User ratingUser rating
Get the white paper!
Real People, Real Results: Why authenticity trumps AI on TikTok, Instagram, and beyond
Case study
Threadless
Threadless

The Threadless Playbook: Data-driven Creativity

Paid social
The Threadless Playbook: Data-driven Creativity

Big Demand for Content with Limited Bandwidth

At Chicago-based Threadless, a company that offers a catalog and marketplace platform on which artists and designers create UGC-driven online shops to sell their apparel, the team requires the resources to handle data for what can be millions of creative designs. “We’ve got just under 40 people total,” said Elizabeth Schmidt, its Digital Marketing Director. “My team is the creative team and marketing team, and we have one graphic designer and one art director and one photographer. So it’s not like we have a lot to work with, and we’re all human, and we can only do so much.”

Across all those instances, they do have a notable advantage.

 

various diverse people wearing threadless branded face masks

Build Content that Works by Gathering Feedback

“All the artist-shop data, sales data — all marketplace sales data and all Threadless catalog sales data over the last two years — we’re constantly looking at that data, and it’s generating recommendations of what we should do and where the opportunities exist,” Schmidt said. “So it’s basically been our playbook for what we need to do and what things we need to launch.”

The process that Schmidt is referring to there is what we at Cohley call the feedback loop. The feedback loop is the ongoing process that our most successful clients follow and it bears a striking (and intentional) resemblance to the Scientific Method. For us, it looks a little something like this:

  1. Generate content
  2. Activate that content across digital channels
  3. Measure results
  4. Use insights acquired from the measurement stage to inform ongoing content decisions
  5. Rinse & repeat

"We’re constantly looking at that data, and it’s generating recommendations of what we should do and where the opportunities exist."

Elizabeth Schmidt
Digital Marketing Director