Today Thread­less announced a US$9 sale on all tshirts in their cat­a­logue. With just over a mil­lion fol­low­ers sud­denly hit­ting their web­site it quickly imploded. Vis­i­tors to the home­page got this message:

I have to say it’s one of the bet­ter “down for main­te­nance” mes­sages I’ve seen. It’s not the generic 401/501 error page. Thread­less had gone to the trou­ble of using exist­ing site ele­ments (the check­out trol­ley and type­face) to build this page. This  showed me that the prob­lem wasn’t overly crit­i­cal (the server infra­struc­ture wasn’t on fire) and that it was some­thing they could recover from.

The mes­sage is hon­est and apolo­getic. It reads like it was writ­ten by an actual human being.

While they worked on the prob­lems, Thread­less also kept their Twit­ter fol­low­ers up to date with infor­ma­tive, yet humor­ous mes­sages.

If all com­pa­nies were like that I think the world would be a far bet­ter place.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 8:15 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.