Creekwood Middle School in Kingwood, Texas is awesome. Why? They’re holding a fundraiser for the Haiti relief effort and will be including the “Many Hands Make the Load Lighter” tee as part of their fundraiser! Hooray!

They’ve purchased a whooping 750 tees, which means they’re donating a full $7,500 to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Fund. So awesome! Here’s the story, as told to us by the very rad 7th grade Texas History teacher Amanda Frederick:

“Our superintendent challenged the entire school district to raise at least one dollar per student in the district (about 35,000). Each school came up with their own idea on how to raise the money and help out the Red Cross.

I receive Threadless emails and as soon as I saw the “Many Hands” tee, I knew it would be a great way to help out. We got all the approval needed and ordered the shirts. We will sell the shirts at our three lunches as well as to parents and the community. In the end, we will have donated at least 7,500 dollars to the American Red Cross and even more awareness will be raised for the issues in Haiti… Our school is very involved in service learning and this is just one way we're able to help others and learn about what's going on in the world.”

If you live anywhere near Kingwood, TX (we’re looking at you, Houston!), be sure to stop by the school and pick up your tee for Haiti. And if you'd like to help or do something similar in your community, just shoot an email to community@threadless.com!

The Bestee buzz has begun! The Bestee Awards honor your favorite creative minds within the Threadless community, and you have a hand in choosing the biggest winner. You've got a week (starting now thru February 14th) to vote for your favorite design of the year aka the People's Choice award. The lucky designer that wins gets $20,000 in cashola! Vote now!

We'll announce the winners for all of the other Bestee of the Year categories on March 8. In addition to our annual awards, we've a new category: Scorer of the Year. This category rewards the Threadless community member with highest correlation between scores and prints (so maybe we should call it Psychic of the Year?).

Here's the awesome and overwhelming category and prize breakdown:

o People's Choice: $20K prize (holy moley!) plus a free trip to the annual Threadless meetup
o Designer of the Year: $10K prize, plus a free trip to the annual Threadless meetup
o Unprinted Designer of the Year: $1K prize (in addition to getting one of their designs printed, they'll get the standard Threadless award of $2500 value)
o Blogger of the Year: $1K prize, plus the honor of choosing an unprinted designer to get printed, and a free trip to the annual Threadless meetup
o Newcomer of the Year: $1K prize
o Kids Design of the Year: $1K prize
o Slogan of the Year: $1K prize (this doesn't include Twitter Tees)
o Collaboration of the Year: $1K prize
o Scorer of the Year: $1K prize
o Plus, a bunch of honorary Bestee Awards to be announced

Congratulations Keith on having The Hills Are Alive chosen by Threadless and Mountain Dew Throwback to be the chosen design for the Loves Throwback challenge!

We decided that it captured exactly the spirit that theme & challenge called for! Keith is now working with Mountain Dew on a special design for them and of course getting hopped up on a year's worth of soda! Congrats!

Hey everybody! TOMS Shoes is having their annual “One Day Without Shoes” on April 8, 2010. The event is a tangible way to make a statement for the millions of children who go shoeless everyday. (Some of us may also go barefoot on April 8th, and you should too!) To spread the word about this important cause, we’re joining up the way we know best: a design challenge!

Your challenge is to design a tee based on the theme: It’s hard without shoes.

There are tons of ways to express the importance of shoes. You have until Feb 21 to take this theme and run with it (virtually of course). If chosen, your awesome tee will be promoted in conjunction with the event. And if that wasn’t enough, TOMS is throwing in 12 months of free shoes and an opportunity to design an official TOMS tee!

Help us bring attention to this great cause with a great design!

Every year here at Threadless HQ we have a Chili Cook-off disguised as a Super Bowl party. This year, we're giving you guys a chance to get in on the hot chili action!

Just submit your rockin' chili recipe to community@threadless.com by 10 am CT on February 5th (one entry per person). We'll choose one meat and one vegetarian recipe and announce the winners at 5pm CT on February 5th. If your recipe is chosen, you'll win a $50 Threadless gift certificate. Plus, we'll make your chili on Super Bowl Sunday (February 7th) and enter it into our office contest for another chance to win. Then, if your chili is chosen as the overall winner of either the meat or veggie category on Super Bowl Sunday, you'll win a $100 chefsresource.com gift certificate too!

Recipes will be judged on:

* Creativity
What makes your chili awesome? Secret ingredients? A clever name? A great story from grannie?

* Football/Threadless relevance
What would make the community vote it a 5$? Or maybe the recipe is a jambalaya-esque ode to the Big Easy? Hint: Don't be afraid to describe the way your chili should be presented.

* Craveability
Does this recipe sound like something we just haveta eat? Like. Right. Now? And of course, your chili recipe must be edible and contain no super exotic ingredients. (ie. giraffe bones, turtle doves, durian, etc.)

Let's get cookin'!

The winners:
Meat recipe: Eric Z.'s "Brutal Beatdown Chili"
Veggie recipe: Liz P.'s "Super Awesome Fake Out Beer Chili w/ Cumin Sour Cream"

Congratulations! The meat chili came in 2nd place and the veggie chili came in 3rd place on Super Sunday!

"Men anpil chay pa lou"
(Translation: "Many Hands Make the Load Lighter")

UPDATE: As of Jan. 25th, 7,000 tees have been ordered, generating $70,000 for the people of Haiti. We're lifting our maximum donation cap and are planning to print as many as 15,000 more tees, including KIDS sizes. Thanks for your support and please continue to spread the word!

We and some friends of ours have come together to support sending relief to Haiti. We’re donating 100% of proceeds of the sale of "Many Hands Make the Load Lighter" to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Fund (up to $100,000).

We reached out to Haiti's neighbors and asked two of our designers from the Dominican Republic to design this tee, Thomas De Santis and Ivan Tarrazo Sanchez. They’ve declined their printing award and are instead giving it to the Red Cross. Shirts Our Business, one of our printers, has donated their printing time and ink. And everyone here has been rallying to get this tee out to retain focus on the relief effort. We hope you too, will send this along to your friends and fams to show your support!


Thomas and Ivan gave us their thoughts:

Thomas says, “Our inspiration (for the tee was) the amazing Haitian street art. It provides a true sense of daily life and community through the use of gorgeous colors.”

Ivan adds, “We hope that with the money raised with the tee we raise awareness as to the importance, not only of immediate assistance, but of the creation of the infrastructure needed to respond in similar crises.”

Alumni Picks!

These designs were hand picked by four of our Alumni winners from the Doodle & Dominate challenge back at our Family Reunion in September (aka the meetup). Each Alumni got to choose an unprinted designer's design to be printed. And man-o-man, they picked some awesome stuff! Check out what each alumni had to say about their chosen designer!


Alumni Artist, Jason Bergsieker (aka NomadSlim) chose Nichole Lillian Humphrey (aka ratkiss) “Music of the Night.”

"Nichole has been producing some really great original art that was getting unfairly scored in my opinion. She has been super supportive of my designs as well as countless others and a real life example of why the Threadless community is so successful. My gut wanted to pick another of her designs, but the voices spoke to the greatness of this particular piece and I felt that by choosing it, I was equally giving back to everyone who supports us designers and makes this possible and especially to Nichole for continually providing positivity to us all. Plus, she lives just a couple miles from me, so maybe she'll buy me a piece of apple pie. ;) CONGRATULATIONS NICHOLE!"


Alumni Artist, Alex Solis (aka alexmdc) chose Donald Lim (aka Pakpandir) “A Geek Legend.”

"I'm a sucker for illustration and detail, this design is something that scores high in my book :) This illustration is EPIC and the details are amazing, I love the limited color palette and how well it works on the shirt."



Alumni Artist, Julia Sonmi Heglund (aka sonmi) chose James Murphy (aka sweet n sour) “Triskaidekaphilia.”

"Sweet n sour has an insane mind and impeccable lines! I first noticed and became a fan of his work with his undead pinup girls, and have long been awaiting the day to wear his art on a tee. Congreat!"



Alumni Artist, Roni Lagin (aka phillydesigner) chose Denise Tadla (aka HorsefaceDee) “A Unicorn For Boys.”

"The fantastic style of illustration, clever concept, limited color palette, and gender role reversal are some of the many reasons I couldn't pass up the opportunity to select this design to grace a Threadless tee. Horsefacedee continues to be an active contributor to Threadless and its blogging community. And in my humble opinion, her mastering of equine-related artwork is unmatched. Can't wait to own this!"

Check out the full set here! More to come soon... We can't wait!

A while back, we asked all you folks who get our newsletter to give us feedback on our emails. We got a range of stuff, but one particular email touched our hearts. Since we’re big softies, it led us to reprint “Sees the Day.” Check out our initial email from Jessica Santistevan:


"So, I initially signed up for Threadless.com e-mails just on the chance that ONE SPECIFIC shirt ever came into re-print. It's a shirt my bf got a while back (in the US) and he wants a second one but he's in the Army and is currently deployed in Afghanistan and can't check on 're-printed' t-shirts…
My bf wore this shirt every weekend he visited home and anytime we were ANYWHERE guys and girls were drooling over his shirt...it became a joke…"


Then when our own Bob Nanna emailed her to let her know the shirt was being reprinted, this was her response.


"…I can't even type in grammatical sentences right now. I know that this is so small in the scheme of things but it's rare that I get to e-mail my boyfriend with fun and exciting news to take his mind off of things he's encountering while being in Afghanistan. If I could reach through the computer and hug you all...I would. Thank you from the bottom of my heart "


For us, this awesome tee will connected with this sweet story from now on. We can’t do much about this big ol’ war that’s happening. But lil’ things like this hopefully help a lil’ bit (we couldn’t help but send her two “Sees the Day” tees for her and her faraway man). And who knows? We might just be doing more reprints like this in the future…stay tuned, kids.

See subject! :)

Enjoy! Find any good back-from-the-dead tees?