One woman's joyfully morbid quest to collect merch from failed companies

Christina Warren collects death trophies from MoviePass, CNN+, Fyre Festival, and more

By Reid McCarter  |  April 28, 2022 | 7:06pm
Aux Features Companies
One woman's joyfully morbid quest to collect merch from failed companies
A few more items for Warren’s collection. Photo: Daniel Boczarski

Christina Warren is a software developer and former journalist who, like the fun version of a serial killer we never knew existed, likes to collect trophies from the corpses of companies that have died terrible deaths.

An NPR article profiling this noble pursuit lets us know that Warren has spent six years building her hall of corporate failure, which grew out of the “pile of endless swag she’d get at tech conferences.” Inspired by the fact that her horde of conference junk included promotional items from a number of companies that “have gone out of business in really spectacular ways,” Warren decided to actually start building out a proper collection made up of souvenirs from failed companies.

She now owns stuff like an Enron-branded mug, a CNN+ PopSocket, a sweatshirt from the doomed start-up Fast, a MoviePass t-shirt, and Fyre Festival t-shirts that she bought on eBay. Basically, any branded junk from companies “that were flying high, too close to the sun” belongs in her collection.

Warren, as the article notes, sympathizes with the ordinary employees who suffer from the fallout of ill-conceived or poorly executed business ideas, but she enjoys collecting artifacts from these failures because it’s a good way for her to reflect on how “certain things get the attention they get” and the ways in which “they fall out of favor.”

Naturally, then, Warren really wants to get something from Theranos, which is tough because counterfeits and overpriced merch (her limit is $75 on a single item) from particularly noteworthy failures make collecting difficult. She still holds out hope, though, that something—even just a Theranos pen—will surface one day.

Read the rest of the article while waiting around to see if, maybe one day, Warren will open a private museum to showcase this collection, which can end up going bankrupt after a lavish promotional campaign and end up collapsing into itself.

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