ANDYou’ve just been laid off from your job at a once-powerful start-up that was going to change the world. The New York Times has exposed the fraudulent business model of its CEO. Investors have been spooked. The stock market is bleeding. Your office access card is not working. What you do next is very important: Go raid the merch closet.
By now, we’ve all seen enough rise and fall documentaries to know how this kind of thing plays out. First come the layoffs, then lawsuits and perhaps a prison sentence for bosses like Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes or Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling. One thing we hear less about: the killer resale market that comes with an era-defining financial disaster.
Cheesy brand merch like t-shirts and mugs suddenly become hot collectibles. It’s all profit for disgruntled employees who picked up office loot for free, or those in the industry who picked up free items at conferences.
This happens pretty quickly: as the Wall Street Journal reported, Silicon Valley Bank items hit eBay just days after the bank collapsed. Coffee cups, blankets and cheese boards were sold. The cheese board alone is $200.
It is a niche market, but dedicated. An investor named Ted Aronson told the publication that he had likely spent around $25,000 on financial memorabilia during his time in the field. Items like a portrait of Bernie Madoff and an Enron code of ethics brochure decorate his Pennsylvania office.
Anna Sorokin, the so-called SoHo scammer, said she “ironically” bought an FTX sweater to wear to a Christmas party last year. This week she also bought an SVB hoodie for, as the Journal put it, her “growing collection of loot from financial disasters.”
Ready to make the great American tradition of failing up, until it all crashes down, part of your brand? These are our favorite articles that honor the fiascos the business world would rather forget. And yes, these prices are real.
10) HQ T-shirt$49.99
At its peak, the gaming app on his phone had $100 million and 2.3 million players. Fans had a chance to win between $11 and $25,000 if they answered the right question, with the cash supplies coming from the massive amount of venture capital funds invested in the company. The only question HQ couldn’t answer was how that business model was supposed to work.
9) WeWork Mug$499.99
“Always do what you love,” reads the tagline of a company with a CEO who preached the solution to millennial burnout as office shuffleboard and kombucha on tap. For anyone who misses the feeling of being imprisoned in a windowless office building where Foster the People are pumped into toilets: these once-ubiquitous mugs now cost hundreds of dollars.
8) CNN+ Notepad$40
So it’s a news streaming service that doesn’t have live news, but Jake Tapper has a book club? I’ll pass, mom.
7) letter from liz truss$1,200
The eBay notes for this say “selling on behalf of an elder”, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the elder in question is one Eli Truss, falling on hard times after becoming prime minister for six weeks. the scam didn’t work.
6) Movie Pass Card$1,400
The seller of this $1,400 debit card makes it clear in their listing that it “NO LONGER WORKS,” but anyone who has used MoviePass knows that it never worked.
5) Lehman Brothers MTV baseball cap$75
OK, sorry, this one we really want. Why Lehman Brothers collaborated with MTV on a baseball cap is a mystery lost to time, but the green and white striped design is preppy Nolita trash.
4) Gawker Media list T-shirt$250
Gawker’s take on the once-ubiquitous American Apparel Helvetica shopping bag lists the former brands of the now-defunct media company. The eBay listing calls the shirt “rare” as it was originally “only available to employees,” though considering how often the group fired all of its employees only to rehire new ones a year later, that could be thousands of people.
3) Silicon Valley bank box$203.50
As the eBay seller wrote in his listing, he received his initial job offer letter at this box, just “a month before the bank blew up.” Presumably his pink slip came in a branded garbage bag. Serious inquiries only please: seller “has to pay rent this month.”
2) FTX fortune cookie$19.99
In a delicious irony, cryptocurrency giant FTX once partnered with an advertising agency to deliver branded fortune cookies to Chinese restaurants across the country. This one costs $20 and ominously reads, “You’re about to change your life forever.” Buyers beware: you may be able to find one of your own for less. CoinDesk reported in December that many FTX fortune cookies were still being served by restaurant owners after the crash.
1) $100 Theranos Gift Card$10,000
This eBay seller received a $100 gift card to fake blood testing company Theranos during a tour of the company’s lab facility in Redwood City, California. Fortunately, they did not use it.
