Silly Feud of the Year: crowdSpring vs. Threadless vs. “Spec Work is Evil”

There are silly feuds and then there’s the crowdSpring vs. Threadless vs. “Spec Work is Evil.”  At South by SouthWest (SXSW if you’re kewl) panel “Is Spec Work Evil?” a three-way fight occurred.  First, you have all the designers who hate doing speculative work (i.e., you’re basically handing in a project and hoping the client accepts it and pays you) yelling at the designers who managed to get paid by doing spec work.  Second, while it isn’t featured as part of the official video, crowdSpring representatives accused Threadless of being a “work on spec” site and Threadless took great offense to both that and crowdSpring comparing themselves to Threadless.  And then the Internet, especially Twitter, start a great to-do about nothing.

Good lord, what a silly waste of time.  By the numbers:

1. Is Spec Work Evil?

It doesn’t matter.  What matters is whether or not you choose to do it.  There’s a certain amount of spec work involved in submitting a proposal or bidding on a project.  Sometimes, you can get paid a small amount to create a more comprehensive mock-up, sometimes not.  In an ideal world, you have a portfolio, show it to the client and say “do you want to do this or not?”

Bidding/proposals aside, I think we can all agree getting paid is best and a designer is better off avoiding spec work if there’s _any_ other work to be done.

Unfortunately, not every designer has filled up 100% of his/her time.  Some designers are unemployed.  Some designers are recent grads that need portfolios.  These are people where spec work is in their best interests, because they don’t have enough going on, and spec work is a way to try and make something happen.  Begrudging an unemployed designer spec work is a lot like begrudging them food.  It isn’t nice, but they have to eat.

Where does spec work come from?  It comes from businesses.  A business does not want to pay to see something if it doesn’t have to.  A business does not want to pay a heavy fee if it does not have to.  In the case of crowdSpring, not only do businesses get to see 25-75 completed designs, they’re paying a heavily discounted fee, compared to an agency, for the completed project.

This is the point where you’ll hear the argument that businesses aren’t qualified to know what a good design is.  That may or may not be the case, depending on the individual business, but here’s the other edge of that sword.  The business in question may actually prefer a design that doesn’t qualify as “good design” by agency standards.  The thing about crowdsourcing is that it levels the playing field.  The company puts up $200 and takes what they like the best, professional reputation of the designers involved be damned. Yes, if you’re an ex-agency art director in a crowdsourcing bid and lost out to somebody from Outer Mongolia, price wasn’t a factor, they just liked the Mongolian design better.

Are they getting the best designers?  Probably not.  Do they care?  Probably not.

I think the bigger issue here is the comparatively low levels of pay associated with the crowdsourcing model of spec work.  Agencies will put weeks of work into spec work if they’re pitching a multi-million dollar account.  With crowdsourcing, you’re usually talking about fees $1000 and down.  Winning a $500 bid isn’t going to make up for not getting paid on the last 3.

Designers would be better off concerning themselves with paying markets.  Spec work has always been there (I could tell you about stories about Fortune 1000s abusing the proposal process, this isn’t just ma & pa storefronts).  Spec work will always be there.  Being able to set the price and get global talent only makes it more attractive to the cost-cutting business.  Accept it and move on to clients who respect you.

I would also venture to say that crowdSpring’s model is as much a contest as spec work.  You’re submitting a design against ~50 people for a client you’ve never interacted with in hopes of winning a contract.  That’s not bidding. Without client interaction it becomes a lottery and you just hope your approach jibes with their taste.

2. Is Threadless a Spec Work Company?

Technically, you submit a design for evaluation by Threadless and the Threadless community and a week or so later you get comments and either $2000 cash for the design or a rejection.  So, yes, that’s the definition of speculative work.  However, that’s entirely missing the point of Threadless.

T-shirts, greeting cards, cartoons for the New Yorker — these are all things that you submit and they’re either accepted or rejected if you’re a freelancer.  Oh, you might pitch some ideas first — if you’re very established –but that isn’t how this type of market works.  Threadless is also a heavily community-based company.  Its community members, the ones who buy the shirts, are commenting on designs and participating in the decision of what gets picked up.  This is, to a reasonably large degree, a community self-selecting its products.  Oh, and $2000 for a t-shirt design isn’t chump change (t-shirt designs on crowdSpring go for $200-$300 on 3/25/09), so I’m pretty sure the respect for designer issue commonly associated with spec work isn’t an issue here.

So technically, what you have with Threadless is a speculative contest that’s a function of its own community to the extent that nobody there really looks at it as speculative work.

3. Are crowdSpring and Threadless Anything Alike?

Um, they’re both in Chicago?  Of course, they’re in very different neighborhoods.

They both have you submit completed work?  That’s fair.

I think crowdSpring is trying to build up a developer community, but I wouldn’t yet compare them on a community basis — Threadless has been at that a lot longer and it isn’t a fair comparison.

Past that, these companies are nothing alike.  Threadless sells t-shirts and crowdSpring is closer to a contest-based contract/temp agency sourcing design for everything from websites to stationery.  Threadless has a specific market for its product and crowdSpring has all sorts of different clients, each with their own sensibility.

Threadless pays you $2000 upfront for a t-shirt design ($2200 if you trade in the gift certificate for cash), whereas looking at crowdSpring’s current listings, they have one instance of $2500 for “Logo AND Stationery” (capitalization is from the site), one instance of $2000 for “Website (uncoded)” and the next highest award is $1400.  Plenty of projects in the $200-$500 range, too.

If your main consideration is money for the work involved, Threadless would seem to be a better and more consistent deal.  Then again crowdSpring has nothing to do with the pricing on its site — that’s all on the clients (see cost-cutting comments above).

No, any similarities between Threadless and crowdSpring are superficial at best.

4. Did Threadless Get Ambushed?

Let’s see… crowdSpring moderator on the panel?  Check.

crowdSpring panelist, in addition to the moderator?  Check.

Prior to this panel, you really didn’t associate “on spec” with Threadless?  Check.

Threadless and crowdSpring seem to be very different types of companies?  Check.

Now maybe crowdSpring innocently thought that Threadless was going to be supportive of spec work, but this strikes me as a manufactured event and a picked fight. Of course this begs the question, had no one at Threadless ever seen an episode of Jerry Springer/Maury/Sally Jesse Raphael where the guest thought they were on for an innocent reason, only to be confronted by their pregnant/gender-reassigned/jilted/angry ex-significant other?

Silly, silly, silly feud.