Call meJeffrey

The other night, I watched a video by my friend Gary Vaynerchuk in which he was saying how he felt that the use of press releases are obsolete. His point is that you have a better chance at winning if you’re that “big fat-ass Italian uncle who tells a story and crushes it” – someone who has a conversation with people, rather than just blasting out information at people.

So, are press releases dead? A relic and a reminder of a way of doing business that once was? For Gary, yes – 100%. For others, maybe not so much. I happen to agree with Gary that if you tell your brand story well, and you have an openness with your community enough to have a dialog, then press releases are likely not necessary. However, any tactic should stay in play until it no longer provides value. So, what if you’re sending out press releases and they continue to provide value? The answer should be obvious: keep sending press releases.

This isn’t about press releases though. Not for me, at least. The bigger picture that I’m talking about here is tradition – and in particular, how tradition relates to business. A tradition is a long-established or inherited way of thinking or acting; a customary or characteristic method or manner in which one does something. Let’s look at that definition and try to extract the “value adding” words: Long-established? No. Inherited? No sir. Customary? Nope.

My issue with those words is that they all imply that there’s build-in respect. But why should we respect something in business just because it’s something that people have been doing for a long time? The answer is we shouldn’t; and therein lies the problem with traditions. But, lets first get to the core of a tradition and discuss how it came to be.

Any tradition begins simply as an idea or solution that once created value. It worked its way from idea to tradition as time went by and the idea went unchallenged – and that’s the key. Unchallenged ideas that provided value at one point are ideas rife to become traditions. This is bad for business because if you never challenge you own ideas periodically, how do you know if they’re still relevant? Think about it this way – if you go to the doctor and are diagnosed with a problem that requires medication, do you get prescribed once and take that medicine forever without periodically getting checked? If you wouldn’t treat yourself that way, why would you treat your business that way?

We’re huge proponents of this at Threadless. We’re a business that started in a very non-traditional way. We’ve told the story many times about how our business started by accident, and we grew by only doing things that made sense to us – only taking steps that we were comfortable taking. Essentially, we did all the things that seemed like a good idea at the time. With all of that said, it wouldn’t make much sense for us to not constantly be challenging our own ideas, considering that the initial success of our business was an ongoing series of trials and errors.

While working to keep traditions out of our business is a logical thing to do considering how we began, that doesn’t mean that traditions should have a place in business that began in a more traditional way. The upside to this point of view is it really doesn’t take much to “de-tradition” your business. All you have to do is simply challenge the agreed upon “good” ideas to ensure they’re still relevant. By doing that you very well may discover that all your ideas are still good ideas, and nothing changes. However, you also may find that your ideas need to be tweaked slightly to regain relevancy. That’s not a bad thing, is it?

Ideas are not immune to the aging process. Like wine, they get better with age only if cared for properly (right Gary?). This care involves always challenging an idea to ensure that it’s still relevant. Double-checking the relevancy of your ideas is an important exercise because by doing so, you get to ensure that your ideas are working for your business and not against it. In the end it’s important to realize that no one is smart enough to come up with an idea that is so brilliant that it stays relevant forever without being cared for.

So what’s the bottom line? If you have a tradition of bringing in pizza for your whole staff on the last Friday of every month should you stop? Of course not. There’s a difference between traditions that effect the culture of your business and traditions that effect mechanics. Obviously, I’m speaking about the latter. A tradition is the antithesis of a nimble organization and can keep you from seeing how ineffective your once effective idea has become.

First I apologize for the “half-head” shot. I’m still getting used to recording on a Flip and like a kid potty-training… my aim is a little off. I’ll get less messy, I swear.

Anyway, I’ll (regular) blog about this later, but I wanted to throw the idea out there that by simply doing what we do – we create an economy of inspiration. There are no rules as to who produces and who consumes. It’s a completely free market, I hope that everyone adds value to both the producer and consumer side to make this economy of inspiration a thriving one.

It’s 12:15am. I have a 4:30am wake-up call, and I even opted for the reminder at 4:45am. I’ve been in Chicago since Saturday and I go to NYC tomorrow at 8am for meetings and to speak at The 99% Conference on Thursday. I leave Thursday night to head back to Chicago to be in our office for meetings on Friday before I head back to Colorado on Saturday. I leave for San Francisco for a week seven days later.

I should be asleep, but instead I’m totally awake. I can’t turn my brain off to save my life.

I was thinking about how much you hear people talk about just doing what it takes to get work done, to hustle your way to success, to push yourself to make things happen. It’s not an uncommon thing to hear me say when I speak, and in fact, it’s the topic of Jake and my speech at 99% “The Do-First Work Ethic.”

What you don’t hear people talk about very much is the time in between “killing” one thing and “crushing” the next. These are the times I find the most important. The moments of clarity that support my sanity while I’m so up-to-my-eyeballs in work that I feel like it will never end (and it rarely ever does).

I don’t like to say “this will work for you”, rather I like to say what works for me in hopes that you can find your own calms before the storm. While I was in Chicago I made time to have lunch with my Mom, Step-dad and sister Lisa. I made time to have a drink and say goodbye to my best friend Burton before he and his girlfriend Sarah moved to London tomorrow. I made time to see my friend Ben and take my brother Josh and his college roommates out for dim-sum (and also got pulled over for talking to my girlfriend on the phone while driving in the process). I made time to have dinner with my oldest friend Scott and his lovely girlfriend Audrey. I made time to have chicken wings with my Dad (our ritual) and visit with my Step-mom and sister Katie. I made time to watch two movies in my hotel, and spend an extra few minutes in the shower each day with the water extra hot, just concentrating on breathing.

This may seem like a lot of time, but in reality it wasn’t. I said “I’m really sorry, but I have to go” more often than I would have liked to. The little bits of time I took to connect with my family and friends, watch movies alone and steal moments of silent meditation are the times that keep me going when I’m feeling worn down and have more things left to do than things that are done.

Why am I telling you this? I feel that I have a tendency to push the idea that life is about work and it should be the priority. For me, this is basically true, but as the saying goes “if you love what you do then it’s not work.” However, loving what you do doesn’t make you immune from fatigue. It’s so important to me to steal as many personal moments as I can in between. So, for as much as I have a lot to say about how to work, here’s some advice on how not to: don’t forget to make the time for things you enjoy (however short of time it may be) and stay grounded in reality by staying connected to those you love.

If beginning tomorrow there were twice as many hours in the day, I’d certainly use them, but even a hustler has gotta sleep.

It seems, that the panel I was part of at SXSW caused a bit of a stir.

How big a stir? Read through the Twitter comments that streamed in during and after (It was a trending topic for a good 3-4 hours). Near the conclusion of the discussion, I got into an argument with Mike Samson of crowdSPRING. I suppose it was less of an argument, and more of me calling him out on things he said that were said to incite me rather than forward the discussion. Clearly he was successful because I lost my cool.

I won’t apologize for what I said. I don’t feel bad about it. I meant every word, and it all came from a good place.

Unfortunately, I know there were a lot of people in the audience who didn’t understand the genesis of the argument and didn’t understand why I was so passionate in my response to cS’ position on their business model’s proximity to Threadless’.

After the panel, and especially after reading the misconceptions and reactions in the Twitter stream from the panel, I felt it would be best to write a post explaining where that passion came from. We’ve all been worked up over issues that deeply matter to us, and like my dad used to tell me, I’m glad I counted to 10 before writing this post.

Now that its been several days since the panel, the adrenaline and emotion generated has subsided. I’ve realized that writing a post filled with examples of how cS uses comparison to Threadless as a way to prove that they’re not doing anything wrong, or telling people that regardless of what I say, Threadless works on a spec model, is pointless.

It doesn’t exactly take investigative journalism to uncover these facts. Just google “Threadless crowdSPRING”. The reality is nothing that I can say will stop them from comparing themselves to Threadless since they have clearly seen success through the brand association to draw in more designers and companies to their “community.” (why else would they do it so often?)

When it comes to our company I have an insane amount of passion. Yes, Jake and Jacob founded the company, but I have been there from the beginning. I have put my heart and soul into skinnyCorp and its community, and when Threadless or the Threadless’ community is misrepresented, its brings out the fight in me.

I have a huge amount of pride in what we’ve accomplished with Threadless and the benefit that we bring to the design community. Creating more opportunities for the artists in our community to learn, grow and interact is our primary focus. Creating more opportunities for our artists to be printed, and thereby having them see a financial benefit more often, is a huge priority for us. Without our community, there would be no Threadless, and no matter how big we get, or old we are (we are going to be 10 next year!), we know that simple fact, and it drives everything we do and everything we have (and will) become.

When a company comes along that consistently represents themselves as a similar business to Threadless, yet in reality are merely a design marketplace focused on transactions (which creates a highly competitive relationship between it’s so-called design community), I get offended.

Let me be as clear as I can be: Threadless and cS not only are not the same business, we will never be the same business.

Our focuses are different; our goals are not aligned. Much like Etsy, Moo or Flickr, our community drives our business, whereas with cS and marketplaces like it, their business drives their community.

It’s not easy to be a designer these days. It can feel like walking aimlessly through the desert in order to find work. And, unfortunately, for many designers, that means there’s plenty of food for the vultures. I just happen to find it more rewarding to have a company that acts as an oasis. That’s the difference, I suppose. Threadless is a company built by designers, for people that appreciate design, so we do everything in our power to make the designer’s experience the best possible.

The sad thing is no designer (myself included) will ever win an argument about cS as long as they keep the focus on spec work and make it an emotional issue. This is a fact that cS is fully aware of. Don’t forget, their main spokesperson online is a lawyer, and it’s to their advantage that the discussion remains about the emotional process their company uses, not the cut-and-dry mechanics of a marketplace.

I encourage you to check out my friend Micah’s post on this subject. He comes to the table with a non-emotional, non-designer’s perspective and explains why as long as the debate is about spec-work, cS will always win.

And with that, I’m done talking about crowdSPRING. It’s a waste of my time to be focusing on such negativity. It doesnt help Threadless’ community or our business, and there are just too many awesome projects at Threadless for me to be working on. BTW, have you seen Charlie’s latest video? Or our community’s latest designs? Perhaps our latest giveaway through our Twitter account or Facebook page? Sorry, but I cant help but be passionate about what we have going on!

UPDATE:
Apparently people jumped the gun and Skittles, in fact, didn’t take their site down, they just moved some things around. Either way, my point remains about understanding the difference between customers and community. Enjoy…

Dear Skittles,

Rough day? To begin, I really hope you saw this coming. It would be insanely irresponsible for Agency.com to not make you aware of the huge potential for “backlash” that you’ve seen in the last day or so. Only, it may make you feel better to know that what you saw wasn’t “backlash”. Backlash is what happens when you change your position in a relationship and that new position has an adverse effect.

The reason this wasn’t backlash is because a relationship between yourself and these people never existed. What you saw was the primal human instinct of testing limits. Without that relationship, people will play nice only for so long, and then they’ll start to see how far they can push it until it’s broken forever. It’s probably a good thing that your new “website” was taken down when it was, because I can assure you that it would have gotten much, much worse.

Here’s some free advice (maybe this is for Agency.com as well if they truly were surprised by this outcome): There’s a significant difference between customers and community. Customers are people who give you money because they like what you have to sell. Community is a group of people who give you their time, energy and loyalty for free because they feel that if your brand was a person, they’d be friends.

While the number of customers you have may sit comfortably in the double-digit millions (maybe triple!), do you have any sense of how many people are part of your core community? That is to say, people who truly care about your brand on a personal level, beyond calling your fruit-flavored morsels their “favorite”. I’m going to throw caution to the wind and guess that number is close to zero.

Don’t get me wrong, I think your company puts out some really amazingly weird and funny advertising and that certainly gets people talking. Unfortunately, by never being part of that conversation you never had a chance to build an ounce of trust with your customers. Building trust-based relationships with your customers are the seeds of growing a community.

The silver lining is that you’re in a good position. People like you. You have a good product. Your customer-facing brand presence through your advertising keeps a positive conversation going. The first step you should be taking is starting to get involved in that conversation. The misstep was putting the cart miles before the horse, though I don’t blame you. However, there’s probably a few people you know that you could throw a shoe at.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Kalmikoff
Skittles Wild Berry Enthusiast