The Art of Scaling Taste

One of the headier promises of AI is that it will make the creation of goods cheaper. Little robots will automate away rote tasks, dramatically simplifying the production of digital and physical products. In this world, there is an abundance of products, and every industry becomes far more competitive. 

How can a startup survive in this environment? The answer is deceptively simple: Have good taste. 

Taste is the bone-deep feeling that you’ve made something good. It is a sense, inexplicable and ephemeral. But it’s also a tangible skill that’s increasingly essential. Taste is how a business differentiates itself when attention is scarce and choice is abundant. Knowing what to make is just as important as the ability to make it. 

There’s an even bigger challenge needed to build a lasting business: scaling your taste, not just into a single object, but into an organization that can build and distribute many products that reflect that taste. 

There are few companies that have successfully scaled taste better than MSCHF (pronounced “mischief”). Well, not exactly a company, as they explained to me when I visited their Brooklyn-based workshop set across the street from a skate park, but an “artist’s collective that happened to raise venture capital.” Or, according to their self-selected LinkedIn industry category, they are in the business of “Dairy Product Manufacturing.”

The group releases a brand-new product every two weeks, each of which has little physical relationship to the previous drop. Their recent releases include edible AirPod-shaped candy, a perfume that smells like WD-40, and a collaboration with Crocs on a mid-calf boot. In the last five years they have released more than 100 products. Each drop is creative and rebellious, winking to the world that capitalism is a necessary joke. They do all of this with a team of 34 people, most of whom are generalists with no background in making physical goods. 

The Croc boot that launched with a Paris Hilton photo shoot. Source: MSCHF. You may think that this is a recipe for disaster, the opposite of most startup advice. Rather than focus on solving a common customer problem extremely well, they do, well, whatever they want. And there’s more weirdness. While MSCHF mostly distributes their goods through channels like email, an app, and social media, they have tried novel distribution techniques that have gotten them banned from Venmo, Shopify, and Twilio. One recent drop I had early access to was distributed with a link to a Google Doc (seriously).

Despite—or because of—these unorthodox practices, the business has been an enormous cultural success. They’ve partnered with celebrities as varied as Paris Hilton ($450 Crocs), Casey Neistat (a single car to which they sold 5,000 $20 keys), and Rihanna (a lip gloss disguised as a packet of ketchup that sold as a six pack for $25). MSCHF is a digitally native brand that has staged high-end art shows in Korea and Los Angeles. They’ve demonstrated a talent for getting journalists to fawn (including this very writer), with coverage in publications like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Vogue.

It isn’t just cultural success—they’ve built a real business, too. Four years ago, they raised $11.5 million from investors like Canaan Partners and Trae Stephens at Founders Fund,. They’ve hit eight figures in revenue, while having no physical retail location. Their shoes—they’ve made 32 pairs—are enormously popular: They’ve measured demand (via direct sales and drawings where customers enter their credit card numbers with the hope to win) of well over 100,000 pairs, which would’ve yielded $35 million in revenue last year alone. The team was unwilling to disclose how many pairs they sold.

And while there are many companies that have grown faster or had more impressive financial results, what attracted me to MSCHF was how they scaled their taste without compromising on it. They’ve made art their business and their business their art. How on earth do they release so many products while staying true to their original vision? How do they keep their team creative and engaged? Are there lessons anyone can apply from what they’ve done? 

This is what I learned.

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• How MSCHF embeds distribution into their products from inception
• The methodical but deceptively mundane process that fuels their creative output
• The importance of aligning artistic vision with business objectives
• The power of narrative network effects