Threadless is an American online apparel and art-print marketplace founded in 2000 by Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart in Chicago, built around a long-running model in which artists submit designs that are scored by the community, with the highest-rated pieces produced and sold to royalty-share splits with their creators.
What began as a weekly t-shirt design challenge run out of an apartment grew into one of the most-cited early examples of crowd-sourced product development and creator-economy infrastructure. The company expanded its catalog to apparel, accessories, wall art, and home goods, and in 2016 launched Threadless Artist Shops — a free print-on-demand storefront platform that lets independent creators sell branded merchandise without holding inventory. Threadless has retained its independence through multiple cycles of e-commerce consolidation, repositioning itself as much around supporting individual artists as around any single product line.