MSCHF co-founder Gabe Whaley walked onto the TED stage and introduced himself as a traveling car salesman with a vintage PT Cruiser featuring faux wood side paneling parked beside him. He was there to sell the keys, but what he gave us was far more valuable: a viral marketing strategy that actually works.
“I have 5,000 of these keys, and every single last one of them works to that car,” he told the audience. Buy one and you get access to the car. So do 4,999 other people. “Whatever happens beyond that is not necessarily my problem,” he said. “Like I said, I’m just a car salesman.”
The project is real. MSCHF, the art collective Whaley co-founded in 2016, released Key4All in the fall of 2022. Whoever found the PT Cruiser got to drive, until another key holder tracked the car down. For nine months, Whaley watched the PT Cruiser change hands hundreds of times, from New York to Philadelphia, across the Midwest, and out to the West Coast. Then the GPS went dark. Then a tow pound called. People kept showing up to claim the car, and every one of them held a working key.
MSCHF took the car back, no longer running, and put the PT Cruiser in a Los Angeles gallery. At the opening, Whaley noticed key holders who had flown in from around the country. They came to see the car. They stayed to meet each other, trading photos and stories about their own runs behind the wheel.
“This project was never about the car,” Whaley said. “It was never about the keys. It was about the people.”
His line holds the answer to the question I ask about every brand.
Every brand has to answer two questions
At Goodbrain, I push founders on two questions when we begin any new project. The first belongs to the people who run the company. What business are you really in? The second is about seeing things through the lens of the customer. What am I really buying? What’s the story and how does it affect my status or reflect my values?