight-up e-commerce site, but just didn't quite have the spice and bite we were looking for.

Custom Men's Dress Shirt Design App

 Before color was cool, and in fact before Zee, our Chief Hamster, and Alec, our Lead Artist, even joined the Blank Team. It seems like a good render, and a front and back view, but was actually really hard to get the fabric colors on the shirt, and probably would've taken forever to load.

The measurement tab here kind of shows you how little we used to know about our loyal shirt designers. Co-created custom men's dress shirts should be a fun process, having that 'Measurements' Tab and expecting guys to either know their body measurements or get a tap to measure themselves was just plain silly. We never quite figured out what we were going to put in that large 'Accessories' Tab either, we'll let you know when we do come up some interesting ideas. In respect to transparency, we'll be sure to run them by you first.

What We're Going to Show You Next Week

 Proudly listening to Matchbox Twenty's How Far We've Come if only we actually knew How Far We Have To Go.

Fan Bi, Chief Shirt, reporting on Blank Label updates on the co-creation blog.

Blank Label is currently looking for a Handy Man (Web Developer Intern) to work with our Chief Hamster (CTO), Lead Artist (Graphic Designer) and Lead Evangelist (Online Marketer) to make www.blank-label.com  the most kick ass e-commerce site with the most awesome Design-It-Yourself Custom Men's Dress Shirt App EVER! Ha, yes we are a bunch of fools, but at least we’re not tools.

We’re a self-funded startup, that launched October 31, to fundamentally change the relationship between individual consumer and apparel producer by offering affordable (starting at $45) co-created custom men’s dress shirts. Already getting orders everyday we’re looking for the opportunity to scale up, and with the long laundry list of things to do, we’re seeking some development help.

The team is spread with Chief Hamster in Orange County, Lead Artist and Lead Evangelist in Boston, and Chief Shirt in Shanghai (where our dress shirts are made). We’re pretty chill about working remotely, dialing in for all hands calls twice a week, being super responsive on email, and keeping scheduled to our project management tools.

Of course we’d love to bring someone on full-time but the reality is we’re a startup not in the cash-flow position to do so. Instead we’re looking for someone quirky and different up for an entrepreneurial opportunity, interested in supplementing college or their day job with some extra cash. Ideally we’d be able to work with you part-time for a couple of months and then dive into stock options and dreaming about the bigger picture.

We hire on culture and attitude first and skill set second. Preferably our Handy Man is a bit of a generalist who can work with our Graphic Designer on some front-end work whilst being able to engage with our Chief Hamster in actual programming in our ASP.NET framework. Experience with ASP.NET or e-commerce or doing any else tremendously awesome is a BIG +.

If this sounds like an interesting gig to you, drop us an email with five things you would do to improve our site. If we agree with three of them, we’ll chase you down. 

As an aside, if you have a friend or colleague in mind, if we hire someone you refer to us, we'll give you a Blank Label co-created custom dress shirt!