It's All About the Profession!

With everybody talking about consumer empowerment through crowdsourcing I found it a bit bewildering, that on the one platform where that form of consumer interaction would be most likely, it is actually professional designers that create the products.

                   http://www.threadless.com/Made/

Having taken a closer look at the Threadless community and their gallery of submitters, I found it it quite surprising that only 5 out of 29 people are not either professional graphic designers, illustrators or involved in any kind of other artistic profession. Can that even be called consumer empowerment? I don't think so. In fact, it looks like the opposite. It seems like yet another classic producer-consumer relationship with the difference that the Threadless corporation does not have to legally employ or sub-contract their designers who even do the work without having the security of actually getting paid.

Yay, another win-win-win-situation for the company!