Five “dead startups” from Juicero to Coolest Cooler parodied like toys



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For its latest drop, the internet collective MSCHF is releasing five famous starter failures as miniature toys for $ 40 each, or $ 160 for a set. The Dead Startup Toys drop includes the Juicero juicer, the rugged One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptop, the miniLab Theranos, the Jibo social robot, and the Coolest Cooler, which MSCHF calls “the poster child for kids. pitfalls of crowdfunding ”.

“This is not a memorialization,” MSCHF says, “but maybe they are a form of necromancy: we are celebrating their pale shadows, deprived of their original context.” Describing toys as the equivalent of a “line of heads on stakes”, MSCHF invites us to “contemplate these magnificent mutants, hoisted on firecrackers of their own solid aluminum one-piece construction”.

The failures range from the over-ambitious and misguided One Laptop Per Child project – which attempted to build a $ 100 open-source laptop for use by children in developing countries – to the Juicero juicer, which squeezed exclusive bags of juice. pre-prepared pretty much like as well as a pair of human hands. Then there’s the Coolest Cooler, an oversized cooler that’s been the subject of a chaotically mismanaged crowdfunding campaign. The collection is complemented by toys based on the social robot Jibo (which had “little to no practical functionality,” according to MSCHF) and the Theranos miniLab, a printer-sized blood testing machine that the company claims , would diagnose a range of diseases.

Many previous MSCHF projects have aroused the wrath of the companies they parodied. It recently launched a “voluntary recall” of its series of unofficially altered Satan-themed sneakers in response to a dispute over Nike’s branding. He was also turned away by Boston Dynamics after he strapped a paintball gun to the back of one of the company’s Spot robot dogs and let members of the public check him in an art gallery. “We condemn the portrayal of our technology in any way that encourages violence, harm or intimidation,” Boston Dynamics said at the time.

The limited edition toys are available now, direct from MSCHF.

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