Most fashion companies rely on long-term cash cows. But that's not the strategy that appeals to Brooklyn-based iconoclast MSCHF (pronounced Mischief), known for selling the controversial Nike Air Max 97 Satan Shoes with human blood in the soles.
MSCHF, which the New York Times called the Internet's Banksy, doesn't see itself as a fashion or shoe company, but as an art collective. Since 2014, it has been causing a stir on the Internet with its bold and revolutionary products, such as the mobile endurance game with YouTuber MrBeast, called Finger on the appwhich in its last edition offered $100,000 to the last player to touch the screen, to an iPhone locked with celebrity phone numbers, sold for $25,000.
Recently, the brand has launched new fashion projects, like its $650 Global Supply Chain Telephone handbag, a mashup of recognizable silhouettes from Hermès, Céline, Dior and Balenciaga. Last month, it launched a $250 sneaker collaboration with Acronym, a Berlin-based avant-garde tech apparel brand coveted by streetwear aficionados.
Gabe Whaley, MSCHF’s founder and executive director, sees fashion as an attractive new canvas for his artistic practice. It naturally appeals to a broader, more mainstream audience, making these projects eminently more visible than others, says Whaley, who sometimes speaks in conceptual terms, leaving plenty of room for interpretation.
Fashion is a great space to play because people have a complicated relationship with it. [it]he continues. On the one hand, its symbol, on the other, its usefulness. Our path forward really depends on our ability to blur the lines between the two.
Rather than following the classic retail strategy of creating a product that can be sold forever, MSCHF thrives on business unpredictability. “If things are going well on paper, financially speaking, that doesn’t mean we’re going to keep selling it,” Whaley says.
Lukas Bentel, founding member and co-creative director, adds: “In a way, it’s more predictable to be so unpredictable rather than just focusing on one product or one type of category. We can change direction very quickly.”
While unorthodox for business growth, this approach gives MSCHF the freedom to generate new ideas that grab people’s attention. It doesn’t rely on tactics like performance marketing or shooting ad campaigns to sell its products. People think MSCHF has a secret sauce for marketing, says Kevin Wiesner, another founding member and co-creative director. You have to start with a product that’s interesting enough that people want to be interested in it.
MSCHF’s creations tend to comment on the absurdity of consumer culture. Often, the fashion items are cool pastiches of iconic brand symbols, a visual feature of the internet’s remix culture that runs afoul of copyright laws. Then they just let the internet do its thing.
This has sometimes caused problems. In 2021, MSCHF was sued by Nike for copyright infringement after selling 666 pairs of Satan Shoes, which used Air Max 97s as part of its collaboration with rapper Lil Nas X. They retailed for $1,018 each, an allusion to Luke 10:18 in the Bible, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” which was printed on them. The shoes’ air-bubble soles contained drops of human blood, allegedly from MSCHF employees. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court, and MSCHF agreed to refund those who wanted to return the shoes. Some pairs have been listed for as much as $15,000 on resale sites like eBay.
Our projects always start with a concept, Wiesner explains. But then there are a few [product] “We created categories that lend themselves to being vectors for these concepts. Whatever the outcome, we try to use different aesthetic languages so that the objects tell a specific story,” Bentel adds.
Over the past five years, many of the limited-edition products (some timeless) offered every two weeks on its website have gone viral. From $48,000 Birkenstocks made from deconstructed leather from Hermès Birkin bags in 2021 to $48 perfumes in 2023 that smelled like WD-40 industrial lubricant, MSCHF products sell out quickly, often in less than a minute.
Last year, his $350 injection-molded Astro Boy-inspired Big Red Boot, worn by everyone from suburban high schoolers to NBA players like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and rapper Doja Cat, racked up more than 100,000 orders on its first day, according to Whaley. Other items have sold in similar quantities but over a longer period of time, either through different editions or colorways.
While MSCHF has declined to disclose specific revenue figures, its irreverence has attracted blue-chip investors and art galleries. Between 2019 and 2020, it raised more than $11.5 million in three funding rounds from investors and family offices. While it does engage in marketing collaborations, such as its 2022 partnership with Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, MSCHF primarily makes money selling its own products and artwork, according to Whaley. Revenue has been growing 100% annually since 2019.
MSCHF’s founding members met in the 2010s, during New York’s golden age of internet creativity, when venture capital was abundant for e-commerce startups and digitally native creatives like artist Ryder Ripps, marketing agency K-Hole (famous for coining the term normcore), and DIS.
The latter two were creative heroes to Wiesner and Bentel, who were part of New INC, the New Museum-run incubator for cutting-edge internet and art projects. They met Whaley, a former BuzzFeed employee and West Point alumnus, through mutual friends and hit it off immediately. “We were either going to be adversaries or very complementary,” Whaley says.
In 2014, Whaley began publishing work under the name Miscellaneous MSCHF. He then began working on projects with Stephen Tetreault, now the company’s COO, and Ramdane Sennoun, now its CTO. But in 2019, Whaley, Tetreault, Wiesner, Bentel, and Sennoun solidified their partnerships as founding members and set a goal of raising $3 million in seed funding (and they succeeded).
The MSCHF is currently planning an art exhibition in New York in September, following well-attended exhibitions at the Daelim Museum in Seoul in 2023 and the Perrotin Gallery in Los Angeles earlier this summer. In Los Angeles, 4,000 people attended the opening, braving a two-hour wait to get into the gallery.
“It’s not easy to reach so many people like that,” says Emmanuel Perrotin, owner of Perrotin, which represents MSCHF as well as artists such as Takashi Murakami, Daniel Arsham and Maurizio Cattelan, who have also worked with fashion brands. Perrotin describes MSCHF as a Cattelan for the digital generation. They’re creative on the products, but also creative on the communication around the products, he says.
This is the branding model of the future, agrees Azelle Rose Harris, founder of marketing consultancy Maia Agency. It avoids all those unnecessary and soon-to-be-automated marketing tactics that are part of a complicated journey to convince someone to buy, instead creating something so interesting that they want to be a part of it.
The more recognized the company is, the more tempted it is to get sucked in and play by the existing rules of the game. That’s the most natural gravitation of all, Whaley says. But we just remember that MSCHF is this Trojan horse that quickly infiltrates a space, disrupts it, and leaves.
True to his rule-breaking ethic, no one knows what he will do next.
Discover our latest stories first @financialtimesfashion on Instagram and subscribe to our podcast Life and art wherever you listen
