To engineer virality, brands are making their own mystery boxes

As tech and culture further co-mingle, we should expect more startups to follow MSCHF’s lead, using drops to win attention. In the process, programmatic methods may rise to contrive scarcity reliably, at scale, online.

Second, I’m reflecting on a point former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale famously made in 1995: “There are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling.” I think we’re burnt out by the fragmentation that the D2C era brought to everything. After subscribing to tons of hyper-niche content over the years, the idea of a couple brands we ... See more

The number of retailers that do this are few and far between, access to metrics has meant that retailers have A/B tested the souls out of their websites to make sliding into transacting the most frictionless experience imaginable, and leading to an SEO-optimised sea of sameness when it comes to the ecommerce experience.