Mother New York Creates a Store to Sell Its Side Projects

By Patrick Coffee 

As we all know, every agency worth its salt encourages its employees to indulge a bit in their side projects, be they research-heavy (tracing the evolution of popular logos), funny for a few seconds (the “real” pronunciations of agency acronyms), satirical (auto-generating Cannes case studies), or sad in a kind of brilliant way (collecting the millions of songs that have never been played on Spotify).

As a few creatives put it back in 2014, Side Projects Get You Jobs. If you’re really good at Instagram, you might even get a job at Deutsch L.A.!

Mother New York, however, has taken the concept a step further: they want to use those indulgences to earn a little extra cash with products like this “ass heart lapel pin,” which you should totally buy and wear to your next super formal awards show.

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ass heart

The agency, which recently combined apps, pizza, sportscars and GIFs to get BuzzFeed’s attention with pet project/incubation thingy Push for Pizza, just launched Mother Made, which is “a very fun and, well, different e-commerce site” consisting entirely of products and/or services produced by Mother employees in their spare time.

This all makes sense because–as a curiously edited Wikipedia page/AdBrands entry tells us–Mother has “a reputation of being one of the cooler agencies in the world.” Now, “creators and designers are able showcase and sell projects that go beyond client work.”

mother ny 1

There are pins from designer Tom Grunwald, quilts from creative studio manager Tamara Stoddard (the Jersey one above has sold out, sorry) and even custom tweets from one Chris Roan, who manages the agency’s investments and “incubated businesses” like the aforementioned pizza app while writing some “exceptionally adequate” Mean Tweets with lots of references to rappers and their significant others.

Regarding the project, Mother co-founder Paul Malmstrom tells us:

“Side projects are important. There’s lots of creative folks working here at Mother, many with passions outside of the work we do for our clients, so it was a no brainer that we wanted to find a way to support their passions – what better way than to create a shop. Mother simply helps with the start up costs and the individual maker makes the profit. Mother gets whatever funny, or elegant halo effect in return.”

Some of the products, like besturlever.com and the booty-shaking app, aren’t even for sale, so we question the economic viability of this shop.

But someone somewhere is counting cool points–and where better to observe that halo effect than right here in the comments?!

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