Death of a Slack Room

The following was posted to our Cotton Bureau Slack room just a few minutes ago.

Attention @everyone: We’ve made the difficult decision to terminate Cotton Bureau Slack effective Friday, July 17th, 2:00 PM EDT.

Why?

First and foremost, the team here hasn’t had enough time to give you all adequate attention. We pushed Cotton Bureau Slack out into the world as an (admittedly hasty) experiment. We thought people with a shared love of high-quality t-shirt design might like to come together. In many ways, it exceeded our expectations. Hundreds of you all signed up the first few days and had some pretty lively back-and-forths. Since then we’ve been privileged to share in your conversations around design and life in general. Our biggest regret is seeing #submissions go along with the rest of the chat. We loved watching you helping each other make your submissions better. The real-time feedback and modification loop was incredible. It’s a shame to have to kill Slack, but we need to be honest with ourselves and with you: the spark we saw that first week failed to become a community large enough to sustain itself. And that’s okay. You all can keep talking to one another on Twitter and Dribbble where you won’t be hampered by a 10,000 message limit (though you will be hampered by a 140 character limit). Of course if you need help, you can always reach out to us on Twitter at @cottonbureau or by email at us@cottonbureau.com. Operators (Sara and Jay) are standing by.

This announcement is most likely coming as a shock to you, so we’ll give you a few days to say your goodbyes, but on Friday at 2 PM the lights go out. Making tough choices about where to spend the limited time we have is one of the things we like to think we do best. It’s what lets us pour ourselves into the features we do choose. We promise shutting down Slack will give us the breathing room we need to bring you something even better.

It was fun while it lasted, Slackers. Now get back to work.