Article

Top 100: 56. Retail crowdsourcing

April 16, 2011

The t-shirt company Threadless and athletic shoe manufacturer Ryz invite consumers to take part in designing their products. Visitors to the websites vote for their favorites, thus determining which items the companies will sell. In yet another play on the “wisdom of crowds” theory, the concept has been dubbed “crowdsourcing.”  Although consumers have long been involved in helping companies develop products and services through focus groups, some companies are looking to the Internet to tap into consumer input on a much grander scale. Professional creatives will scoff and decry the lowest common denominator taint of it all, but, for the generation coming of age in the era of Web 2.0, crowdsourcing is the kind of input and interaction they’ve come to expect.

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