MSCHF: The company that creates chaos

MSCHF is a relatively new “company” who seem to upend every traditional stereotype about what a company is.

Jack Harris, Online Copy Editor and Arts Editor|November 19, 2020

In May of 2019, a 2008 Blue Samsung Netbook running Windows XP SP3, was sold for $1.35 million. The reason for this high price on an obsolete laptop? It contained six of the most powerful computer viruses ever developed, viruses that combined to cause $95 billion in damages. The buyer of this laptop? Who knows. But the seller, the seller was a new company by the name of MSCHF, which is exactly what they set out to cause.

“

MSCHF has managed to give a company a personality.

— Jack Harris '22

The way MSCHF operates is similar to luxury clothing lines, like Supreme or Gucci. Every few weeks they drop a new “thing.” This thing could be literally anything. Past examples include a collar that translates your dog’s barks into profanities or an AI software that autogenerates pictures of feet. The company’s only LinkedIn post is a five-word sentence that reads “We are a dairy company.” Besides this Linkedin profile the company has virtually zero social media, and the only way to stay up to date with the company is through their app or their website.

After discovering MSCHF, there’s a question everyone wonders at some point: “Who made this company and why?” Well believe it or not there are real people behind the company, 10 employees to be exact, plus founder and CEO Gabriel Whaley. The company runs out of Phoenix, AZ, and was founded in 2016. The goal of the company is two things, according to Whaley. Nihilism and mischief. They don’t want to make the world a better place. They want everyone to know how much the world sucks.

“

After discovering MSCHF, there’s a question everyone wonders at some point: ‘Who made this company and why?’

— Jack Harris '22

MSCHF thrives off of attention. The company doesn’t run advertisements, so they need to be memorable and relevant to succeed. They have several different methods to do this.

1: Appeal to the internet: MSCHF always makes sure to stay ahead of trends and appeal to internet culture so that people like them.

2: Exclusivity: MSCHF has new drops every two weeks, on the second and fourth Monday of the month. Often these drops are highly exclusive, such as Jesus Shoes, tennis shoes containing water from the river Jordan that allow you to literally walk on water. Only a few thousand of these shoes were made and they sold out in minutes. Another way MSCHF feeds the flames of exclusivity is through early access to drops and secret drops. Secret drops are randomly given to a random number of app users, who are then the only people with access to them. Early access to drops involves a secretive process that only the company itself has true knowledge of.

3: Brand popularity: MSCHF has managed to give a company a personality, and an extremely likable personality at that. The complete lack of pattern but a high concentration of quality in their drops leads to people becoming fans of MSCHF, not the products they make. This allows the company to do whatever chaotic thing they want.

4: Not caring: Whaley has made very clear in interviews that he does not care about making money (although they have no trouble with that) or even being a company, saying in an interview with Business Insider, “Being a company kills the magic. We’re trying to do stuff that the world can’t even define.”

MSCHF is a company for everyone, with many of their drops being completely free, or even giving money away. They intend to give the finger to the status quo and enjoy doing it. MSCHF isn’t going anywhere either. They have drops planned as far in the future as September 2021, and who knows what they have in store. Whaley did make one promise about MSCHF’s future drops in an interview, “Nothing is safe.”