Designed, Selected and Screened - T-Shirts???

I just received my monthly copy of Entrepreneur over the weekend and was looking through it just minutes ago when I stumbled upon this tech spotlight - two young entrepreneurs from Chicago are making millions off of t-shirts. They are projected to make $26 million in 2006 - from t-shirts.

Yeah, right I said. I even spoke with a colleague whose initial thought was the same as mine - people don't make a lot of money from t-shirts, but these guys do. Jake Nickell, 25 and Jacob DeHart, 24 discovered that if they harnessed the creative juices from their market, they would in turn guarantee their market. They created www.threadless.com in 2000, where they design and allowed outside people to design t-shirt logos. Anyone can sign up to be a member at this site and even submit their own design. Designs are then voted on by the members. They currently have 300,000 members and that will probably triple now with the fact that they were focused in Entrepreneur this month. Each month, the votes are tallied and the winner is announced. The winning t-shirt design is then inventoried where you can buy them.

To me, this is such a great business model. They have advertised by word-of-mouth and I'm sure the local email world. Their membership database grew, and also grew their market. Their market in return designed logos that they thought were cool (there are also financial incentives driving this), and then that same market told threadless which t-shirts they would buy. Threadless in return made the t-shirts that would sell. Wow, that is so simple and so LOGICAL.

So, here I am thinking, how can I capitalize from this idea. What about corporate ads? Have the market design ads for major corporations, vote on them, and then sell them to the corporate giants... check out www.threadless.com and design a t-shirt, or at the very least, vote on one.