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Ever wonder if you could be a fashion designer, a producer, a marketer, a sales forecaster? At Threadless.com you can do all these through proving you’ve got the talent worthy of one of their T-shirts. Underneath this design savvy website, is a new type of business model sure to catch the eye of marketers.

The concept is simple. Create a T-shirt design and upload it to Threadless. Once posted, visitors and members of this social network community will score your design on a scale from 0 to 5. Then, every week about ten designs are selected for actual production. If you’re one of those lucky ten you’ll receive about $2,000 dollars (cash), a gift certificate to the website, additional money if they reprint your design and the pride of knowing you may just run into someone wearing your design.

The Threadless phenomenon reaches beyond just voting for T-shirt designs. The site also hosts blogs, Threadless TV, and interviews with designers. Interestingly, this company’s following and successes are still masked in mystery. The company has never advertised, nor does it employ professional designers, modeling agencies or fashion photographers. As result, costs are kept very low. Plus, since virtual community members have indicated precisely which T-shirts to make, every product is pretty much guaranteed to sell out.

The Threadless.com business model is built around the idea that an online community can drive the very innovation needed for success.  Whether it’s called user innovation, crowdsourcing, or open source, it shows the impact of drastically rethinking one’s relationship with customers.

Harvard Business School professor Karim Lakhani sums it up best:  “Threadless completely blurs that line of who is a producer and who is a consumer. The customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting. All that has been distributed.”

Threadless.com is giving a whole new meaning to the adage, “The customer is king.”