One of the main goals we had in creating Threadless stores was to be able to have real, live, tangible events around the launching of new tees every week. We release 8 or 9 new and reprinted designs every single week which is quite unique in the apparel industry. Right now the launching of the tees takes place online every Monday.

We've printed nearly 1,000 designs since the beginning of Threadless in November of 2000. About 300 or so of those are in stock right now. It would be very difficult for us to have all of those designs in the store. We decided to focus the store on just the newest 2 weeks worth of designs plus a few exclusives, starting with the Glennz/Arzie13 tee. There will only be 20 designs for sale in the store at any given moment. Each of the 20 designs gets its own special area complete with an LCD display cycling through various photos and close-ups of the design, comments from the original submission and other rad stuff. The designs for sale will change weekly, as will the store window.

The kicker is that - at the store - we will be launching the new tees the Friday before they get released on the website. While you won't have access to our entire catalog from the store, you will have a head-start on what comes out on the website.

Keep in mind that the store will only be receiving a small portion of what we actually create, so there is no way that a design would sell out in the store and not make it to the website. The website will always have inventory on Mondays whether things sell out over the weekend in the store or not. Also, WE DO PLAN ON OPENING STORES IN OTHER CITIES. I know with all of this awesomeness happening in Chicago a lot of you are probably feeling left out. Well, if Chicago does well, we'll work our little hineys off to get more stores opened around the world as quickly as we can ;) But sorry 'A Markets,' we think Threadless stores make more sense in smaller, artsy communities like San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Boulder, Columbus, Boston, Minneapolis, or Savannah...

BTW, we're totally fine with our Chicago customers leaking the designs with photos taken in the store and such. We hope it'll be a fun set of conversations in the blogs over the weekend before the designs come out online.

Check out the previous posts about the store:
- Announcing the Chicago Threadless Store Grand Opening and Grand Opening Party!!
- Chicago Store Sneak Peek #4: Arzie13 and Glennz Store Launch Tee!
- Chicago Store Sneak Peek #3: Learn Something Upstairs in the Gallery
- Chicago Store Sneak Peek #2: Reusable Bag-Coupons!
- Chicago Store Sneak Peek #1: Weekly Mashup Store Window Paintings!