Gone are the days when the big fashion houses decided what was in and what wasn’t. Welcome to the dawn of “crowd-sourcing”—although it isn’t exactly new on the scene, crowd-sourcing has definitely seen a rise with companies like Threadless and Designed by Humans and the new kid on the block, Goodfibres.

The Dawn of Crowd Sourcing

Apart from understanding ones target audience better, “crowd-sourcing” also allows the consumer to participate in the design process by contributing ideas or, in the case of companies like Threadless and Goodfibres, contribute to a final product!

Many times you find the public saying that “crowd-sourcing” devalues the designer and encourages people to treat design as a commodity. The fact is that it only encourages creativity and gives people a chance to get their designs out in the public who otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Crowd sourcing is also seen as being impetus to creativity; but Crow sourcing also curates itself: art for the masses, by the masses. Who better to tell you what your target audience likes than the target audience itself?

Art for the masses, by the masses.

In it for the Artists

The benefit for artists is that they also get to test the impact of their designs at no cost of their own. In addition, when designs are chosen, artists stand to make money. Goodfibres has slightly altered the model of its latest contender’s competition by giving the artist 10% royalties for every design sold with the artist retaining all the rights to his/her own designs. Additionally, on their website, they also mention that they match every purchase with a donation to someone less fortunate, more details of it here. But the best part is, they have really nice designs.

So do your part, whether it be designing a T-shirt or buying one or voting for one. Join the crowd-sourcing revolution.