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Youre probably a fan of Mschf, even if youve never heard of it. The Brooklyn-based art collective has spent the past five years commandeering the internets attention through product drops like Satan Shoes (Nike Air Maxes filled with blood) and Big Red Boots, alongside community experiments like turning Venmo into a game of Survivor. Mschfs 30ish-person team regularly ruffles the feathers of brands, products, culture, and even its own investors. Over the years, Mschf has faced cease-and-desist orders and lawsuits from the likes of Nike and VF Corp. for turning their products into creative clay. But now Mschf has decided to stop poking fun at brandsat least some of the timeto do business with them. Its launching a creative consultancy, called Applied Mschf, to offer services to between 5 and 10 brands a year, and restructuring its business entirely to support this project. The collective has previously collaborated with companies on one-off products: For Tiffany it made a participation trophy for being rich; for Mattel, it produced a rusted jalopy with “Wash Me” on the window. But Applied Mschf is a much more ambitious and far-reaching effort. Mschf is codifying its servicesincluding marketing, industrial design, digital design, and even architectureas a full-on creative consultancy. Instead of the brands paying their lawyers [to sue us], they should just be paying us, Mschf cofounder and CEO Gabe Whaley tells me, with a laugh. Mschf as a service Mschf spent its early years thumbing its nose at the capitalist establishment. Shortly after launching, the collective began producingat a torrid paceboth tongue-in-cheek collectibles like Kill Pills (theyre just sugar) and groundbreaking art projects like Severed Spots (which cut a $30,000 Damian Hurst dot painting into 88 mini canvases). But the group remained cloaked in mystery. When I followed Mschf to Korea for its first art retrospective in 2023, the collective had amassed a museums worth of work and a global reputation and yet it was still relatively unknown. Today its founders are recognized across the creative community, and the organization’s output is the envy of many brands. Mschf’s eight-figure business is fueled by its now tried-and-true product drops, which include shoes, fashion, collectibles, and art. To launch Applied Mschf, the collective is restructuring into a holding company. The footwear, collectibles, fashion, and art groups each have their own leadership and budget. At the center of everything is Mschf’s legal and central creative team, which will serve all the divisionsincluding the 5 to 10 external clients and partners that Mschf hopes to bring on over the next year. With this mechanism, Whaley and the team want the partners, the revenue, and, quite frankly, the excuse to execute on a larger scale. When I met with cofounder Kevin Wiesner last year, he said he was itching to construct a building. Now Whaley tells me that Wiesner wants to partner with a city to rethink its public transitand he’s not joking. I’m very excited to pursue bigger, harder formats that are potentially more permanent, Whaley says, laying out an intentionally non-prescriptive groundwork to woo partners who have grand, ranging ambitions. Whaley says Applied Mschf’s projects could be cobranded or white-labeled, and may involve everything from consulting to actually spinning up entirely new businesses. He’s open to working on retainer, for royalties, or even taking equity in a new venture. It all sounds quite amorphous, but this kind of creative consultancy is becoming far more established in the modern world of influencer-driven creative direction. Kendrick Lamar, for instance, releases music and videos that define his cultural relevance. But he also has the consultancies pgLang and Project 3 to pursue corporate clients. Whaley points to the late Virgil Ablohs archipelago of companies, clients, and hobbies as a creatively satisfying path to success that Mschf hopes to emulate. Whaley’s also well aware that his company, which defined itself by bucking the consumer system, is now offering to fuel it. At the end of the day, Mschf takes culture as existing materialthat’s our medium. At the most aspirational level, this is really just about expanding our tool kit with available material for us to use, he says. I think a lot of people may think we are anti-big brand based on our past work. But the thing is, there was never animosity. It was just that they had such good existing material. The evolution of Mschf Whaley says that as Mschf has evolved, so has his perspective on its place in culture, especially as he’s met young designers abroad who admire the brand. He’s become more comfortable with his own role in the creative community. These days, Mschfs leadership regularly makes the rounds of design schools and podcasts. We understand that we’re not that secret, mysterious, shadowy behind-the-scenes figure anymore, Whaley says. So the question is, how do we use our existing context to do more and make our world bigger, versus trying to retreat back into the shadows from where we came? For Whaley, Applied Mschf is one part shrewd business move, one part creative necessity, as the team looks to balance its business with the blank space, anything-is-possible ideas that originally propelled the collective. There’s a lot of value now in rejecting this notion of chasing ephemerality, he says. [Ephemerality] was a very special thing that helped characterize our practice for the last half decade. But you see everyone chasing their 15 seconds of fame. We’re all chasing it, but that half-life of attention keeps decreasing. I think it’s a race to the bottom, and I think now is an interesting time to actually focus on things like permanence. And so that’s what’s going to define Mschfs artistic practice in the future: less of these rapid-fire, one-offs every two weeks, but more large, impactful community-driven moments. Mschf has traditionally viewed virality not as the goal of its art practice but the means to an end. Virality created the feedback loop from the fan or consumer who gave its sometimes sophomoric projects a PhD-level meaning. Wiesner has called Mschf a digitally mediated performance art practice, with its core question always being: “Does each viewer-participant of a project make it better? But Mschf now lives inside culture its helped create, where brands themselves are launching wave after wave of nonsensical collabs as part of their core marketing strategy (at the time of filing this story, Coors Light had just announced a refrigerated deodorant). No doubt, Mschf doesnt just want to be the only ephemeral player in on the joke, and its creatives want to continue pushing boundaries. Done right, Applied Mschf could fuel Mschf’s most impactful work yet.
Category:
E-Commerce
Another month, another founder accused of fraud. This time its Christine Hunsicker of CaaStle, indicted on July 18 for allegedly falsifying financial records, misrepresenting profits, and continuing fraud even after her removal by the board. According to reports, before meeting with an audit firm, she searched online for the terms fraud, created an audit firm fake, and JP morgan 4m records fakedan apparent reference to fraud charges related to yet another disgraced founder, Charlie Javice of Frank. These incidents are no longer outliers. Theyre becoming a pattern, and the startup world has yet to confront what that the pattern reveals: The startup ecosystem is designed to encourage deception. Risk-taking and self-confidence We all know that most founders share a penchant for risk-taking and a healthy sense of self-confidence. But couple these characteristics with the relentless assault of pressures that constitute daily startup life, and you have a recipe for trouble. Risk-taking slips into recklessness, and confidence metastasizes into outright narcissism. Lying is the norm. Particularly during the early stages, a Growth at All Costs imperative means that startups feel obliged to pursue aggressive growth to secure high valuations and attract continuous investment rounds. This pressure can lead founders to inflate metrics, fabricate success, or conceal failures to maintain investor confidence. Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX secretly transferred customer funds to his trading firm, Alameda Research, concealing these movements and misleading stakeholders. From optimism to deception A Fake It Till You Make It culture means that what starts as harmless optimism can easily escalate into deliberate deception. Founders initially omit negative details, then progressively falsify data to uphold illusions of success. Nikola founder Trevor Milton exaggerated product capabilities, even staging videos of a nonoperational electric truck rolling down a hill. The brutal demands of fundraising result in constant pressure to secure funding and maintain operational cash flow, which often pushes founders to compromise ethically. The necessity to present a highly favorable narrative to investors encourages fraudulent embellishments. Combined with a lack of oversight and governance, especially in early-stage startups, this leaves founders unchecked, increasing opportunities for fraud. Early investors and boards often fail to provide rigorous oversight due to limited motivation or expertise. A gradual process White-collar fraud is always a gradual process. No one jumps straight into the deep end of the criminality pool. Law enforcement officials have a 10:10:80 rule of thumb when it comes to white-collar fraud: 10% of people would never commit fraud, 10% of people are actively seeking out opportunities to commit fraud, and 80% of people have the potential to commit fraud if the timing and circumstances are right. The vast majority of these founders probably started in the 80%, along with most of the rest of us. It often begins with minor embellishments aimed at securing initial investment. Successful deception attracts further funding, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. But as the discrepancies between reality and claims widen, founders face intensified pressure to maintain their narratives, resorting to increasingly severe fraud to conceal earlier lies. Witness Christine Hunsickers continued deception even after her board had essentially kicked her out of her company. Seismic consequences The consequences of all this founder misbehavior can be cataclysmic. They extend well beyond the direct financial losses to investors. Broader investor confidence deteriorates, leading to reduced funding availability for legitimate startups. Employees suffer job losses, reputational damage, and psychological distress. Customers can experience direct harm, as in Theranoss false medical test results. The broader innovation ecosystem becomes risk-averse, slowing innovation due to increased regulatory scrutiny and cautious investment behaviors. Potential time bombs To mitigate this deadly cocktail of ego and pressure, we first need to understand that all founders are potential time bombs: the same traits that help them secure money, talent, and press are the ones that can eventually lead to their undoing. The old method was pretty straightforward: fire the founder, and replace them with a manager. But that only leads to zombie companies that stifle innovation in the crib. Startup founders are constantly being gaslit. Theyre being flattered as geniuses and world-changers on a daily basis. Many of their direct reports are sharp, canny careerists who only want to share good news. Its easy to see how people can lose perspective and start believing their own hype within the emperors new clothes environment of a startup. These people need perspective in order to curb the worst tendencies of startup culture. Every founder should cultivate a star chamber of mentors who are removed from the everyday persecutions of the startup in question (perhaps an older CEO, or a colleague from an accelerator program, or a startup blogger you admire). They need advice from people whom I call models of values: transparency, accountability, and ethical leadership. Many boards are sadly hopeless at this, because theyre complicit in the success (at all costs) of the startup. Oversight and accountability On the stick side of the carrot and stick approach, however, these people also need oversight and accountability. Their boards and investors must actively engage in governance roles, monitoring company practices and demanding transparency. They need to ensure financial transparency and operational integrity through audits and detailed reference checks. To prevent the next Hunsicker, Javice, Bankman-Fried, or Holmes, we need to confront the cultural rot at the core of startup life. We still need ambitious entrepreneurs to drive innovation, but not within a system that rewards deception and punishes transparency. Unless we change the rules of the gameby rethinking incentives, strengthening oversight, and investing in founder developmentwell keep producing brilliant visionaries who become cautionary tales.
Category:
E-Commerce
In 1967, a man named George Maciunas purchased a cast-off building at 80 Wooster Street in New York City. It had once housed light manufacturing, but by the late 1960s, it was empty, like much of SoHo. Maciunas was an artist and a bit of a provocateur. What he wanted to build wasnt a home or studio. It was a community. And within a few years, 80 Wooster had become a nerve center for Fluxus, the revolutionary movement that fused performance art and design. You could argue that much of SoHos creative explosion, and the contemporary art market that followed, traces back, at least partially, to that one building. But the real lesson of SoHo isnt about one building. Its about what happens when people live and work and think together, in close proximity. Its about density. Shared space. Its about what Maciunas stumbled upon and what Jony Ive, half a century later, is trying to design deliberately in San Francisco. During the pandemic, we collectively adopted a belief: that physical place doesnt matter anymore. That knowledge workers could work from anywhere, that Slack could replace the hallway conversation, that Zoom could replace the studio. But in shared spaces, powerful ideas emerge from the combustion that happens when thinkers and doers comingle. You see someones sketchpad. You hear someone pitch a prototype. You walk out of a gallery and into a conversation. Communities have always been engines of creative cross-pollination and acceleration. And they still are. Lets look at the evidence. Proximity Shapes Behavior When the Bauhaus school moved to Dessau in 1925, its new campus was a compound: a deliberate arrangement of workshops, student housing, dining areas, and design studios, all connected by a spatial logic that encouraged flow and interaction. Masters and students worked together, ate together, debated design over dinner together, and crossed paths in shared hallways and courtyards. The schools interdisciplinary breakthroughs (think of Breuers tubular steel chairs or Moholy-Nagys experiments in photography and metalwork) didnt come from curriculum alone. They emerged from proximity. The architecture itself, featuring transparency, openness, and connectedness, was a catalyst for creative exchange. We know from research that proximity changes behavior. MIT professor Thomas Allen found that communication between engineers dropped off sharply once they were more than 10 meters apart and declined even further across floors or buildings. Weekly collaboration often disappeared entirely. The closer we are, the more we interact. And the more we interact, the more likely we are to spark something new. So, what does that mean for the world we live in now? Renewal in San Francisco and Detroit Jackson Square in San Francisco, once a lively mix of galleries, boutiques, and creative firms, hollowed out after the pandemic. Office vacancy topped 35%, and much of downtown lost its pulse. But Jony Ive saw possibilities where others saw decline. Rather than lease a studio, he began acquiring and renovating a cluster of adjacent historic buildings. Why? Because he was, and is, on a design mission: how do you build a space that invites creativity, not just from your team, but from your surroundings? He called the resulting courtyard the Pavilion. And its not an office amenity. Its a place for open-air meals, impromptu conversations, private concerts, and more. Yo-Yo Ma has played there. Artists, technologists, and musicians mingle without an agenda. Conceivably a typographer might walk out of a meeting and stumble into a sound check. A hardware engineer might trade notes with a novelist over espresso. This is cross-pollination by design. Ive is building a creative ecology: a space where disciplines intersect, where proximity builds trust, and where inspiration moves laterally, not from the top down, but from the courtyard across. A contemporary answer to an old truth: ideas need neighbors. Jackson Square is not the only place where revitalization is happening through the communal sharing of ideas. Detroits Newlab anchors the citys 30acre mobility innovation district. Its built around the newly reopened Michigan Central Station, hailed as a symbol of Detroits creative revival. Since opening in April 2023, Newlab has housed more than 100 startups in mobility, climate tech, and hardware innovation, providing access to stateoftheart prototyping labs, fabrication workshops, and pilot zones designed to facilitate realworld experimentation. Newlab is both a workspace and a community. In June 2025, Michigan Central and Newlab launched a Creative Residency funded by the Knight Foundation, placing artists alongside technologists to explore projects at the intersection of art, science, and mobility. Fellows and Cohort members engage in crossdisciplinary prototyping, installations, and public dialogues, weaving creative practice into the heart of criticaltech innovation. On-site facilities like textile, CNC, robotics, and metal labs mean that a sculptor can dart between a fabrication session and a conversation with a batterydesign engineer. These are unplanned collaborations that spark fresh ideas. That creative density scales into impact. Through Detroits Advanced Aerial Innovation Region, startups like Lamarr.AI use drones and AI to audit city-owned buildings, capturing thermal inefficiencies and structural data for retrofit in days, not weeks. The project demonstrates how shared infrastructure and pilot zones accelerate meaningful collaboration between companies, municipal agencies, and innovators all within walking distance of Newlabs shared hub. What This Means for Businesses This isnt just about San Francisco and Detroit. Any business that depends on ideas should care where those ideas come from, and the lessons we can learn from the power of place. Talent Clusters Deliver. Designers in Barcelona. Engineers in Boston. Founders in Austin. When talent lives near other talent, new work gets made. The people who shape culture still gather in physical places. Cities with culture, density, and walkability will continue to pull ahead. Creative Adjacency Is a Multiplier. You dont need to be in the same company. You just need to be in the same neighborhood. Thats why companies moving into innovation districts perform well. The serendipity is built in. Participation Is More Powerful Than Presence. Renting office space in a city isnt the same as showing up for its cultural life. Businesses that attend local shows, sponsor creative spaces, or mentor local talent become part of the ecosystem. Thats how you stay relevant, by being part of the local rhythm, not just watching it. Dont Mistake Remote for Rootless. Remote work lets people live anywhere. That doesnt mean they live everywhere. Creative people still gravitate toward vibrant places, and businesses that want to hire or partner with them need to think the same way. If you want to find the next generation of storytellers or technologists, look for the places where ideas are already in motion. Culture Is Not a KPI. You cant track the power of culture on a dashboard. But you know when its there. In the right place, ideas sync faster. Instinct sharpens. Teams move with more confidence That matters, especially for work that doesnt come from templates like good brand work, new product ideas, original strategies. These things dont arrive fully formed in a shared doc. They emerge from conversation, curiosity, and experience. All three live in places with creative density. The Texture of Innovation In business, we often talk about innovation as if its a matter of systems: of process, of capital, of talent deployed efficiently. But that language leaves something out. It misses the texture of innovation, the way it moves through a neighborhood, picks up influence, and reshapes itself in conversation. It forgets that the most important ideas emerge, slowly, from an atmosphere. From a shared block, a corner café, a sunlit studio, a courtyard where someone plays cello in the afternoon. If companies want to matter, not just to markets, but to culture, they need to rethink place as something more than a backdrop. It is not a container. It is an ingredient. A brand built in isolation may be polished. A product designed in a vacuum may be efficient. But timeless relevance, the kind that resonates, that sticks, that spreads, comes from being in the world with others. The real opportunity in front of us is not a return to offices. Its to ask better questions about what kind of places we want to build around the work we do, and what kind of work becomes possible when we do.
Category:
E-Commerce
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