We’ve often referenced Threadless.com, the online purveyor of customer designed graphic t-shirts, as an example of an innovative business that found success by empowering their customers as co-authors of the brand. In this brief, yet insightful, interview Kalmikoff describes how their fundamental strategy of enabling “customer co-creation” has created a multi-million dollar retailer that sells 80 to 90 thousand t-shirts per month. Much of the success of brands like Threadless.com, is owed to the fact that when customers are co-authors of a brand, the brand stays relevant to its customers. The brand is continuously reinvented by the evolving culture of the community that supports it.