Unquestionably great, but is it the future?

The guys behind Threadless — the community-driven t-shirt design site — have been profiled in a cover story for Inc. magazine. The general sentiment: that Threadless is on the vanguard of a movement that will fundamentally change the way businesses operate and, ultimately, thrive.

Maybe.

If we’re talking about the core idea behind Threadless — a company that makes its customers an integral part of the process and uses the idea of community as its compass — then it’s absolutely true. But I think another, equally interesting, article could be written about how Threadless reflects some of the inherent difficulties of navigating new media.

I was an early user of Threadless. Not early in terms of “at launch”, but early in the sense that I was around when the first wave of popularity hit. I submitted some designs of my own and spent hours scoring others’ designs. Threadless was then and remains a brilliant idea. Even so, I eventually moved on.

Why? The whole thing became a little too cool.

Communities — whether online or on the ground — develop for a lot of different reasons, one of the main ones being a shared sense of being part of something interesting and different. The problem is that it’s all too easy for that to sense of belonging to become a sense of excluding.

The Threadless article actually touches on this, and in their case it seems to have worked out just fine. They’ve managed to stay cool while still growing and adapting. So far, so good.

But here’s the question: is a business built on being cool sustainable? Maybe it is for Threadless, or maybe (and this is my guess) they’ll eventually evolve. But the question itself highlights what I think will be a key challenge going forward as businesses adapt to new media. It’s not a matter of just going online and “starting a community.” It takes time, it takes sensitivity, and you have to be very careful. And — this ought to be obvious but I wonder if it is — it takes knowing what you want.

A lot of people are going to learn this the hard way over the next few years.