Jacob DeHart is the founder and Vice President of skinnyCorp, the company behind Threadless, Naked & Angry, ExtraTasty, and more. Most of their projects are "community based, meaning that the site is built to create an environment where users can interact and mutually benefit from each other, another term to describe it is user innovation." Visit his blog here.

What is threadless, and how did the company get started?

Threadless is an on-going t-shirt design competition. The process is fairly simple. Designers register on the site, download our templates, create their design and upload a low-res version to Threadless. After a quick approval process, a design is then put up for voting over a 7 day period, after that period it is taken down and put into the archives. Each week we look at the best scoring designs in the archives and choose 6-10 shirts to print. Threadless started back in late 2000 when Jake Nickell and myself entered into a one time t-shirt design competition held on a design message board. Jake won the contest which sparked the idea to create an on-going t-shirt contest website, thus the idea of Threadless was born. Jake and I are designers and programmers, so we were quickly able to design and program Threadless. Over the years the ideas, technology and business of the site has evolved, but the initial goal of the site has remained, which is to inspire young artists and to easily get their work out there for their peers to critique.

What does running such a unique clothing company involve, and what do you see as your greatest challenges?

Every year Threadless grows by a multiple of 3-4x the previous year. At this rate we're constantly faced with the challenge of scalability. When I say scalability I don't mean (usually) on the web end of the business, by more on the logistical backend of our fulfillment business. We've grown from doing orders once a week out of Jake's apartment to having 20 full time employees, shipping thousands of shirts a day.

What is the technology behind it all, and why did you choose it?

The current Threadless is hand built by the two Jakes using PHP and MYSQL. We chose this because we're able to quickly develop strong applications that scale well.