Since Charlie and Craig haven't introduced themselves yet, I thought I'd do so myself.

Craig has been with us for about 3 years now and manages a lot of the day to day Threadless tasks. Particularly printing up new tees and interfacing with the winning designers. Craig has an awesome video website that I made for him with a lot of videos from around the office that you should check out: craigshimala.com

Charlie used to ship packages for us and now he does all of our podcasts. He's also going to be helping with filming videos for new tee shirts when the new Threadless site comes out.

They are both pictured below. Charlie is on the left, Craig on the right.

Part 3: Structure.

I think i was avoiding writing this last part due to the fact that we are all still learning how to do podcasting without sounding like idiots – and for anyone who has heard us – we still sound like idiots. So what i am going to do is go through all the tips and structure guidelines Charlie and i have been trying to follow. Of course they are not commandments sent down by Harper the Podcast God. These are just some loose guidelines and hints that Charlie and i both have had great success in using to create our awesome and somewhat insane podcast.

I want to jump right into the form and structure of a podcast. When i think about doing a podcast, a couple things really jump out at me.

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Harper, Jake and Ivan rigged the air vent in Charlie's sound booth to drop over 100 bouncy balls on him with the pull of a string.

Watch the video

Part 2: The studio.

Building the skinnyCorp podcasting studio has been quite a journey. We started out by placing all of our equipment in a low traffic area in the back of our warehouse. It was nice because it wasn't busy and was far away from all the hustle and bustle that was Threadless' christmas sale. However we totally underestimated the mics ability to pick up ambient noise. Man, those first couple podcasts were FULL of ambient noise. We would be recording an interview and while wrapping it up and doing some post work on it – we would end up hearing an entire conversation in between pauses.

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skinnyCorp has been pumping out podcasts for the last couple months and have been getting a little bit of feedback and press. I figured since we are still learning the ropes, making mistakes and building out our studio – it was time that we let yall know how we go about making our podcasts.

As with most things, skinnyCorp does podcasting a little bit differently than maybe another group or person would do podcasting. We may have gotten some things out of order. The first thing we did was get a bunch of equipment, then we built a studio, and then we started to think intelligently about our podcast design and structure.

I will be breaking this up into three parts. Equipment, Studio and then podcast structure and design.

Part 1: The equipment.

Over the past couple months, Charlie and myself have been cobbling together a small easy to set up recording equipment to make podcasting as easy and robust as possible. We started using Apple's GarageBand software, a M-Audio USB interface, a couple of real mics and an Apple iBook. We choose the iBook on the basis of the strengths we saw in GarageBand and the ease we thought it would be to create podcasts. I had a t-amp laying around to use for amplification and Jeffrey had some ghetto studio monitors that we ended up using. Combining all this we were able to get started.

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