đź‘• Features I Want in Threadless Artist Shops
Even great products can improve.
I’m a big fan of Threadless Artist Shops, and I think they’re a great way for any independent artist or business to bring in some passive, low-effort revenue. I constantly recommend their platform to creators I know. Here are a few of my ideas on how they can make their tools even better.
[Update 032820: I’m now adding indicators next to these features as Threadless makes product changes.]
Admin Panel UX Improvements — ✅
The admin panel is where I spend all my time, whether I’m updating existing styles or adding new designs to my shop. The whole admin environment feels sluggish and slow at times, like the database is on the other side of the world, and the UI makes some simple tasks difficult.
[Update: Since writing the first draft, the admin panel has undergone significant improvement. It no longer has that sluggish feeling and navigating designs is much easier.]
Infinite scroll on designs filter view in admin panel — ❌
Infinite scroll is used when scrolling through the products list, so I’m confident that it will come to designs soon, but it honestly can’t get here soon enough. The products filter view is the non-default view and actually has to display more data than the designs view, so the fact that it was implemented on that page first may mean that this whole tool is changing soon.
[Update 042822: It appears Threadless has chosen to stick with a pagination model for now on the Designs page.]
Search for designs in admin panel — ❌
I’m often coming to my admin panel with a specific change in mind. Maybe I want to add a color to a design that I just realized will work well, or maybe I’ve noticed that I forgot to add all the size options for stickers on another design. Whatever the specific task is, I would love to be able to search for my design from the dashboard, quickly access what I need to change, and be done quickly. Presently, I have to paginate back through time on the designs list view until I get to what I’m looking for.
[Update 042822: Still no search for designs by name. This seems like some low-hanging fruit. Search is a solved problem.]
Better Collaboration Tools
A major feature improvement that has occurred since I became a Threadless user has been the introduction of collaborators, a simple way to share revenue on items with other artists. This feature has greatly improved my quality of life, as it saves me a good amount of bookkeeping, but I’d love to see the team go even further here.
Email notifications for collaborators when sales occur
I always forward emails to folks when they make a sale, just to let them know — but it would be nice to have this happen automatically.
Full view of total revenue with split and earnings by collaborator
It would be nice to see how much money I’ve earned and how much I’ve helped others earn.
Design Tools
Ability to add variant designs in a single item
I often have a black and white variant of an artist logo that I use on different colored shirts. It would be nice to be able to bundle these together as one item and list the print colors as “variants”.
Ability to do limited-run items
I love Threadless for what it is, an always-on, full workflow service for selling merch, however items from Threadless shops have one serious point of devaluation, and that is that every item is part of a potentially infinite series. The quality of their shirts often outshines band merch that people gladly buy off Bandcamp pages — usually just black Gildan cotton tees — and Threadless offers so many cool and unique product options.
It’s really fun to be able to think about selling 10 shower curtains with some silly image on them, but it’s impossible to sell 50 of them, and trying to do so would devalue the 10 that might actually sell if they’re a rare or special item. I know items can be enabled and disabled for a certain window of time, but limited count runs would also be a nice feature.
Better workflow for all-over printed items
Right now, all-over print items have to be set up through Threadless support and it takes a long time to get things online. The new cut-and-sew options help mitigate some of this annoyance, but they’re also not trivially easy to set up.
[Update 042822: This complaint has been solved by cut-and-sew shirts which have a good self-serve workflow. It would be nice to see further workflow improvements here, perhaps a direct integration with Adobe’s new Photoshop for Web?]
Marketing Tools
Every artist markets their differently, so out-of-the-box marketing tools are always hard to get right, but I think there are some basic things that almost any brand could take advantage of.
Analytics
I know I can export everything as CSV, and trust me, I don’t want that feature to vanish, but some sort of stats views on earnings and sales and orders over time would be nice as part of the admin dashboard. I know there are some pie charts, but I’m talking about data over time.
Auto-generated marketing content based on your designs.
The new Download Product Images tool is very cool and allows you to easily make shareable versions of your products, ready for posting on Instagram to announce sales or just showcase items. Something like this would be awesome if it was expanded to generate things like Facebook Page header images that showcase your designs on a whole variety of display items.
Better integration with social links on account homepages
Social links are only displayed on the /about page. It would be nice to be able to list specific social channels as an optional parameter on designs. Social badges would display if links were added.
Threadless, if you’re listening…
Threadless is a great platform, and I run a significant part of my side hustle business on it, but some improvements would really boost my ability to work with the platform in a way that feels productive, modern, and engaging. These are just my suggestions for some UX improvements that I would personally benefit from. I hope some of these ideas are useful to someone.
The Threadless Store I run is http://bassmerch.co/ — I sell shirts for electronic music producers.
