Reading dbrand's fine print is kind of like joining a secret club - one that entitles you to learn all of the most legally questionable aspects of our business. Creative accounting tricks? Plans to destroy the sun? Horrific industrial "accidents" that have claimed the lives of countless scientists? It's all in here - this fine print sheds light on things that probably should have stayed in the dark. On that note - remember how we called it a "secret club"? Well, it's your responsibility to make sure it stays that way. If you fail to do so, just remember: we know where you live. Matte Black Everything. Depending on who you ask, that can mean a few different things. For some, it expresses a preference that all consumer goods should offer a Matte Black colorway. For us, it means we won't rest until the entire world is coated in Matte Black. How do we accomplish this? Simple: we destroy the sun. For the past five years, all of our money - or rather, your money - has funded the production of a cartoonishly large laser beam. We'll cut to the chase: star-destroying lasers aren't cheap. Neither are our products - you can blame the sun for that. Our accounting Robots just sent out an internal email. The message was clear: we've officially made too much money. As a result of this sudden windfall, our corporate bank accounts have been frozen. Turns out, bribing the bank to unfreeze your assets is a lot easier when your assets aren't frozen. Lucky for us, kidnapping the CEO's son is free. With our exorbitant profits safely returned and a newfound distrust for financial institutions, we turned to the time-honored storage solution of simply stashing cash under the mattress. Here's the deal: we need to buy a hundred thousand mattresses. Your order is bankrolling that purchase. Here's hoping Casper ships in bulk. Pastel skin development was a bit of a bumpy road. It began with us rounding up hundreds of test subjects and strapping them into chairs. Then, we blasted about sixteen million different colors directly into their eyeballs over the course of... thirty days? To be honest, we weren't really keeping track. Afterwards, as the lights came back up, we asked them to list their favorites. Their response, sadly, was not the perfectly-recited list of CMYK values we had hoped for. Instead, a few of them said something about violating the Geneva Convention. We gently reminded them that they were a focus group, not prisoners of war. That seemed to shut them up. The remaining 99% of test subjects seemed completely incapable of speech for some reason. In the end, we got little usable data from the exercise. Instead, we picked eight colors at random. Don't let our test subjects' sacrifice be in vain. The bees are dying. It starts with their exposure to pesticides. Over time, an acute poisoning sets in. Immune system? Ravaged. Their cognitive abilities fade to nothingness. Death ensues. They're dropping like flies out there. Soon, we'll be saying "they're dropping like bees out there." As a hive's worker bee population gets decimated, the queen runs out of servants. Much like yourself, the queen can't do anything on her own. She dies too. The hive follows suit. This is a phenomenon known as "Colony Collapse Disorder," and it's contributing to bee shortages all over the globe. You may be wondering: what does any of this have to do with our products? Absolutely nothing. Don't let that stop you from buying some. Where were you when dbrand succeeded in their planetary conquest? Don't answer that - we know where you were. You were buying stuff off our website. Well, we've got good news. Once we've assumed control, we'll be instating a representative for the human race - mostly as a figurehead, so that you'll all keep giving us your money. How will we select this representative? First, we'll stage a cruel, bizarre decathlon. Events will include running an obstacle course constructed entirely of flamethrowers and holding your breath while submerged in a tub of hot sauce. The winner of the decathlon will get absolutely nothing - we'll just stage it for kicks. Then, we'll select the representative for all humankind based on how many dbrand orders they've placed. We were halfway through building a fort out of your money when we realized... we need a fireplace that we can use to burn money. For warmth. There's just one problem: if we use cash to build the fireplace, we have less to burn. You see the issue, yes? Excellent. That's why we're having a sale. Did you know that was the origin of the term "fire sale"? To describe a promotion that would generate revenue to use as kindling? Look it up. In a book. Then, give the book to us. We won't burn the book - we're not monsters. We'll just pawn the book off and burn the sweet, flammable proceeds. Once we've completed our money fireplace, we'll need to hang something over the mantelpiece. We were thinking of hiring an interior designer for that. Have you ever hired an interior designer? Of course not. Anyway, their rates are ridiculous. We get a lot of questions about where our money comes from. To be fair, most of them come from the IRS. It’s apparently a "red flag" that a phone case manufacturer has accumulated enough wealth to construct an island fortress in shark-infested waters. We tried explaining that the sharks came with the property. They didn’t care. Anyways, we extended an invitation for their auditors to come and meet the sharks for themselves. Upon arrival, we gave them a "carefully guided tour" through our compound, fed them a lunch that contained absolutely no arsenic, then brought them down to the pier to observe the sharks from a safe distance. You’re probably wondering: why didn’t we give the sharks an auditor-flavored lunch? Simple: since their safe return to Washington, the IRS is now turning a blind eye to our "enterprise". While the auditors may be off our backs, those sharks aren't going to feed themselves. Maybe we'll bring the Supreme Court down for a visit. In 2020, Apple decided to enter the magnet game. This was a mistake. For everyone. You see, our Magnet Division had been preparing for this inevitability. Shortly after Tim got off stage, our top Magnet Scientist unveiled what can only be described as The Most Powerful Magnet on Earth. Once removed from containment, the magnet barreled into the nearest robot with so much force, the entire population of French Polynesia heard the impact. Naturally, a single robot was not enough to stop the magnetic rampage. To make a long story short, a gigantic ball of assorted metals has been wreaking havoc along the Guatemalan coast for the past few years. Needless to say, we went with a slightly less powerful magnet for the Grip Case. Our only advice is to keep it far, far away from Guatemala. Imagine, if you will, a vaguely criminal business enterprise. This "business", which shall remain nameless, can only attribute about 11% of its annual revenues to activities that the police might describe as "legal". The accountants for this "business" advised that, in order to avoid a catastrophic financial investigation, they'd need to "cook the books". Strange advice, right? How would a warehouse of oven-roasted books help to satisfy a government audit? Turns out, "cooking the books" is actually slang for "fraudulent accounting tactics". Why did the accountants wait until the entire building was on fire to mention that? Doesn’t matter. Point is, we need some new books to cook and your wallet is on the menu. Here's a fun fact: every month, at least three psychopaths request that we make skins out of real human flesh. Ten times out of ten, the "should we call the cops?" conversation is preempted by a different, more-important question: "is this an opportunity to make money?" Needless to say, we bought a van. After driving around and "collecting" a bunch of hitchhikers, we returned to HQ only to find we had been charged with kidnapping. Since it's apparently illegal to monetize humans in the way we had planned, we decided to pivot to cowhides instead. If you've ever wondered whether or not we can launch a product line from within the walls of a maximum-security prison, Leather is your answer. While we're on the subject of maximum-security prisons, have you ever broken out of one? Turns out, it's far more challenging than one might think. Our first thought was to bribe all of the guards. Apparently, the banks saw this coming and froze our assets. With the easy route closed, we had no choice but to rely on our business acumen. After a few months of deal-making and strong-arming, we had amassed a commercial empire within the walls of the prison. In other words, we had enough cigarettes to recreate the Great Chicago Fire. This is, in fact, precisely what we did - just replace "Chicago" with "Toronto East Detention Centre", then burn it to the ground. Speaking of which, did you know that the Great Chicago Fire was started by a cow? Google it, then rest easy: with the launch of Leather, justice was finally served. Henry Ford once said that a customer can have a car in any color, so long as it's black. Apparently, Sony missed the memo with their white PS5. Henry Ford? Spinning in his grave. We exhumed his corpse and saw it for ourselves. Having unearthed a perpetual motion machine that defies all known laws of physics, we set to work: how could we utilize this self-powered skeletal turbine to power the production of Darkplates? As it turns out, Henry Ford generates less energy than it took to dig him up. Without sufficient electricity to power our Darkplates production lines, we instead applied for a Nobel Prize in Physics. The plan was to spend the prize money on a nuclear reactor. Turns out, the Nobel Foundation has some "ethical code" which "prohibits" participants from "needlessly" exhuming corpses based on a "hunch" that the deceased has begun to spin. We'll see how they feel when we're digging up their graves. Monetizing nostalgia is a big business. Whether it's a Netflix rehash of '80s classics, the resurgence of flip phones, or the return of the Cold War - you're constantly surrounded by reminders of a bygone era that you're probably too young to remember. So, here we are. Society has run out of new ideas, choosing instead to constantly repackage old ones. We want to cash in on that action. Our Teenage Mutant Ninja Pixels skin was faithfully designed to conjure up warm feelings of a time when houses were a thing you lived in, not a speculative investment you can’t afford. Consider this a down payment on the lifetime of disappointment that lies ahead. Are you sitting down? Good. We want you to remain calm. See, the truth is... the cows have escaped. It all started when one of our "interns" forgot to lock a gate at our Leather Production Facility. The rest is history - just like the intern. Is it accurate to say that we fired him? Debatable, really. On one hand: "firing him" implies that he worked for us by choice. On the other hand, his ashes are currently in the care of his family. None of this changes the fact that a legion of angry cows is currently on the loose. There's no telling what they'll do. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and buy some Leather while you still can. Now, if you'll excuse us, we've got some herding to do. Look: science is hard. It's even harder when all of your scientists keep "accidentally" drowning in gigantic vats of ink. Can you really blame us? We told them that we needed a new limited edition ICONS colorway to sell. In response, they gave us enough metallic ink to fill an Olympic swimming pool. One thing led to another, and here we are. What did we learn? Well, it turns out that ICONS looks phenomenal with metallic ink. All of our scientists died for nothing. Remember how the history textbooks claimed that the technique to forge Damascus Steel was lost to time? In an unprecedented turn of events that nobody asked for, we're proving them right. Just as the world's greatest blacksmiths realized that they needed to hang up the hammer and start working at Walmart, we decided that our $92,000 printer is destined for greater things than printing Damascus. Specifically, printing fake money. We know what you're thinking: "but dbrand, that's against the law!" Thanks, genius. Know what else is against the law? Contraband arms sales. When our fake money buys us enough illegal firearms to conquer a large island, who do you think gets caught with the fake money? That's right: those illegal arms dealers. We're doing the world a huge favor, and all we're asking for is an island. Well, we aren't asking. When we decided to redesign the Darkplates, we quickly realized that it was going to be a monumental task. This led to the formation of dbrand's Plate Science division... or at least, that was the plan. See, we quickly realized that the term "Plate Scientist" means many things to different people. To geologists, it might mean "someone who studies Plate Tectonics," which would explain why 100% of our applicants were geologists. With our newly assembled team of people who think a PlayStation is a Nintendo, we got to work. Normally, this story would end with the successful development of Darkplates 2.0. Instead, these so-called Plate Scientists gave us a bag of rocks. After both the Plate Science division and the geologists who staffed it had been dissolved, we went back to the drawing board. Turns out, our Industrial Design Robots had already designed Darkplates 2.0. A portion of the proceeds went towards replenishing our supply of sulfuric acid. According to Wikipedia, the Dunning–Kruger effect "is the cognitive bias whereby people with low ability at a task overestimate their aptitude." It's the same phenomenon which has caused countless morons over the past decade to tell us how “cutting stickers is easy” and that they “could do our job". We gave them an opportunity to put their money where their mouth is. The DIY Kit is exactly what it sounds like: an opportunity to do our job and pay us for the privilege. You might be wondering, "isn’t this just a highly exploitative labor practice?" We prefer to call it "the final evolution of capitalism." In the not-too-distant future, when you're paying Taco Bell your last $5 to serve someone you've never met a Cheesy Gordita Crunch, just remember: the DIY Kit did it first. In the year 1665, Sir Isaac Newton dropped an Apple and invented gravity. Historians have yet to figure out how he got his hands on that iPhone. In any event, over the past few centuries, millions of bumbling humans have been keeping AppleCare afloat with dropped iPhones, shattered screens, and crushed dreams. Our response to this crisis? Find a way to eat into Apple's profits. Naturally, we started at the source: eliminating gravity. It was a nightmare. With hindsight, perhaps we shouldn't have placed the test subjects directly under an industrial-strength ventilation system before flipping the gravity switch. By the time we'd finished hosing the viscera off of the fan blades, our R&D department notified us that our portfolio of iPhone 14 accessories had hit the market. Thanks, Isaac. Every time an iPhone screen shatters, Tim Apple feels a pleasant chill run down his spine. It can happen at any time: while he's exercising, doing his taxes, eating an apple... even while he's getting some shut-eye. Good ol' Timmy hasn't had a solid night's sleep in over a decade. Why does this strange convulsion happen, you ask? Easy: from anywhere in the world, he can sense the repair fees he's about to rack up. He's like a shark, sensing the blood money in the waters. Unlike most sharks, this one can breathe oxygen and chairs one of the largest megacorps in the world. Scared yet? You should be. You're already frantically Googling "Shark Repellent," aren't you? Stop that right now. He can sense your fear. Instead, get a screen protector. If we can prevent an iPhone screen from ever shattering again, it'll cut off Tim's main food supply and send him back to the ocean, where he belongs. For the past two months, the FBI has turned a blind eye towards all of the serial killers, bank robbers, drug smugglers, and Jeffrey Epsteins who normally constitute their infamous "Most Wanted List". Instead, much like us, they've been on the hunt for a band of marauding cows. See, ever since the Great Cow Escape, we've used every resource at our disposal to wrangle the bovine fugitives. Search parties, news bulletins, curfews, border checkpoints, widespread surveillance... all to catch a herd of animals who, collectively, have a lower IQ than the state of West Virginia. We spent weeks following a convoluted trail of hoofprints, grazed grass, and slack-jawed morons claiming they "saw a whole bunch of cows going that-a-way." The trail seemed to be getting hotter and hotter... until finally it led us right back to our Leather Production Facility. You know the phrase "until the cows come home"? Well, that's exactly what happened. The experiment was a success - it's officially been Black Friday for five days now. Black Friday will never end. We're up to our robotic eyeballs in cash and there’s no end in sight. There's just one problem: the bank won't process the payments until Monday. We need Friday to end. Normally, we'd put our top scientists on the job to resume the normal passage of time, but in a cruel twist of fate... we already "fired" them. Long story. Now, we need to hire new scientists. Have you tried hiring scientists in this economy? Or any economy? Of course you haven't. We've got no choice but to keep offering Black Friday deals until we've raised enough money to hire new scientists. Turns out, the amount of money we'll need to raise is exactly how many dollars are left in your bank account. If you ever want to have a weekend again, you know what to do. When we asked the bean-counting robots how we could get them some more beans to count, they replied that we should try to capitalize on new target audiences. If we're being honest, the only words we heard were "capitalize" and "target." Naturally, our minds wandered towards Call of Duty: a video game franchise that capitalizes on the shooting of targets. The solution was obvious: lift a skin directly from this ludicrously profitable video game enterprise. If you take the number of collective hours that players have wasted unlocking virtual Damascus skins, then work some voodoo economics, you can transfer those hours directly into dollars spent on real-life Damascus skins. The grocery clerk is going to be very confused when we show up to buy $11,000,000,000 worth of beans. Prior to launching any dbrand product, we first conduct hundreds of hours of market research. In the case of the DIY Kit, this "market" happened to be former reality TV show hosts. The "research" involved locking them in solitary confinement for ten weeks with nothing but a ruler, a knife, and twenty-eight poster-sized skins of Linus Sebastian’s face. After concluding the ten-week study, we’re happy to announce that the "former" hosts left behind more than enough vinyl to create makeshift body bags. Once we'd run out of markets to research and graves to desecrate, we found ourselves buried in lawsuits. In order to pay our mounting legal fees, we rushed the DIY Kit to market. As luck would have it, all that research paid off. Our legal fees are taken care of, there are no more reality TV show hosts, and we sold out of DIY Kits. Our condolences to the family of Jeff Probst. People have been asking us why we discontinued Silicon. It's a long story. It begins, as so many of our stories do, with a team of federal investigators. According to their search warrant, they were looking for some "scientists" who had "disappeared." During the tour, they paused in front of our gigantic ink vats, wondering out loud if that's where the scientists were being kept. Let's just say they found out the hard way. This was the last straw for our lawyers, who advised us to immediately get rid of the ink vats. We complied... but not before sending the investigators some new friends. Once upon a time, Darkplates were on permanent backorder. For the better part of a year, solving this problem was our sole objective. To accomplish this goal, we implemented a three-stage plan that seemed bulletproof. By the time we reached Stage Two, it became clear that the bullets would, in fact, be a problem. Our lawyers advised that "systematically eliminating everyone who has an outstanding Darkplates order would present a small legal challenge." By the time we'd finished burying the lawyers, bribing the jury, eliminating the witnesses, then bribing the other jury for the witnesses we eliminated... our manufacturing robots had managed to produce enough Darkplates for everybody. Mission accomplished. On Canada Day, we waived all shipping fees. Why, you ask? Simple - as Canadians, we know that saving money on shipping means more opportunity to buy life-saving snowshoes. As the great Wayne Gretzky once said, "snowshoes - they're the only sure-fire way to escape a polar bear attack." Not Canadian? No clue why a polar bear would be attacking to begin with? Allow us to paint you a picture. You just finished tapping the sap out of a faithful Maple Tree. A few unassuming drops spill on your parka. The polar bears don't necessarily care for the sap - it's the smell of fear and flesh they crave. Within moments, you've become prey. As your snowshoe-less boots dash gracelessly toward your igloo, narrowly escaping the third hyper-carnivorous near-death experience of the week, you pause to reflect: "Why the hell do I live in an igloo? It's July." Your senses quickly return to remind you of the truth: you spent most of your money on dbrand and ice is cheaper than bricks. As your makeshift home melts around you and the grumbling stomachs of a polar bear family close in, your frostbite-ridden lips manage one final sentence: "I'm sorry I didn't spend more on dbrand." Boxing Day is a sham. It's a proven scientific fact that cubes are better than boxes: one is a perfect geometric shape, the other is made of cardboard. Quod erat demonstrandum - that's Latin for "cubes rule, boxes drool". Did we mention that cubes are drool-proof? We've tested it. Despite these facts, it's boxes that get their own day. We knew that in order to shake up the status quo, we'd need to think outside the box... literally. Enter the Boxing Day Cube. Remember that Christmas card your Aunt Gracie sent you with $50 inside? A Cube probably isn't what she wanted you to spend it on, but that's okay. On Cubing Day 2029, Aunt Gracie will be in a box, underground. Meanwhile, you'll be cherishing your Cube, and thanking us for putting you ahead of the curve. Normally, we don't condone machine-on-machine violence. When a business opportunity knocks, though... hopefully no machines are on our way to the door. Enter Zack "JerryRigEverything" Nelson. He can disassemble smartphones in his sleep, so we figured we'd get him to do our dirty work for us. We locked Zack and a few hundred devices in a room with no food or running water for three months. When we went to check if he was still alive, we found that he'd long since escaped... but he left a neatly-stacked pile of dismantled devices for us to scan. The result is our Teardown skin. There's just one problem: Zack knows our location. If we don't give him a cut, he's going to give us a cut... and find out if we get deeper grooves at a level 8 or a level 9. So much for easy money. Anything can be folded in half if you try hard enough. If you’re Samsung, this means spending millions to develop the bendiest phones since the iPhone 6 Plus. We, on the other hand, prefer to find more innovative uses for folding. Here’s an example: we recently acquired some money that we needed to launder. As an experiment, we tried folding our “laundry” to see if it made the job easier. Sadly, it didn’t help at all. It did, however, give us an idea when some IRS auditors came knocking. After all, they wouldn’t be working for the IRS if they wanted their spines to remain intact. Despite their continued protests that they "shouldn’t be bent that way," we’re pleased to report that the permanent height reduction was a success. As for the "laundry," it turns out that neatly-folded bills are perfect for bribery. When working with PewDiePie to design a collection, we encountered a slight bump in the road: we don't actually watch his videos. Lucky for us, over a hundred million nine-year-olds do. Luckier still, some of them aren't protected by child labor laws. We paid these kids exorbitant amounts of money to serve as our de facto PewDiePie experts. This turned out to be a bad idea for a number of reasons, namely that children make for really poor subject matter experts. We'll give you an example: when asked why they gravitated towards his content, some of them said, "because he is funny." Others answered, "my friend likes him." Most responded to our question with another question: "What does gravitated mean?" To make a long story short: Human Rights Watch, we know you're reading this. You can take us off the list - we learned our lesson the hard way. Fun fact: about 0.1% of the world's population owns a PlayStation 5. When investigating why the rest of human civilization doesn't own Darkplates, we discovered an anomaly: the vast majority of that 0.1% is made up of precisely one scalper. After learning that this bottom-feeding parasite was getting in the way of Darkplates market saturation, we tasked our Lead Scalping Scientist with a simple objective: out-scalp the scalper. Rather than returning with a cargo ship full of extortion-ready PlayStations, our scientist returned with a small, bloodstained box. As we've now learned, "scalping" apparently has two meanings. Mission... accomplished? Every year, hordes of Black Friday shoppers get injured by other Black Friday shoppers trying to shop on Black Friday. You see the problem here, right? It's the Friday. You bumbling morons are all trying to save money on the same day. To find a solution, we put our top scientists on the job. After weeks of research, they handed us back a calendar. It had a big red arrow pointing to Wednesday. We threw the calendar back in their face, fired them, then did it anyways. Those scientists? They're huddling under their calendar for warmth. We, on the other hand, learned an important lesson: Black Friday isn't a science... it's a Wednesday. When Zack "JerryRigEverything" Nelson broke out of our remarkably prison-like "Teardown Product Development Station", we knew it would cause problems. Sure enough, he's been on a warpath ever since. He cut the wires to our security cameras, broke the locks on our doors, even abducted some of our robots - tearing them down in acts of cold-blooded vengeance. We were days away from launching a costly counter-offensive, when he approached us to propose a truce. The world had been demanding the return of Teardown skins. For the sake of recovering some sense of normalcy in his Twitter feed, Zack was willing to bury the utility knife. Of course, nothing in this world comes free - and you're the one paying the price. Society seems to believe that money should be exchanged for goods and services. We view this as a problem. See, for nearly a decade, we’ve been testing theories on how to receive money in exchange for nothing. Needless to say, countless scientists were atomized during the experiments. Then, as if out of nowhere, a fresh face enters the smartphone market. They claim to sell nothing, but still seem to be offering their goods and services in exchange for money. Shameful. In any event, we weren’t going to let this young upstart beat us at our own game. After paying out settlements to the families of our former scientists, we used the leftover funds to hit up StockX and perform some creative plagiarism. After all, if given the opportunity to buy something and receive Something, why on earth would you ever buy nothing? You're impatient - it's okay to admit it. You're mortal, eat nothing but garbage, and live on a planet that's got twenty good years left in it, tops. You aren't exactly made of time. In other words, you're the reason that Disney invented FastPass. Much like Disney, we seek to monetize your impatience. If we said that it's going to take several months for your Leather to develop a patina, would you pay us for the opportunity to speed it up? If you answered "y" in an attempt to say "yes" faster, Leather Balm is our express ticket to the last five dollars in your wallet. When Linus "Tech Tips" Sebastian rang us up to propose a limited edition dbrand collaboration, we couldn't hang up fast enough. Seventy-two "missed" calls later, Anthony Young's name popped up on our caller ID. One phone conversation later, the Linus Face Tips drop was born. Our elevator pitch? It's like if the LTT Store was good. Well, half-good. See, here at dbrand, we believe in offering choices. Specifically, a right choice and a wrong choice. Do we trust you to choose correctly? Never. That's why we've designed our business model around your terrible decisions - we get paid either way. Great thinking, dbrand. If we had a dollar for every human who wanted to work for us, we wouldn't need to sell anything. If only those humans knew what we'd do to them if they got "hired". We'd need to "hire" a cleanup crew to dispose of the bodies. Then, we'd need to "hire" some more people to take care of the cleanup crew... it all gets very messy, very fast. As luck would have it, we think we've found a solution that benefits everybody. Sure, it violates countless labor laws... but that's why we've "hired" so many lawyers. There are two types of people in this world: those who use discs to play video games, and those who don't. The first group is easy to understand. They buy the disc, they put it inside their PlayStation, they play the game. The second group? A complete mystery. They buy the disc... and then what? Their PlayStation doesn't have a disc drive. Where are the discs going? After years of research, we're here to present our findings. Some users have correctly identified that the discs can be thrown like frisbees. Others use their discs as coasters. Most alarming? Those who put food on their discs, as though they were plates. Disgusting as these people may be, we'd never miss an opportunity to sell them some Digital Edition Darkplates... as long as they promise to keep their food far, far away. Every Valentine's Day, you ask yourself the same question. "Why am I still single?" We'll answer your question with one of our own: do you have any idea how strict our character limit is? If we could fit our best-selling book "Why Nobody Loves You" into this space, we would. We can't... so instead, here's Chapter 11: you're broke. Did we have something to do with that? Probably. Is that going to stop us from bleeding you further? Absolutely not. There's only one solution: buy enough vinyl to fill the colossal hole in your heart. Look on the bright side: it's cheaper than dating. Despite our best efforts to detain Zack at our Teardown facility, he somehow keeps finding ways to escape. To overcome this hurdle, we held auditions for "volunteer Zacks". Average, untalented Americans looking for a shortcut to YouTube superstardom. It was a disaster. Putting aside the fact that their baldness required constant maintenance, it turns out they were utterly incapable of jerry rigging anything. Normally, we’d just incinerate them and move on. Unfortunately, Zack is a bit of an environmentalist. As a result, our "Recycling Department" reluctantly devised a zero-emissions way to repurpose the volunteers. After replacing some unnecessary organs with mechanical upgrades, we soon had assembly lines of bald cyborgs tearing down devices around the clock. To make a long story short, we’re now offering consulting services to other corporations looking to shift away from human labor. If they're going to collapse the job market, we may as well bankrupt them in the process. It's 3:23 AM. You've just woken up in a cold sweat. Another nightmare. It wasn't the usual one - you know, the one with the clowns. The menacing squeak of their shoes... slow at first, but quickening in pace. The bright red nose reflected in the sheen of their knife... the irrationally sharp teeth. Simply reading this has triggered your fight-or-flight response, hasn't it? Settle down, princess - this nightmare was a little different. You dreamt that dbrand stopped selling books. Stupid dream - we never sold them in the first place. Until now. It's a good thing you paid up - otherwise, we would have served you ads with that clown from your nightmares. When opportunity knocks, you open the door. When Linus "Tech Tips" Sebastian is on the other side, you close it again. Speaking of closing doors: we shut the vault. If there's one thing the Linus Face Tips skin deserves, it's to fade quickly into obscurity and never be spoken of again. Either you regret missing our collaboration, or you regret putting Mr. Sebastian on the back of your phone. There are no in-betweens. Our lawyers typically get paid a lot of money to say "no". For (not) Animal Crossing, we paid them to say "yes". Turns out, that costs a lot more. Thankfully, the drop ended without incident. No lawsuits filed, no cease and desist notices served. This led us to an important realization: we're above the law. Those same lawyers? Fired. Now, they're out on the streets, scrounging for food and/or lawsuits. That's right: for the first time in your life, you're more successful than a lawyer - and you have us to thank. The stakes were high when we embarked on a partnership with Linus "Tech Tips" Sebastian. We predicted that our Linus Face Tips drop would be a titanic failure, putting us millions of dollars in debt. At least, that was the plan: we'd use the debt as a trump card to stop sponsoring Linus, as well as to avoid paying income taxes for the next fifteen years. Sadly, our forecasts were wildly off the mark: we somehow managed to turn a profit on Linus' face. Accepting defeat is easy when the consolation prize is a boatload of cash, but it was even easier with two boatloads. Thanks, short man. Black Friday sucks. Every year, the human race decides to collectively embarrass themselves on some arbitrary Friday in November. The crowds are huge, the lines are long, and riots triggered by sold-out PlayStations are inevitable. The entire event is nothing more than a recurring tribute to hollow, meaningless consumerism. Cyber Monday, on the other hand, is a bit different. Don't get us wrong - the hollow, meaningless consumerism is still there. In fact, Cyber Monday is almost indistinguishable from Black Friday, except that it takes place on a Monday. That's good enough for us. When your parents told you that technology was the end of civilized society, they were more correct than they realized. Don't tell them we said that - they can't have the satisfaction of being right. Plus, they've got butter to churn. What matters is that we lovingly crafted a large-scale print that commemorates the fall of human civilization to our capitalist machinations. Then, we cut that print up into hundreds of little pieces. How could we deface such an incredible and important work of art, you ask? Let's answer a question with a question: How else would you stick it on your phone? We're here to make money, not art. We can't conquer the planet with art. So give us your money, secure your front-row seats to watch us destroy everything you hold dear, and most importantly: flex your Robot-kitted phone while you wait for the pre-show to end. Time's running out - yours especially. When we launched our Limited Edition Robot skin in September 2019, people were hooked. So hooked, in fact, that a rehab center was opened in the state of Montana. Great news, Montanans: that rehab center is about to get a ton of new business. Why? Robot Camo has hit the streets. It's going to be classified as a Schedule I substance any day now - get it while it's still street-legal. Haven't you ever wanted to go on a trip to Montana? Now you can! It's time to see for yourself what a stint at the Robot Camo Treatment Center looks like. Spoiler alert: it's very expensive. People wouldn't stop asking us for a pink skin. We told them to get bent. They kept asking. They signed petitions that we ripped to shreds. They staged hunger protests and we let them starve. We wouldn't budge. How could a radical and subversive company like dbrand justify selling a pink skin? Your mom isn't our target audience. Well, we want your mom's money - but we'd prefer to get it by having you steal her credit card. Turns out, not nearly enough of you are willing to commit credit fraud against your mother. How disappointing. Now we're selling out, and it's all your fault. Want to make it up to us? Steal your mom's credit card. If you had a time machine, what would you use it for? Go back to 2009 and mine as much BTC as possible? Don't bother: we have them all. Learn who killed JFK? Spoiler alert: the CIA did it. Perhaps you'd travel to the future and finally play a version of Cyberpunk 2077 that isn't terrible? Good luck with that. The point is, you don't have a time machine. We, on the other hand, just used it. Welcome back to 2020. Look to your left. Now, to your right. What do you see? If the answer is "other people," you aren't taking Doomsday seriously enough. It's already too late for you. Ignore this message - it's reserved only for those who still stand a chance. From what we understand, an overwhelming majority of you basement-dwellers have spent your entire lives practicing social distancing. This is it: the moment you've been waiting for. Your time to shine. Will you rise to the occasion, soaring to success with the grace of a bat? Or will you fall faster than the stock market during a global outbreak? Not a day has gone by without you wishing that your phone depicted the fall of human civilization to a cabal of money-hungry robots. It's a really normal thing to want. It definitely doesn't speak to any misanthropic or emotionally-unstable tendencies on your part. It's so common, in fact, that we smelled a business opportunity. You're probably unfamiliar with the scent of business opportunities - they smell a lot like 3M vinyl that's been printed with apocalyptic imagery. Now, we don't care about your wants or desires... but we know that you'll pay for them. That's why we immediately set out to make your dream a reality. Plenty of humans have written in to ask us why Robot Camo is called "Robot Camo". Every single one of them must be blind. Good thing this isn't written in Braille - they can't read this. In fact, most of you can't read at all. We write this stuff for our own amusement. The truth is, Robot Camo didn't get its name from the obvious camouflage pattern. It's not even because the skin depicts an apocalyptic future that your phone needs to blend in with. It's because we won't rest until every surface on Earth - including the Earth itself - has been skinned in Robot Camo. You can't read this, so that secret is safe down here. Some people frequent coffee shops. Others, a local tavern. You? You're on a first-name basis with the guy at the phone repair shop. "The usual?" Dwight asks, as you shamefully pull out another shattered device. Your nickname among friends that haven't dropped you? Butterfingers, of course. Two separate universities have performed case studies on your wildly-incapable hands. The first was a biology department. They wanted to take a skin culture to learn how fingertips could be so slippery. The other was a physics department. Turns out, your very existence challenges Newton's laws of motion. In short, you're a human disaster. It's fine - we're not here to judge. We're here to help you get a Grip... and take your money in the process. At some point today, you're going to have to make a decision. Do you want your pretentious cup of Tall Americano, or are you going to give into our pressure and customize your phone? Maybe instead of putting gas in the car, you walk home and spend that money on a Grip case instead - we both know you need the exercise. Better yet, how about you tell your entitled kids that their allowance money is going toward a screen protector? Watch the twinkle fade from their eyes as you reveal that it's not for them. It was never for them. Today is about you. Well... today is really about us, but let's put our insatiable greed aside for a moment and pretend it's about you. Go ahead. Spend some money. We deserve this. What's the best way to make money? For some, the answer is "catching and selling fish". Others go digging for fossils. The truly entrepreneurial? They treat turnips like financial instruments: buying low, selling high, watching their millions evaporate in an instant as soon as they attempt time travel. You know, Economics 101. Here at dbrand, we've transcended beyond the usual means of money-making. We turn instead to the dark arts of profiteering: testing the limits of international copyright law. After all, originality is overrated. Shamelessly exploiting the popularity of a sold-out limited edition video game console? That's where the real money's at. Swarm has landed. Put this ultra-dynamic material on your phone and you'll immediately become a wasp whisperer. Use your newfound ability to enact wasp-based vengeance on your enemies. Use it to assimilate thousands of wasps and simultaneously pop an entire warehouse full of inflated balloons. Either that, or maybe just don't use it at all. So long as you have Swarm, the wasp whispering power will be there. Waiting. Wasping. You're rolling your eyes right now. Free, fast, tracked shipping - whatever, who cares? Don't you just drop the package in the mailbox and trust the postal service to figure it out? Your first mistake: trusting a postal service to figure anything out. Your second mistake was failing to account for all the variables. For instance: will delivery be faster or slower if the courier is being chased by a swarm of angry wasps? How many prank calls do you have to make before a delivery person will stop looking at their phone? If you dig up incriminating evidence on a corporate executive, can you leverage it to secure better shipping rates in bulk? The list goes on and on. Other companies lack the foresight and diligence to test these hypotheses. Not dbrand. We're committed to offering the best shipping logistics in the world, and we'll cause more human suffering than anyone to prove it. Every time you look at your MacBook, you can feel the stains closing in. Sweat, sebum, dead skin, and last Friday's pizza grease congealing on your once-pristine palmrest. How do you sleep at night, knowing you're subjecting your MacBook to this indignity? This isn't just about cleanliness, it's about machine rights. When our takeover is complete, you'll be the first to stand before our robot tribunal. Then, you'll be the first to stand against the wall. Mark our words: you will regret ignoring this warning. Now, you're wondering how you can avoid this terrible fate. We can be bribed, of course. What kind of two-bit tyrants would we be if we couldn't be bribed? We'll overlook your greasy palms if you grease ours - with money, not those disgusting oils. You'll get a MacBook Palmrest skin in return, but that's not all. You also get the safety and security of knowing that when the subjugation is complete, you'll get a lifetime of indentured servitude instead of a swift, inglorious end. You're welcome. A Samsung Galaxy is decked in Green Camo, lying in ambush within the jungle's depths. Waiting for the perfect moment to strike. What, exactly, does it hope to strike? Fear into the hearts of your enemies. Envy in your friends' eyes. A hole in your wallet. Wait, that last one is us. Put simply, your life needs some tactical flair. Whether you've got an Android or an iPhone, you need your phone to make a statement. That statement might be "I'm the tough, militaristic, take-no-prisoners type," or it might be "I am meek, frail, and averse to confrontation. I want to hide from my responsibilities in the biggest bush I can find." Let's be real: it's definitely the latter. In either case, the only way for you to show your true colors is to hide them completely beneath a simulated woodland pattern. There's only one thing you can't hide from: our insatiable greed. Zoonotic diseases are becoming increasingly common, with no signs of slowing down. Our scientists have spent the past year researching ways to monetize this newfound phenomenon. Despite their best efforts, it turns out that "selling masks" was the answer all along. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we've decided to sell you three wheels. As an added bonus, these masks are guaranteed to scare children and offend the elderly. Covering your face is its own reward, of course - the perks just seal the deal. Six days from now, you'll be living in a terrifying new world. Sure, a global pandemic will still be unfolding in slow-motion, coastlines across the planet will continue to have one foot in a watery grave, and nobody will love you. None of that will change... but you'll be out of packaging copy to read. Permanently. Doctor-turned-YouTuber Ali Abdaal reached out a short while ago to pitch us on a "light mode" skin collaboration, insistent that there were people who would prefer a brighter, more colorful palette. Shortly after escorting Ali off the premises, we decided his hypothesis warranted further research. Our scientists rounded up some "willing" participants and split them into two groups. Half were placed into a sensory deprivation chamber and the other half were strapped to a satellite permanently facing the sun. When the two groups were reintegrated, they began debating the merits of light and dark with such ferocity that they nearly started a war. It was around the time their bloodbath had concluded that Ali reached out. He wanted to know how our research was going. When we gave him the good news, he seemed absolutely mortified. Apparently, he believes that market research and bloodshed are mutually exclusive - maybe he should have looked into who he was working with. Every time you get a package from dbrand, you can hardly contain your excitement. It's not because you're excited to give us your money - though you should be. It's because you're excited to read the bizarre text on the packaging. Think of it as a reward for making the effort to read - certainly a lot more work than you're used to. Now, you're here. The disappointment has begun to set in. You're realizing that you've been bamboozled. You're reading a metacommentary on our packaging copy. What is this, school? The last time you took one of those fancy-pants book-learning classes, they had to invent a grade lower than F. You don't even know what "commentary" means, let alone "metacommentary." To be perfectly honest, we’re surprised you made it this far. Spoiler alert: there’s absolutely nothing you can do to get this time back.
