When You and Your Customers Make the Products Together

Juliette Powell

Today’s audience isn’t listening at all—it’s participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical.

—William Gibson, Award-winning author (excerpt from Wired magazine, July 2005)

It was the height of the dot-com bubble, and everybody was getting in on the game. So when a couple of college dropouts with no formal business training got together in 2000 with $500 each and decided to start a T-shirt shop on the Web, nobody paid much attention. Not at first, anyway.

Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell got the idea for their online store from a T-shirt design contest that Jake entered and won through an online ...