Bad at Sports Episode 903: Jake Nickell & Lance Curran of Threadless

Bad at Sports

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller cruise their way into a murder mansion fever dream with Jake Nickell and Lance Curran, two of the minds behind Threadless—the Chicago-based t-shirt empire that helped invent crowdsourced artwear before we’d marketed terms like “creator economy” or “drop ship.”

What begins as a nostalgia trip (setting the stage for how the business developed through DIY screenprinting and forum culture) quickly becomes a deep dive into ethics, art careers, AI disruption, licensing chaos, and why having your work sold in Hot Topic definitely still counts as making it.

We unpack:

• The founding of Threadless on a secret art/code forum

• Shifting from screen printing to digital on-demand

• Working with artists, bands, and comic book creators

• Parody vs. IP theft (and WTF the DMCA is)

• Building safety and anti-hate moderation into a global platform

• Why Chicago still rules

• And why Punch Nazis continues to be a top seller

Along the way, we also discuss vending machines, Karl Marx, Cheetos, the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, and what happens when art school turns into a startup.

And, importantly, how capitalism can be leveraged using Foucauldian power for artists—rather than for their subjugation.

Jake Nickell is the founder of Threadless, and a pioneer in crowdsourced design and artist-first merchandise models. He started Threadless in 2000 while still in art school.

Lance Curran is the VIP Accounts Director at Threadless, a longtime champion of artist partnerships, muralist collaborations, and weird comic book projects. He joined the company in 2005 and once described the warehouse as “the Foot Clan layer from Ninja Turtles.”

Names Dropped:

• Jake Nickell
• Lance Curran
• Threadless
• Tony Moore
• The Walking Dead
• Hot Topic
• Hope for the Day
• The Trevor Project
• Redbox
• Columbia College Chicago
• Four Seasons Total Landscaping
• Nathan Fielder
• Disney
• Warner Bros.
• Universal Studios
• Marvel
• Harvard Business School Case Study on Threadless
• Silicon Valley
• Chicago Art Scene