After seeing all the great feedback on Alex's Atrium features blog, I'd like to share a bit more about why we started Atrium, why it is what it is today and what we have planned for the future. I've actually been meaning to write this for a while!

There have been a bunch of different things at play over the past few years that have lead to this.

TL;DR version:

Our code is old and difficult to work with. We've wanted to redesign the site for years using new, modern web practices. We want to create more opportunities for artists by getting good at partnering and providing more canvases to design for than just t-shirts. We wanted to be able to test and prove all of this stuff first.

So - we launched Atrium as a startup within Threadless, small group of people worked on it, developed a whole new codebase from scratch and proved out the business model. The success of the challenges so far as well as the ridiculous amount of in-bound interest from partners right now has deemed it a success. Next step over the coming months is to roll it all back into Threadless and also to give Threadless itself an overhaul using our new codebase and a new design. Atrium as you know it will no longer exist, it will just be the code behind Threadless.

More detailed version:

First, our codebase was becoming very difficult to work with. Especially when it came to hiring new tech people, it was very difficult to read, took people a year just to get up to speed on our code. There is code on Threadless that is 10 years old. About 3 years ago we attempted to refactor a bunch of it, but that just wasn't working. We still didn't have a framework and it was too easy to just write code the old way. We also needed to build an API so developers could build apps on top of Threadless code, we wanted to start using a modern web framework to increase the speed of development and be able to leverage all of the great 3rd party services out there now so we don't waste our time on things that have already been done. So we wanted to start from scratch.

Second, we feel the site is really showing it's age visually too. There is so much cool stuff happening on the web right now with HTML 5 and the advances in Javascript heavy applications. The current design is just getting pummeled with content with no place to put it. The homepage currently looks like a newspaper. We want something bold and refreshing that really represents what Threadless is about. The redesign doesn't come into play yet with Atrium, but by developing a new codebase, we will be able to roll it out more easily at the same time. So all these things get intertwined into our master plan :)

Third, and really the biggest thing IMO, is that Threadless can be so much more than tees. We've dabbled in iPhone cases, water bottles, laptop covers, flip flops, etc, and it's all done really well. Threadless will be the worldwide leader in community based design, period. We want to provide as many opportunities to artists as possible and, to do so, we need to figure out how to partner with other companies that can help us find opportunities for your art to be made into products and distributed around the globe. But, Threadless.com currently is very much about t-shirts and it will take time and effort to show what more it can be.

For all of this, we also wanted to test as we go, releasing things to the world to use. We didn't want to work in a big bubble and then just flip a switch and all of a sudden everything is different. We needed to test to make sure we could make partnerships work, give our new codebase some action, get all the great, constructive feedback from all of you and work towards our goal in digestible chunks, adjusting as we go.

Hopefully some things make more sense with this info! Feel free to discuss here and I'm also always available to talk more in email at jake@threadless.com

ps. We're hoping to have a live demo of the new site ready for the meet-up, maybe even a way for some of you to start using it in beta.