A WD-40 cologne. Nike Air Max sneakers filled with blood. A Fruit Loop as big as your head. Everywhere I turn in this garage that’s been half converted into an office, I see objects that look like they belong in a Hot Topic managed by a MoMA curator on acid.
I’m perched on one of three couches, which appear to have been rescued from the curb to form a conversation pit. Around me are piles of stickers, gallons of chemicals, a power sander, and a shop vac. To my left, a few glass conference rooms hint at more grown-up endeavors. A hand-drawn sign is taped to one of them: rat loose inside! keep this door closed! The door stands casually ajar. At Mschf, it’s hard to tell where the joke ends and the truth begins.
Over the past six years, the Williamsburg, Brooklyn–based art collective has captured the cultural zeitgeist with its twice-monthly “product” drops that light up the internet with their ingenuity—and get people to spend.
The 30-person studio is probably best known for its Big Red Boot, which went on sale—and quickly took over social media—in February 2023. That comical Astro Boy–style shoe is part of the group’s growing collection of nose-thumbing, limited-edition footwear, which includes Lil Nas X “Satan Shoes” (the aforementioned Nike Air Max), a Reebok covered in nine of the shoe brand’s inflating pumps, and a Gobstomper sneaker coated in layers of colored material that wear down over time. But Mschf is also renowned for its cunning digital projects, which frequently bend and twist other companies’ intellectual property, such as a crowdsourced take on piracy that challenged fans to remake Bee Movie, a 2007 animated classic, by redrawing it one frame at a time. The collective, which is represented by the Perrotin gallery, produces museum-worthy pieces, too: a Boston Dynamics robot dog that’s been armed to the hilt with automatic rifles (Spot’s Revenge); a hand-forged steel sword that’s made from guns crowdsourced from Mschf’s Guns 2 Swords website; a working ATM topped with a digital leaderboard that displays users’ faces and ranks their bank balances. With its steady stream of releases, Mschf offers the commentary of Duchamp’s Readymades, mass-produced like Warhol’s screen prints, and disseminated through 21st-century light-speed social channels.
Mschf’s projects regularly go viral, often sell out, and are resold for increasing dollar amounts. But true fans understand that getting the next Mschf drop—be it shoes, fashion, sculptures, or digital art—is less about the products than it is about participating in a larger idea that’s being hatched one participatory scheme at a time. That’s why cofounder Kevin Wiesner often calls Mschf a “performance art project,” not a company. Even so, according to CEO Gabe Whaley, Mschf generates eight figures in annual revenue and is profitable “when it wants to be.”
Mschf’s admirers range from Doja Cat, Spike Lee, and Tony Fadell, to the half dozen VC firms that have invested more than $24 million in the company, to countless brand and marketing agencies that look to it for cues. “My whole job, and my whole existence, is to come up with a new idea and a new way of saying something,” says Ruba Abu-Nimah, the executive creative director for the Italian fashion house Moncler. “That’s why I find Mschf so brilliant, because they emerged with this whole new concept of how to say a lot of things in very simple ways.”
As Mschf has raised the bar for consumerist absurdity through products like the Global Supply Chain Telephone Handbag—a Frankensteinian bag produced by knockoff purse factories in four countries that cloned a Birkin then mashed that design up with ones from Celine, Dior, and Balenciaga—other brands have tried to get in the game with their own creations. Pringles and Crocs, for example, recently collabed on a resin boot with a holder around the ankle that fits a can of chips, “to snack on the go.”
But Mschf sees these as stunts, not competition. “You see people say, ‘It’s just like a Mschf project’ because it has the one-sentence description that really bangs and goes viral, but it almost never has layers beyond that,” says cofounder Lukas Bentel, who serves as co-creative director alongside Wiesner. “It’s purely the vehicle without the criticality attached.”
Poking at business and culture has made Mschf some enemies. Over the years, it’s faced cease-and-desist letters from Grubhub, the Motion Picture Association, Boston Dynamics (twice), Chanel, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s, Michelin, and Hybe. It’s been sued by Nike and recently lost a lawsuit brought by VF Corp., the parent group of Vans, over the Wavy Baby sneaker, Mschf’s contorted take on a Vans Old Skool. Mschf has ducked and weaved around these legal actions. It obliged a handful, ignored some, and turned others into the centerpiece of new Mschf drops. All the while, it’s proven its skill at deconstructing and reconstructing the objects and systems of capitalism toward its own ends. “We’ve infiltrated every space,” says Whaley.
Today, Mschf has fans (and haters) waiting to see if it can live up to expectations, and investors and collectors banking on it to grow. It’s facing a classic business challenge, but one that’s particularly existential for an artistic endeavor: How do you expand but stay true to your ethos? “It’s the perfect place to be in, but it’s the most precarious spot to be in,” says Whaley. “If we dumb [the art] down and embrace the institution, it seems like there’s a stable path toward sustainability, profitability, growth, all of that. But that’s in direct opposition to why we’re even here.”
Mschf was just a year old and about to go under. The collective was supposed to be disrupting marketing by day in order to fund art projects by night. Instead, in spring 2019, Mschf was weeks away from running out of money.
The cofounders had met two years earlier, introduced through a mutual friend. At the time, Bentel and Wiesner were freelance digital marketers who were gaining a reputation for spinning out pseudo-businesses online, such as BiteLabs, which promised to clone the tissue of famous people to create artisanal charcuterie. Whaley, meanwhile, ran a nascent studio that created playful digital products for brands like Casper and used the rest of his time to release online provocations like Infinite Text in Progress, a viral iMessage prank that used blinking dots to make your friends think you were always . . . writing . . . them a text. All three were struggling financially and creatively. Eventually, they combined their fledgling agencies under the banner of Mschf.
The art went well. Their first collaboration, “Times Newer Roman,” was an open-source typeface that widened the letters of the popular font to subtly stretch student papers. But though it gained attention online, this kind of work didn’t bring in enough clients to be sustainable. The cofounders had a meeting to discuss their options. Then Whaley remembered something he’d come across earlier in his career: venture capital.
From his experience with direct-to-consumer companies, he saw how these operations spent a majority of their funds on marketing. If you wanted to sell mattresses, you bought ads on Facebook and Instagram. The DTC startup, as he saw it, was really like a pass-through for VC money before it went to Facebook. “I was like, well, maybe I can do it so that none of that money goes to Facebook,” Whaley recalls. “Maybe we’re able to build the brand through organic virality, without a cost of acquisition.” Mschf’s cofounders had already proven that they could command eyeballs. All they needed was capital to make products.
Whaley set up some meetings, telling his cofounders, “I don’t know who these people are, but let’s just see.” A few weeks later, he returned with $3.5 million from Canaan Partners and Comcast’s now-defunct venture arm. Then Mschf set out to release a project every two weeks. Nothing too precious. Just create.
That September, the team went down the street and bought a few pairs of Nike Air Max 97 Triple Whites. They got a hospital syringe and injected water into the Air bubble; it looked pretty good. But what if they dyed the water blue to be more noticeable? What if that water was sacred and from the Jordan River (orderable on Amazon!)? What if the shoe had a cross amulet (also orderable on Amazon!)? What if they added stickers, like one quoting Matthew 14:25, where Jesus walks on water? What if they only sold 12 pairs, for the 12 apostles, and charged $1,425 as a nod to the Bible verse? Behold, the Jesus Shoe. In the era of peak hypebeast, it was the holiest of holies, a sneaker that literally let you walk on water.
The night before the shoe went on sale, Whaley’s phone started lighting up. People were messaging him about this shoe that hadn’t even been seen by the public. The popular resale site StockX had pulled a shot from Mschf’s site and put it online, teasing the launch.
The Jesus Shoe sold out the next day. But people kept coming to Mschf’s site. For the next few days, as the shoe left the internet and became the talk of late-night TV, the team scoured New York City for every Air Max 97 Triple White they could find. They scared up 60 pairs, which would equate to $85,500 in revenue. Three days later, Jesus “rose again” on Mschf’s site. Whaley watched on Shopify as the shoes instantly sold out. Then time slowed in his mind: Instead of halting sales when the inventory ran out, he sold more shoes. And more. Then he snapped to, closed out sales, and slammed his laptop shut.
“I looked at the guys and said, ‘We just sold 700 pairs. We made a million dollars in 30 seconds,’ ” recalls Whaley. At 11:30 in the morning, the trio walked to a nearby bar and drank for an hour in silence. When they returned to the office, they frantically hopped on their phones, throwing credit cards across the room. Because they needed to source hundreds of Nikes, immediately.
In the wake of the shoe’s success, Whaley took half a step back from the creative output to focus on operations, taking the title of CEO. Mschf quickly began to grow. It added new talent, like Josh Wardle, the Welsh programmer who had created Wordle. Three former employees of the now-defunct crowdsourced hardware startup Quirky joined, helping Mschf churn out all manner of products quickly. John Belcaster, who started his career interning for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, came aboard as general counsel—a key position for an organization that regularly turns companies’ IP into a punch line.
Today, the team consists of art school grads, designers, engineers, footwear specialists, and creative technologists. The result is a studio that’s mastered global production of just about any idea. As Mschf’s stature has grown, brands from Fenty to Tiffany & Co. have sought it out for collabs, looking for a pinch of its viral pixie dust. And Mschf has infiltrated the high-art world, first with a show at Perrotin’s New York gallery in 2022, with pieces reportedly priced between $25 and $150,000. (The show is currently in Los Angeles.) Mschf also launched its first museum retrospective in Seoul in late 2023.
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The venture capital firm Founders Fund is known for backing Silicon Valley mainstays like Facebook and Airbnb, along with surveillance giant Palantir and defense tech startup and military drone maker Anduril. But in 2019, under the recommendation of partner Trae Stephens, it was preparing to make an unorthodox investment: putting $6 million into Mschf, becoming its largest backer to date.
Stephens was a Mschf enthusiast. He admired its drops and its ability to electrify a crowd. Plus, he likes collectibles. (His desk in his New York office sports a Kaws statue holding a dead Grover.) There was just one hitch: The Founders Fund team wasn’t sure if Mschf was pranking it. So Stephens called up Whaley. “I have the team here, and we just need to know: Are we being played here? Are we part of a scam?” Stephens recalls asking.
Whaley’s response? “I can’t tell you.”
“That was just to fuck with them,” says Whaley, laughing. Mschf would continue “fucking with” Founders Fund after it became an investor. In 2021, as part of a drop, Mschf cloned Anduril’s employee ID badge, putting Anduril’s IT team into a panic.
“Mschf has trolled our portfolio companies,” says Stephens. “Gabe doesn’t even bother to check, which is great. It’s how important irreverence is to what they do.” Stephens, who cofounded Anduril, says that he especially admires Mschf’s war-ready Boston Dynamics robot dog: “It’s funny and a societal critique in a way that’s art.”
Today, half a dozen other VC firms have collectively bet at least $24 million on Mschf (that figure excludes two fundraising rounds for undisclosed amounts). Most appear to be involved, first and foremost, as a way to get in on the fun. But they also see value in an entity that understands modern culture so innately. “They are able to capture the interest and attention of wide demographics of customers, and ultimately, do that sustainably and repeatedly,” says Atul Joshi, founder of Raga Partners and an early investor in Peloton.
Such faith is necessary, since creating a conventional financial model out of Mschf may be nearly impossible. For one thing, there’s its constant rule breaking: To ensure it can push boundaries, Mschf relies on general counsel Belcaster to assess concepts for legal risk. For one particularly worrisome project—which veered beyond IP infringement into criminal territory—Belcaster ran a Bayesian analysis and provided Mschf with a numerical assessment of risk to the company. While he says the “odds were better than a coin flip” in Mschf’s direction, he was relieved when the team voted to scuttle the project. (Belcaster says he’s given Mschf one “hall pass” for a high-risk project, but Whaley has yet to cash in.)
While many of Mschf’s drops lose money, certain projects have coalesced into their own categories, offering some business predictability: sneakers, streetwear and luxury fashion (Mschf’s biggest moneymakers), collectibles, novelty items, and, more recently, blue-chip art. “We’ve built a good system and process around manufacturing fashion and footwear,” says Whaley, “not just the making [of products], but the distribution, too.” He’s now focused on bringing this process to Mschf’s other product categories—and blurring the lines between them all.
As Mschf grows, Whaley plays point person to investors and keeps constant tabs on sales. “Someone needs to do the dirty work,” he says. “And maybe I can be that businessperson who so fundamentally understands what we’re trying to do creatively that I design a system that complements it.” He curls his lip at some of Mschf’s past work, even when successful. He still views the company’s biggest financial windfall—its cartoonish $350 Big Red Boot—as a missed opportunity. It was too viral. A project that got so big, so fast that it became a spectacle rather than a cultural object.
Though Mschf won’t disclose how many Big Red Boots it sold, it only needed 2,900 to clear $1 million. It’s easy to see why, over an 18-month span starting in late 2022, Mschf dropped eight sneakers, ranging from $145 to $450. Its prices often creep into high-fashion territory, as with its Global Supply Chain Telephone Handbag ($600). But it continually offers less expensive drops, too. In 2024, it sold 2,000 mystery keys priced at $12 apiece (totaling $24,000), followed by 450 mystery boxes priced at $50 ($22,500)—despite providing no explanation of what the keys were for and what the boxes held. Whaley says the business is simple: “We make a thing, and then someone buys it. It’s pretty straightforward.” What’s trickier is not getting too commercial and staying culturally savvy, so Mschf can do that again and again and again.
Ask investors about Mschf’s long-term play, and they offer a range of suggestions. Is Mschf the next Supreme, as Stephens suggests? Could it be a billion-dollar brand, as another investor, Andy Weissman, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, speculates? Bentel and Wiesner shiver at the suggestions, while noting that Mschf, which has no official logo, isn’t even much of a brand. Might Mschf go public one day? Hmm . . . the cofounders enjoy toying with this idea, but not in the traditional sense.
“We play a lot with the idea of the financial transaction as a participatory performance art. Going public is just like a really grand scale of that,” muses Whaley. “That might be how Mschf dies, though—but that would be a pretty glorious ending.”