Inside MSCHF, a Company Selling Random Viral Products Like Jesus Shoes

A company called MSCHF just got sued by Nike for selling Lil Nas X's 'Satan shoe.'
MSCHF has quietly been creating some of the most absurd and viral products online.
CEO Gabriel Whaley told Insider the company runs on "structured chaos."

Thanks for signing up!

Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go. download the app

Their only post on LinkedIn refers to themselves as a dairy company. It's probably the best, and only, description you'll ever get of the startup behind AI-generated feet photos, an app for making stock investments based on astrological signs, and, most recently, a "Satan shoe" made with human blood.

Even its CEO and founder isn't sure how to characterize the company.

"A brand of what? I don't know. Being a company kills the magic," Gabriel Whaley told Insider. "We're trying to do stuff that the world can't even define."

Whaley is the founder and CEO of MSCHF, the company that collaborated with Lil Nas X to sell the controversial 'Satan shoe,' a Nike Air Max 97 knockoff said to be made with a single drop of human blood.

Nike sued MSCHF for trademark infringement after the startup sold every pair of "Satan shoes" in less than a minute. A court just approved Nike's request for a temporary restraining order against the startup.

For the past few years, MSCHF has been behind the internet's most viral stunts, stories, and products that have spread throughout the meme-laden, cynical internet community for years.

Their products are meant to poke fun at everything and anything, because MSCHF takes pride in pushing the boundaries.

There's no apparent thread connecting MSCHF's slew of projects: The team has built a browser add-on that disguises your Netflix watching as a conference call, designed a squeaking rubber chicken bong for smoking weed, and created a YouTube channel solely consisting of videos of a man eating everything from a tub of mayonnaise to a photo of Pete Davidson.

But for Whaley, the lack of continuity is the point: As long as the team can figure out the resources to create and launch a product, "nothing is safe."

"Our perspective is everything is funny in a nihilistic sort of way," Whaley said. "We're not here to make the world a better place. We're making light of how much everything sucks."

The Brooklyn-based startup MSCHF is head by a former BuzzFeed employee who describes his employees as 'fans of mischief.'

Insider visited the headquarters of MSCHF in December 2019, located at a nondescript address that blends in among the warehouses peppered throughout Brooklyn's trendy Williamsburg neighborhood. The space is dingy, with cult-classic movie posters on the walls and tables covered in loose papers and partially unpacked MSCHF products. The "conference room" is a tiny loft located up a flight of stairs bearing a sole plastic chair. Whaley is quick to share that the roof leaks when it rains and the heating isn't great, and takes pride in showing off the inside of the single-stall bathroom filled with graffiti and artwork.

Before MSCHF, Whaley was a West Point military academy dropout who was already heralding goofy viral projects on his own, such as an app that was essentially Tinder for airplane travelers. His work landed him a brief stint at BuzzFeed in 2013, but he left after a year when the department he worked in was shut down. He officially launched MSCHF in 2016.

Now, MSCHF is 10 employees strong. They're mostly twenty-somethings — including just one woman, who was hired in 2020 — and Whaley describes them as "fans of mischief." In the four years since founding MSCHF, Whaley hired his team along the way: one employee he found playing soccer in Chinatown, and another he hired by sliding into his DMs.

When a mass shipment of MSCHF's latest product is delivered to the office — a dark $10 toaster bath bomb — all seven employees in the office that day crowd to the center of the warehouse to unpack them and get them ready to be shipped to customers. It's a flurry of activity, a cloud of cardboard boxes and packing materials.

MSCHF CEO and founder Gabe Whaley, right, and creative VP Ben Rosen. MSCHF

The layout of its headquarters is a stark reflection of the MSCHF's unofficial doctrine to adhere to "structured chaos." Daniel Greenberg, MSCHF's head of commerce, flaunted how MSCHF shirks the traditional business model: The MSCHF team currently sets aside no budget for advertisements and marketing, and conducts no user testing of its products.

It's also unclear whether, or how, the MSCHF team makes any money. The company used to run nontraditional ad campaigns for brands like Casper and Target, but Whaley says MSCHF stopped doing that in September 2019 to instead "go all in on our own stuff." Since then, the company has closed two rounds of funding from investors — including an $8 million round just made public in January — totalling $11.5 million, according to PitchBook's funding database.

However, Whaley told Insider he's not worried about the sustainability MSCHF's current way of business, and how the company can continue to scale. To the MSCHF team, the only opinion that matters is theirs, and their only goal is to get people to notice them — whether that attention is negative or not.

"If we can make people a fan of the brand and not the product, we can do whatever the f--k we want," Greenberg, the head of commerce, told Insider. "We build what we want. We don't care."

MSCHF has had to shut down controversial projects in the past, but is still committed to making one-of-a-kind products.

There are times when this dissident outlook has gotten MSCHF in trouble from entities and companies that don't share the same attitude. Slack shut down an open Slack workspace where anyone could compete in guessing the word of the day to win $1000. In its most blatant middle finger to the establishment, MSCHF created a shell restaurant called "The Blue Donkey", where employees who pay for meals using company money or corporate perks could pretend to order "food" using an online delivery app, like Grubhub or Seamless. In actuality, those "food" orders were political donations to candidates with anti-corporate policies. Blue Donkey lasted only hours before it was shut down.

MSCHF has since committed itself to releasing a new product every two weeks. In line with its anti-establishment attitude, MSCHF only announces its products via text message (you can sign up for early access on its website). Despite their limited publicity, MSCHF frequently sells out their products — they only make 1,000 units — "in minutes," Greenberg, the head of commerce, told Insider.

"We're in this weird place where we're not really thinking like a business," Greenberg said. "We just do shit, and people buy our stuff."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufonyuv8KhnWabn6K9orrYZpmeoJmjsW7CyKuYpWWamsC2v4ysn6ido2KzprHTZp6eppWnrrW70WaZrqScYrqwu81maWlqYGJ%2B

PicoD

Inside MSCHF, a Company Selling Random Viral Products Like Jesus Shoes

The Brooklyn-based startup MSCHF is head by a former BuzzFeed employee who describes his employees as 'fans of mischief.'

MSCHF has had to shut down controversial projects in the past, but is still committed to making one-of-a-kind products.