Mining the crowd has been a frequent source of wisdom across a whole host of domains for a while now, and data is increasingly powerful in fast moving industries such as fashion and retail.

A recent study highlights how crowdsourcing can be invaluable in helping companies know what products will be a hit, even before manufacturing begins.

A new business model

At the heart of their study is the American fashion website Threadless.  They rely heavily on the crowd, with designers encouraged to submit product ideas to the site, and only those with enough support then going into production.

Whilst this approach has been successful over the years, it wasn’t clear whether designs that proved popular on the website would be commercially successful or not.

The researchers examined six years worth of sales data from the site, featuring over 150,000 designs from 45,000 different designed.  In total, the designs received approximately 150 million votes.

Intuitively, you would imagine designs with high ratings would go on to sell well, or at least considerably higher than those with lower ratings, and that is what the study found.  Designs with four or five star ratings would do better than those with two or three star ratings.

Where things get interesting however is with designs that only achieved a one or two star rating.  This wasn’t always a reliable predictor of future commercial success.

“Surprisingly, designs that garner a strong reaction, even if it is negative, can sometimes be popular with purchasers,” the authors say.  “For example, a T-shirt with a rude or offensive image might encourage a negative score, but still be popular from a sales point of view.”

It is interesting, but Threadless as a company have been around for quite a while now, and they haven’t scaled to the heights of even fellow startups such as ASOS, let alone more established outlets.  Indeed, their estimated revenues of $30 million are dwarfed by the $1.8bn or so that ASOS make, despite both companies starting life in 2000.

Nonetheless, the authors believe that the Threadless model does nonetheless hold some lessons for the industry.

“Crowdsourcing opinions on new products provides fast feedback, allowing companies to quickly bring popular products to market. It also helps build a community of engaged customers and this can save on advertising costs,” they say.  “It might not be applicable for all brands, particularly high-end fashion, but for producers of items like sneakers or T-shirts this approach can be very effective.”