Never Stop Making

Threadless began as my hobby twenty years ago. At the time, I was attending art school and just wanted to make cool things with my friends. That’s still what Threadless is all about today. It’s a little bit bigger with millions of people involved and hundreds of thousands of artists making things, but the spirit remains. Threadless exists as a place for artists and designers to share and sell the things they make in their spare time. We make products from their art, distributing them around the world, and paying artists handsomely for their work.

After stumbling my way into a successful business and speaking a bunch about Threadless, I wanted to make a talk that wasn’t about my company but about the essence of what we do and what we stand for. “Never Stop Making” is that talk. I put it together about 10 years ago for TEDxBoulder… you can watch it at the end of this article. It’s about the importance for all of us to make things. And to never stop making things. Here I am finally making it into an article, officially retiring it, and starting on a new talk :)

I believe that all of us have an inherent need to make things. In 2004, Jeff Howe, an editor at Wired magazine, coined the term “crowdsourcing.” He liked to use Threadless as an example for how it works. When we released a book for our 10th anniversary, he wrote an article in it. He wrote about how he followed the Vans Warped Tour around one year and witnessed all of these creative kids making things. They were making poetry, videos, animations, tattoos, all kinds of things. But none of them were doing it for the money. And they weren’t doing it because they wanted to become filmmakers or poets. They were doing it because, and I quote Jeff:

“Making stuff is the most joyful occupation in which we ever engage. It’s the closest we come to God.”

We all have something to say or contribute, something unique about us that we can share with the world. That’s what art is all about and I believe it’s one of the most fundamental things that fuels us as humans. Even if it’s just making a giant stack of grilled cheese sandwiches to share with friends.

Are you old enough to remember making your first mix tape? Think back to when you fumbled to put the tape in, hit play on one side, record on the other… You probably messed it up a few times, recorded over a few songs. But eventually you became the mix tape master.

If you aren’t old enough for the mix tape I’m sure you’ve had a similar set of challenges trying to figure out how to make your first digital playlist. What do these buttons do? I learned HTML by clicking view > source in the web browser. The code was right there! I began trying to make sense of it and figured out little bits at a time. Then, I figured out Photoshop by first figuring out how to download an illegal copy, then opening it up and slowly clicking every button, trying to see what they did. Your computer won’t explode! Try it, click every button. The next thing I knew I had a job as a Web Designer… in high school.

True story: At 15 years old I made a website for my bunion surgery. It became the #1 search result for “bunion surgery” so then I started learning a lot about online community when grandmothers started emailing me asking for advice about their bunions.

This works in the “real world” too. I learned how to build a tree fort by nailing a board into a tree, standing on that board, and nailing in the next one. I was 12 with zero carpentry background. But by the end of it my friends and I had built a three story tall tree fort that we could even have sleepovers in!

Most of the things I do in my career have been self taught by simply being curious enough to start giving it a try.

When you don’t know how to do something, so long as you have the confidence to try, that’s when you’re the most creative & innovative. If you do something that you’re an expert at, what more do you have to offer other than what you’ve already mastered? Step outside of your comfort zone and approach a situation with fresh eyes, offer a new perspective… you’ll either learn something new or teach someone else a new way to think about things.

I started Threadless by making myself REALLY uncomfortable. I won a t-shirt design challenge for an event in London with the design above. Just one hour afterwords, I started a thread in a forum online saying that I’d make t-shirts from the best designs people posted in it. This was where the first 5 Threadless designs came from. I didn’t know how I’d print them, ship them, charge credit cards, anything — but I threw myself in the deep end! By doing this I sort of flipped my fears as well. Rather than being scared TO do it, I was scared NOT to do it because I promised I would to all of these talented people that I respected.

It’s impossible to predict what will happen, what you’ll learn, how people will react, or how it could snowball out of control when you make something and put it out into the world. But one thing’s for sure, more will happen than if you do nothing.

My hobby turned into what I’ve done for a living for over a decade… it turned into a multi-million dollar business that supports thousands of artists around the world. That was certainly unintended. Thousands of years ago we divided our lives into “work” and “hobbies” and I’m here to say it doesn’t have to be like that. But let it happen organically. The best, most fun things to work on were results of the joy of creation. Prioritize your hobbies!

Do it for yourself.

Scratch an itch… give yourself a creative release from all of the things. Your work, your significant other, your kids. Have something in your life that you do and do well. Something that you’re proud of and you do it simply because you are craving it as part of your life.

It’s far too easy in our culture today to just become a passive viewer of the world. It’s up to you to define your legacy. When your children ask what kind of people their parents were, you don’t want them to say “oh, he was really good at watching funny youtube videos.”

The other day I went out in my backyard in Chicago and built an outdoor fire pit out of brick and mortar. That was my first time mortaring anything and it turned out quite ugly. But it got the job done, I learned something, and best of all… I built something with my bare hands. It felt good. I made that fire pit. And now I roast s’mores around it with my kids.

Every once in a while you just need to build something. Stretch your own canvas and use your paintbrush instead of your mouse, go dig a hole in the ground to see if you can make it all the way to China. Or forget your tent next time you go camping and build a shelter.

It reminds you what we’re here for.

I’m sure many of you have ideas that you want to bring to life. Maybe you’ve had them for years. A lot of times they are so big they are overwhelming. You think you’ll never do it, and so, you never start. But simply start sketching it out a bit. Write out how it would work, think it through… build a prototype.

Even “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was “Charlie Brown’s Christmas” before it got out of Schulz’s head

The simple, physical act of touching a pen to a piece of paper. You don’t need to know the master plan for the next great American novel or the next Facebook or Mona Lisa before you begin. By the way, I’ve found that one of the best times for this is at work when you’re supposed to be doing something else.

There is a secret bonus to this process as well. The best way to move on from a bad idea that’s haunting you is to give it it’s moment. Just make it real for a second and let it show you that it doesn’t work.

The best way to get into a routine of making things? Having made something yesterday. Get into a cycle of making things. The act of making something is the best fuel there is to drive you to make another thing. Watch less TV. Have a project. Any waking moment you have think about how you could be using that precious time to create something.

At Threadless, sometimes we draw on the walls when we take a break. Or carve pumpkins, or set up fun things for an event in our community space. Sometimes we get out the ink and set up a screen printing activity at local schools. We try to do everything we can to keep the creative energy flowing.

Don’t forget the power of collaboration! That tree fort wouldn’t have been nearly as fun to build without my buddies there to build it with. If you’re an entrepreneur and want to find a co-founder, a musician who wants to start a band, a writer looking for an illustrator, whatever the case may be… I suggest you make some friends and go make some things with them first.

Make friends.

Then make things with your friends.

I first met my co-founder by getting in experimental JavaScript battles with him on a weirdo artsy forum on the Internet.

My friend Dustin, who has some amazing carpentry skills, and I built a real-world Threadless design-scoring arcade machine in my garage. The machine later ended up in a Gap store. Now he is our VP of Digital at the company. My friend Joe painted a bunch of murals in our office, and he and I always went snowboarding together out in Colorado. Eventually we started a snowboard company called Nightmare.

Get ideas out of your head with friends. You can sit all day and come up with innovative ideas, but until you start acting on them they’re just ideas. We encourage our community, our team and ourselves to make stuff together. In fact our slogan at Threadless is “Make Great Together” … that’s what it’s all about!

Bonus: Make with kids!

Kids have a really unique outlook on the world that we can only try to remember. There is so much to re-learn from the approach that kids take in making things. they just don’t know the rules. And it leads to amazing things. Where we may try to sculpt something out of play-doh, they’ll just stick it to their face. I learn so many valuable things from my kids that I use in the way that I approach making things at work. One time we went to a pop-up shop for the Chicago Children’s Museum where the kids got to make things out of cardboard. My daughter made a skyscraper with a kleenex box elevator. There was no room for the people because the elevator took up the entire space... but why not, it’s a cardboard skyscraper, we can change the rules!

This is a great trend I’ve seen people try to do online. A lot of artists on Threadless have given this a go. Challenge yourself to make something cool every day. Document each thing you make… share it.

It can be small. Enough to satisfy a little pop of creative energy. One of my favorite “MSCED” projects is Brock Davis in 2009. Check it out. It was a lot of very simple but super clever photos and illustrations. I am so inspired to see people able to consistently put out so much great work.

Give it a try!

This one is so important to me.

It’s amazing how empowering the internet is for people who make things. At the very least you can easily share what you’ve made to the world. Post it to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat, wherever! As powerful as simply making something is, it’s that much more powerful when the world can react to it. Who knows what will happen

Or take it a step further. If you craft, make something and post it up for sale on Etsy when it’s done! If you love to cook, consider sharing a recipe. Or use Kickstarter to launch a project you’ve been thinking about. Someone out there is in the market for a necklace with a model of the digestive system on it, or a lunchbox made out of the Ouija board.

So, to wrap this all up…

I think a typical problem in our lives is we get locked into a routine. We get stagnant, too comfortable, stuck in a rut. We sit on the couch and get bored. Then we start to get depressed.

I believe making things, actually doing stuff, is the best way to release yourself from that rut.

Maybe we should all go get lost in making … starting now!

A huge thank you to the @Threadless community for designing all of the little “Make” illustrations scattered throughout the talk!