It’s like Funko Pop for failed hardware. Or Garbage Pail Kids for startups. Randomly creative house MSCHF has created a set of tiny versions of famously bad hardware projects — or projects that failed famously. And coming as a shock to absolutely no one, Portland’s Coolest Cooler — at one time the breathlessly heralded “most successful Kickstarter in history” — is right there among them. Front and center.
Poster child for the pitfalls of crowdfunding, the Coolest Cooler was an all-in-one outdoor event station that combined a cooler, speaker, blender, and general-purpose battery. At a bargain $185 pre-order price, the Coolest Cooler merged design solutionism with dad-core to create a total package that seemed too-good-to-be-true. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, it was.
Techcrunch has a more sympathetic take on the newest MSCHF drop:
But big visions and hardware dreams are not always so clearly pocketed into the hole of ‘failure’. Sometimes the hardware works but the supply chain doesn’t. Sometimes the vision is sound but the product is just too early. There are any number of reasons products fail — but (in as much as they were actually real) you often have to give it up for the teams of people and visionaries that wanted a thing to exist in the universe and dragged it kicking and screaming to that point. And off the cliffs.
For more information or to buy at least a semblance of the cooler you never recevied, visit Dead Startup Toys.
