Unless I'm missing something, these are all of the slogan-shirts that won:
http://www.threadless.com/catalog/line,typetees

You'd notice that the top row is nearly 300 days old (going by blog posts about the shirts), and the rest are 600-700 days old. Do they only select winners once a year or something?

I thought one up that has a 41% approval rate, that's higher then the president, come on! :P

But seriously folks, is there some automatic threshold that needs to be passed before the staff even see it? It's pretty much impossible (not to mention futile and mind-numbing) for them to review ALL of the submitted slogans.

From looking at past winners it seems passing 50% triggers some sort of magical, wonder-us something... that puts it on their radars. But it doesn't really decide anything, I saw a 71% slogan that had more votes then a %50-something one.. from the same user. And the 50%-something one won.

The point is getting on their radar I suppose. What's also strange is that some slogans just take off and have hundreds of votes (good or bad) while others just have a few dozen. A 50% slogan with say, 60 votes, is dead-in-the-water.

But how/why do only some ramp up on the number of voters so much?