Nestled in a second-floor warehouse space amid meatpacking plants and feet from an elevated train track in Chicago's gritty West Loop, an entrepreneurial company that built its business on creating a novel way for businesses to design materials is launching a new initiative—competitive bidding for promotional copy writing.

What the company, crowdSPRING LLC, is attempting to do is akin to creating an eBay for creative work. The firm bills itself as an online marketplace for graphic and industrial designs. When Barilla needed a new pasta shape and LG needed a phone design, they went to crowdSPRING. And the company has helped hundreds of small businesses buy professional designs, in many cases for hundreds instead of thousands of dollars.

This week, the three-year-old company expands into copy writing. To find artists and writers, companies simply post their jobs at www.crowdspring.com and wait for creative types from around the world to respond. Businesses offer awards anywhere from $100 to tens of thousands for top entries (a 15 percent commission is paid to crowdSPRING).

"It doesn't matter who you are. Great ideas can come from anywhere," says co-founder Ross Kimbarovsky, 39.

Case in point: When crowdSPRING was preparing to launch in 2007, it needed a logo. So it put the job out to competition. The winner was a janitor from Canada.

"This is the purest form of capitalism," says David Bigelow, CEO of Indianapolis-based Simplified Logic Inc. Bigelow, 40, used crowdSPRING for two separate jobs for his software-licensing company, paying a total of $1,400 plus commission. That's far less than he'd pay for a graphic design shop to do the work, he says.

But price isn't the only motivator for Bigelow. When he asked for a logo that said "American boldness with European sexy," he got exactly what he was looking for.

Target Customer: Small Business

Kimbarovsky says outsourcing sites like Guru.com or Elance.com can offer rock-bottom prices for design work, tech support, and other business needs, often attracting work from India. What crowdSPRING tries to do with its 49,000 designers from 170 countries is provide the same quality of work that would cost businesses thousands of dollars through professional firms.

The company's business model is based on crowdsourcing, a term coined by Wired magazine in 2006 to describe a new type of outsourcing. It draws on a wide network of people who do freelance work. Companies like photo supplier iStockphoto pioneered the idea. (Portfolio.com is a client of iStockphoto.)

About 90 percent of crowdSPRING's projects are logo and graphic design jobs for small and large companies. In all, 8,300 projects have been completed for startups, small businesses, and some of the world's largest companies. The company even helped Judas Priest design a tour poster for $500.

The model created by crowdSPRING empowers small businesses to find professional design that they may not have access to unless they spends thousands of dollars, something many small operators and entrepreneurs certainly don't have. A crowdsourced job can be had for hundreds of dollars instead.

"The smaller you are, the more difficult it is to afford services," Kimbarovsky says.

He and partner Mike Samson, 50, discovered this as they researched outsourcing and crowdsourcing prior to launching the company.

CrowdSPRING was started with $3 million raised from 16 Chicagoans, or what Kimbarovsky calls "nontraditional angel investors." None of them are disclosed. Revenue is in the single millions, and the company expects to be profitable by the middle of this year, Kimbarovsky says.