Entrepreneurs Strive To Turn Buzz Into Loyalty

Some small companies win instant fans, often because their products or services strike a nerve or generate buzz. But turning those followers into loyal customers can be a challenge. Take Threadless.com, an online T-shirt retailer in Chicago, which launched in 2000 and quickly built a following through a simple approach: allow anyone to design a T-shirt and upload it to the site, where people vote for favorites each week and get to buy them. Threadless, a unit of skinnyCorp LLC, has signed up a million registered users on its Web site, and now has about 860,000 Twitter followers and more than 70,000 Facebook fans...