After a period of radio silence while we created some new shirts and products, we’re back with a timely special offer. Not tried our new mystery products yet? Now is your chance…
For the next 48hrs only, free shipping on all our mystery products – Mystery Items, Mystery T-shirts and Totes.
Just enter coupon code “imawinner”.
Cordially,
Dr W
After more than two years working with Mystery T-shirts and honing the service, we’re excited to kick it on to other entertaining non-tshirt offerings. The first two are now ready:
Totes have always been the top seller in our Dawanda store, so now we’ve invested in a much larger range to form our Mystery Tote collection.
For Mystery Gifts we’re combining some of our own offerings with the wares of other brilliant companies and smaller Etsy/Dawanda sellers.
The format is the same, you can select the new products at the end of the survey.
15% off today only
To celebrate their launch, we’re offering 15% off our mystery gifts and totes with coupon code “iwantmesomeofthat”.
Greetings from Berlin,
Dr Willem
Berlin 01.04.12 – Today the mystery t-shirt service The Hipstery have announced the newest addition to their innovative mystery product service – Mystery Pets.
“After extensive market research we learnt that most people have great difficulty picking a suitable pet” says chief scientist Dr Willem von Tinkel. Several pet owners we met also agreed – “I love my dog Jasper, but sometimes I do wish he wouldn’t hump my leg and eat his own poop” says Justin Merryweather, from Salt Lake City. Sarah Wilmington, from Leamington Spa concurs “my guinea pig is nice, but it’s basically a furry idiot that always escapes and hides under the sofa. Plus it lives like two weeks, I’m sick of burying these things already.”
“NO MORE!” says the Hipstery team. Their freakishly intelligent scientists have developed the CombiPetATron3000 which allows the splicing of DNA from several different pet species to be assembled into the customers Perfect Pet. “Just answer six cryptic questions and let the Hipsterys new team of Pet Scientists frankenstein the perfect pet for you.” says Dr Willem. “Just a few days later it’ll knock on your door. Assuming it has knocking capabilities, otherwise it’ll probably just sit there.”
We tracked down several customers of the service to see how satisfied they were with their Perfect Pets:
An Artists (bad) impression
Jessie Wilson received – BillPugOwl
“I actually think this is our best work to date. Jessie’s answers suggested strong Hipster tendencies, lets put it this way I didn’t need to look at the address on this order to find out he lives in Williamsburg. So we combined the three Hipstery favourite animals to create BillPugOwl – 33% Pug Dog, 33% Owl, 33% Bill Murray, 1% audacious. Combining the ironic ugliness of the Pug, the smart elitism of the Owl and zany mid-life crisis tendencies of Bill Murray.” adds a visibly proud Dr W.
Luisa Müller received – Wolpertinger
“I was sceptical at first. Wolpertinger is not a beauty. I wasn’t really sure exactly what to do with a flying horned hare with webbed feet. I still don’t know really, but boy am I having fun trying to find out!” said Luisa.
Silvio Balingo received – ManBearPig
“Half man, half bear, half pig! I just couldn’t believe it. It’s like all my dreams came true. Also one of my nightmares.”
1. You know the new coolest place in Berlin. Neukölln is the new Kreuzberg, is the new Moabit, is the new Pankow, is the new Wedding. Berliner Hipsters have an overly unhealthy interest in identifying where the current “hottest place in Berlin” is at any one particular moment in time. Okay, maybe not identifying it but denying the claimed hottest place in Berlin as suggested by other Hipsters.
2. They’d have to pry the Tote Bag out from your cold, dead hands. You at all times carry this cloth tardis for the tardy. The only thing that wouldn’t fit in your Hipster Tote Bag is your emotional baggage.
Hipster Essentials Tote Bag 8,00 € More Info » |
Ich Adde Deine Mutter. 15,00 € More Info » |
Du Hast Angst Vor Hermann Platz 15,00 € More Info » |
The Denglisch Tote 8,00 € More Info » |
A Likely Story 12,00 € More Info » |
Miau Tote 12,00 € More Info » |
Real Men Love Cats $12.00 More Info » |
3. You have a minimum of 7 professions. Minimum. It’s important you should claim to be able to do everything, but not actually make any money from anything. Making money would support the scheiss capitalist system. If you are not a hybrid combination of DJ, VJ, CTO, Artist, Knitter, Ruby on Rails programmer, Sound Engineer and Barista this city is not for you.
4. Du sprichst kein Deutsch! If you are German, deny all knowledge of your mother tongue. If you are foreigner sprinkle the odd word in as you might pesto on pasta. Here are a few choice Hipster Berlin Deutsch phrases:
5. You molest Wi-Fi. Once upon a time Cafes introduced wifi, to entertain people while they ate and allow them do a little work or quickly check e-mail. Then you arrived with your Macbook pro and your sleeping bag. Yeah you ordered a Mocha Latte, once, two weeks ago and still didn’t pay for, but now maybe it’s time for you to go home and stop molesting the WiFi to post dolphin clipart to your Tumblr. Other people would like to sit down, you know.
6. When cut you bleed Mate. Club Mate, bitches. Does it taste good? Sort of. Does that even matter? Absolutely not. It’s not a drink, it’s a state of mind.
7. You pick friends like you’d prepare an outfit. You Accessorise them. You ensure a balance of ethnicities and heights. That means if you are a normal, lame, pale European, you don’t seek out the company of your continents compatriots. BORING! Instead, you’d only exit your Friedrichshain Altbau-Wohnung in the company of a Pug dog named Mr Giggles and Cindi your small Asian fashion designer friend with the bitching side-swept asymmetrical bangs and mint green hot pants. Triple Berlin Hipster score if you only have friends with names that start with Z.
Official Barney Stinson Armani Grey Suitjamas $99.95 More Info » |
Cowboy Tshirt $24.95 More Info » |
Giant Chicken $110.00 More Info » |
American Apparel The Disco Short Small-Caramel $52.00 More Info » |
American Apparel The Disco Short Small-Caramel $28.14 More Info » |
Denglisch T-shirt 24,90 € More Info » |
Hipster Essentials T-shirt 22,90 € More Info » |
8. You wear oversized retro Glasses. Berlin Hipsters understand that the larger their vintage spectacles are, the higher their Hipster social ranking will be. They should not look like glasses, but giant cylindrical portals that people could walk through to a better Hipster world of the future where it rains Soya Milch and all food comes as a cupcake.
9. You are working to overthrow the system. Whether you are attending a Betahaus skills exchange or living in a eco-hippie commune in an abandoned warehouse, you and your friends are working to overthrow the system in some way. The time is coming. You can feel it in the air. It may not be tomorrow. It may not be next year. But, it will happen and when it does, you’ll be there, at front of the ensuing medley wearing your Che Guevera t-shirts and serving the revolutionary comrades slices of your delicious homemade Quiche.
10. Tats. You understand there is nothing more visually offensive than a blank canvas. Surveys by actual scientists have proven that 99.6 % of all Berlin Hipsters sport a minimum of 12 tattoos. One must be tribal.
Want to become a Berlin Hipster? Check out the Hipstery’s Berlin Hipster Kit. What are we missing? Let us know in the comments.
The Bible Flask $20.00 More Info » |
Space Hipster Food $19.99 More Info » |
Creepy Cupcakes with your own face on $18.50 More Info » |
Cool Cat Tote $12.97 More Info » |
WTF LOL Stamp $12.99 More Info » |
David Bowie - On Vinyl! $45.99 More Info » |
The Hipstery - Mystery t-shirt experience 22,00 € More Info » |
Hipster Business Cards $4.00 More Info » |
Bill Murray Print $16.00 More Info » |
You Doo Doll $12.81 More Info » |
Sequin Fanny Pack - Solid Colors $19.95 More Info » |
Bacon Soap $5.99 More Info » |
Temp Tats 5,90 € More Info » |
Moustache Cookie Cutter Set $15.00 More Info » |
Ich Werde Ein Berliner; How to be a Really Hip German £4.64 More Info » |
Winner of our earlier contest for a free Berlin Hipster kit is Stephanie Padilla-Kaltenborn. Thanks to everyone who entered!
UPDATE – This vacancy has been filled by one unlucky candidate who should have known better. Thanks to all who applied! We have no vacancies at this time…
With much planned for 2012, we now have a paid position open to be the official Hipstery Order Packing Donkey. While not a position of glamour, you’ll be an essential cog in our small, disjointed business. It will be based here in Berlin and be for nine hours a week, spread across either three mornings or evenings, increasing during times of sales & promotions.
Tasks:
- Covering customer service requests.
- Assembling standard products like our Hipster Kit.
- Analysing survey answers, selecting mystery shirts and packing orders.
- Handling returns and exchanges.
These are the requirements:
- Fluent Deutsch. Native is preferable.
- Freelance status (be able to invoice monthly for your time).
- Can work either early in the morning, or late in the evening. Flexible in increasing hours to respond to spikes in orders.
- Strong attention to detail.
- A willingness to embrace chaos.
- A passion for apparel and the ideology of the Hipstery.
Please send a CV and brief covering letter to salutations @ hipstery.com and be sure to include your required hourly wage. This position will start by the end of January if the right person is found. You can apply in either English or German. We are not looking interns at this time.
If this all sounds too good and you prefer a job of higher personal exploitation, may we recommend you consider our long standing vacancy for a Hipstery Scapegoat?
Update: Mens M, L and XL are sold out.
I have the honour of sourcing the cotton pleasure canvases that become your Hipstery shirts. It’s a job I take seriously and approach with the sort of manic zeal often demonstrated by the unsound of mind. I celebrate all my successes loudly and publicly, as one might expect. My failures, the shirts I order at 3am on a Tuesday morning, while inebriated, which when they arrive immediately cause both my retinas to shudder. Those, I put into a reject box hidden in a corner of the office, about which we do not speak. Until today.
Will you like them? We consider it possible, but perhaps not probable. Will you wear them outside the house? Possibly, but only for a bet. Can you return them if you don’t like them or they don’t fit? Oh no. Don’t even try it. All sales are final on this one.
We only have a small number of these shirts, so you are limited to one per order. Probably they won’t last long, we’ll deactivate the coupon code for that size when we’re sold out.
To order them, depending on which size you want, enter the correct coupon code:
For a Womens S shirt use coupon – “uglyshirtdayWS“,
For a Womens M shirt - “uglyshirtdayWM“,
For a Womens L shirt – ”uglyshirtdayWL“,
For a Womens XL shirt - ”uglyshirtdayWXL“,
For a Mens S shirt - ”uglyshirtdayMS“,
SOLD OUT! For a Mens M shirt
SOLD OUT! For a Mens L shirt
SOLD OUT! For a Mens XL shirt
and you’ll see the reduction of €17. Making them €5 per shirt, plus shipping (assuming you order our €22 Just The Shirt). This lets our scientists know to only pick you something from our ugliest of outcast shirts.
If you’ve ordered before you can skip the survey if you don’t feel like repeating yourself, we’ll use your previous answers to guide us (colour preference may be over-ruled during this promo depending on stock levels).
Naturally you can’t use this discount to get any of our regular assortment of quite frankly, stunning shirts. Nor on gift vouchers.
If what’s happening here makes no sense, you probably didn’t read our newsletter yet. You can do so here. Basically it’s International Democracy day so we’re holding a little election of our own. One candidate gets you more, the other lets you pay €4 yes. You vote by entering their name as a coupon code.
Skip Willborough
Skip loves you. No seriously. He’s thought about it, deliberated long and hard – he really does. Admittedly he loves everyone, but that doesn’t make his love for you and less special, just maybe a touch less exclusive. You see, Skip is a nice guy. He believes in everyone. He talks regularly about “the global family”. He hugs trees. But not just trees, lamposts, parking wardens, squirrels, anyone who doesn’t run from his hugs will receive them. He wants to make the world a better place. Some have said he is overly idealistic. If Skip wins this Hipstery election he is not really sure what he is going to do, but he’s certain it’ll be positive and people will like it, it will possibly involve hugging. Globally.
Vote for Skip by entering “skip” as a coupon code will save you €0,01 on your order, but ensures we’ll also add a quite possibly democracy related extra gift to your order.
Jackson Templeton
Jackson also….well maybe not loves, but definitely likes you. Sometimes. When you stay out of his way at least. That is not say that Jackson is incapable of love, oh no, he just invests it carefully like a particularly prudent hedge fund manager. You demonstrate your ROI and he’ll love every inch of you. He is probably not very nice to the elderly. But if you get sued by a man who believes he the rightful owner of your Yorkshire Terrier, you’d probably call Jackson. If Jackson wins the election he will pass into law the 4 day work week.
Vote for Jackson by entering “jackson” as a coupon code saves you a flat €4 off your order. Who will win our election? We’ll keep you updated on Facebook as the votes roll in.
Ready to vote? Go mystery shopping….
Update: After early voting, Jackson is in the lead with approx 65% of the vote.
Okay, so it’s not actually Black Friday we reused the banner from last year and we don’t even feel slightly guilty about.
Yep, it’s back. Special promotion for one day and its triple propaganda pesos! Spread the word via your prop link this Friday and you’ll earn for every sale you refer – 600 Propaganda Pesos (worth €6) instead of the normal 200 (€2). But just if your friends and fans order this Friday (we’re flexible for those of you in differing timezones). They will save €2 as normal.
Get your link and some handy tools to spread it after logging in at http://hipstery.com/login. The three buttons shown at the bottom here, from your admin page make it fast and simple pimple to share your prop link via mail, facebook or twitter. Spread the word and get rewarded for your multiplicatory endeavours! We already pre-filled the options with some funny texts introducing our service.
Forgot your password? No problem you can also reset it from the login page by clicking this link:
It was a truly splendid afternoon spent reading and analysing all your answers to our 2nd year, so what now then? survey. Your enthusiasm and wisdom brighten even the dullest of afternoons in the Hipstery HQ.
Using random.org we selected two names at random to win a free Hipstery experience. One of these fine individuals is called Åsmund and comes from Norway, the other is called Ali and comes from Belgium. You guys will have mail shortly.
Here are some of the results for your perusals:
We read the goal was to get over 40% Very Disappointed, which apparently suggests your business has legs and might do something with them beyond laying around on the couch. So good news there.
A broader split here, but still a general consensus in favour of more, and easy ways to regularly receive this “more”.
Here are some of our favourite answers to the optional, open question:
1. “Basically the hipstery is another word for perfection”
2. This one was in German, but the basic gist was that we should add larger – “Tit-friendly-t-shirts!”
3. “…it’s my birthday next week and if i could have offered my family the option to gift me a T that i could pick myself that would have been lovely. because, really, how well do they know me? i could get an inappropriate ‘T’ like i did when i was a callow youth and my granny thought i liked Scooby Do, but i really liked Desperate Dan and the Power Rangers, and i had to wear it and say it was nice, and was even told to write a thank you letter (sorry i didn’t always write Gran).”
4. “I kind of like you and stuff…”
The saddest news is that our planned mystery tin opener project is now halted after reading this one…
5. “I don’t think I’d be happy to fill in a survey and just get a random mystery object (Lucky dip bags are never what you hope for). What if you sent me a tin opener? I’ve already got two and I don’t even use them that much….I think mystery hand bag would really go down well, but you might need to girly up the site a bit. I don’t know if many women would be happy with men buying their clothes.”
Super to read someone noticed the message to the postie on our new packaging
“Oh yeah, and I though it was really cool of you to have printed on the postalpackage a message to the postaloffice dude/dudett, at the moment it was sent from Hipstery it started to become a gift for several people on it’s journey and I felt great that I’d “given” this cool little message to my local postman/lady, it propably smiled when delivering my mystery, and that thought makes me smile!”
So plenty to chew over from all the results and feedback. Thanks again for taking the time.
Going forward it’s still hard to know exactly what will come next. We’re still a very small business, a business in which none of us founders are actually paid a wage. We started it by cobbling together a laughably small investment since we’re all paupers, and only really got the business off the ground solely on kind, talented friends donating us their time and skills. Oh, and some begged and pilfered t-shirts. None of that is an excuse, just background info on why it has taken us a long time to bring out changes and new products/services. Honestly, we’ve already come a long way in terms of the number of shirts we have, in that we now actually have a custom built website (6 months work right there) with the backend wizardry that allows us to pack more and more orders each day, in that we have dedicated office space (the first six months we ran it from my sleeping chambers). Still, we often run into cash flow issues that inhibit what we can risk on new ideas and improvements.
In short, we can’t promise we’re going to get there soon, but however long it takes and whatever it looks like once we do make it, we hope that we’re still lucky enough to have such enthusiastic patrons as yourselves supporting us.
We really look at every answer you give to the survey before selecting your shirt. So we see a lot of answers. Tens of thousands by now. It’s still fun, your creativity always entertains us. Here are some gem answers we had lately:
Q: What is this?
“The image of god, saying to us all “Those who are not with me, will become the leaders of the Coca Cola company and there lose all their respect, trust, loyalty, royalty, authenticity, they lose the will to live for anything else than money. They will choke on emotions. They will suffer in an infinite abyss of hate and rejection. For those who are not with me I will seals the sea of happiness with all my might. For those who are not with me, life will be nothing more than a miserable state of wallowing in the darkest of all feelings. But for those who are with me I will make life the purest of things. Those who are with me will be living life. Those who are with me will enjoy the most delightful emotion they have ever felt. Speak my tongue and bite my bread as from now on I will be your captain and pathfinder. The almighty Ekttiw. ”
Q. A genie appears. He grants you just one wish, what do you wish for?
“Happiness, not everlasting, but with the right amount of sadness to always quantify the happiness, and beig able to get through the sadness with the absolute knowlege that I will be happy again. I’d wish this for everyone.”
Q. There is room with you on your otherwise deserted island for one fictional person. Who gets your invite?
“I want someone smart, sexy and practical. And I still want Sex. As I am gay and I like bearded men I would love to have an attractive man with me. He should not be gay, that would be too simple and shortlived. He should be straight, that will give me and us more time: Ignorance, Despair, Curiousity, Sex, Guilt, Despair, Realization, much more Sex! And I want a macho – Okay, I want RUSSELL CROWE!”
Sometimes you read and answer though and you’re faith in the creativity of humanity decreases more that a little bit. You can only hang your head in shame. To illustrate this point I offer you exhibit A -
