The Future Is Now

In 1999 an idea was hatched that eventually became a phenom!  Three kids were thinking of a way to give their geek buddies an opportunity to see their artwork, their creativity, become real.  Thus began, Threadless from an investment of $1,000 to creating the #9 internet millionaire under 30!  This concept is known as Web 2.0 and represents a totally new consumer centric business model.  Of course they have now branched out to kids clothing and a really new concept called Naked & Angry. 

They have also spawned a whole new industry with companies such as Cafe Press, Rhetoric Tees, Zazzle, and Design By Humans, to name a few.

Now, the concept of consumer centric or democratic consumerism has taken a tremendous step forward with companies such as Mod Cloth and Bonobos one of which recently received 21 million dollars and the other 18 million dollars in venture capital financing.  Based upon what I know of what returns Venture Capital firms anticipate they expect these two companies to generate roughly 1.6 Billion Dollars in annual sales in roughly 5 to 7 years! 

Web 2.0 is basically the trend associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the world wide web.  A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mash ups, and folksonomies.

A Consumer Centric business model is actually where what is produced for consumer consumption is created by and or dictated by consumers:  The consumer becomes the company!  Now, a kid with only a high school education is a millionaire who finds himself giving lectures at business graduate schools!