Welcome back to the super secret underground vault, where we’re about to take another trip down un-memory lane and uncover the mysteries of Мишка projects that, tragically, never made it into this big beautiful messed up world of ours. In our first installment, we gave you the skinny on a triple stack of sneaks we collaborated on with Reebok.
At least those, however, we’re still bummed about never going all the way with. These Skullcandys on the other hand…Whoa boy, not a good experience. Seeing how much music stuff our brand is involved in, it made perfect sense to produce a Мишка-ed up pair of headphones. This idea first germinated sometime in 2010, and at the time Skullcandy headphones were selling like wildfire (maybe they still are? I’m not exactly plugged into the pulse of the headphone game…).
Skullcandy was a big company that was only growing, so we knew the’d have no problems cooking up some Мишка specific headphones. Plus, the spherical build of their ‘phones immediately jumped out at us.
When we see a sphere ’round here, there’s a little pavlovian tickle: we can put a Keep Watch Eyeball on that! Much like the pumps on the ‘boks, what better way to show it’s a Мишка item than big bloody eyeballs? And stuck to the side of your head like some sort of streetwear Guillermo Del Toro creation? Sign me up, amirite?
Skullcandy was on board too, and some time later we got the models you see above delivered to us. Keep Watch ear casing, Мишка embroidery on the headband, and magenta speaker liner. They looked great! But. There’s always a but. The first thing we noticed was that the sound quality wasn’t exactly stellar, but at the price point it actually was nowhere near as bad as it could have been. Listen, I’m never going to say they were studio quality headphones but they weren’t gonna be sold like that.
As far as casual use – subway rides, sitting at home on your laptop, etc. – there were no problems there. The bigger problem was the Skullcandy people effectively dropping off the face of the earth. This started to get us a mite worried, as we had already started promoting these bad boys. But our communiques went unanswered.
What could have happened? Skullcandy had been so excited that they were planning on selling the headphones themselves as well, out of their online store. They even told us – after we pitched having the outside be a fully molded Keep Watch – that we could implement that on the second edition because they envisioned a long partnership.What could have changed? We still don’t really have the answer to that question (at least I don’t think so) but eventually they got back to us and said they just didn’t think they would sell enough of them. Which we knew was utter BS. It’s not like we were doing a run of tens of thousands. Greg tweeted about it here, here, and – to be fair – here.
We were totally pissed, but it may have been a blessing in disguise, because soon after all the samples we had around the office started to break hard and fast. Plus the earbud samples we had requested never even showed up. Less than two months of use and we were getting busted speakers, broken headbands, and fucked up wires. Turns out they were really low quality after all. So I guess we dodged a bullet after all. But that doesn’t excuse Skullcandy’s unprofessionalism. Not cool bros.
