How to Build a $1M Physical Product Brand For $0 Upfront 👌

The Muddycap Blueprint

This is @muddycap, a South Korean furniture designer who’s gotten the attention of HYPEBEAST, HIGHSNOBIETY, Marie Claire, and he even got a shout out from Virgil Abloh in 2020.

His unique and innovative chair and couch designs have earned him a following of over 220,000 followers and every single time he posts he has people in awe and clamouring to buy his chairs. But if you look at his bio, you’ll notice something is missing… a link to buy any of these chairs.

The reason there’s no link is because these chairs don’t actually exist. The images you’re seeing are renderings of his chair designs, and not physical chairs themselves. Ergo, Muddy has essentially built up a waitlist of over 200,000 customers without having to spend a single dollar.

Since he began posting in 2020, Muddy has only ever released one of his chairs for purchase. Earlier this year he collaborated with the South Korean based cellphone case brand, Gragg to release the “Baby Chair” for 9,000,000원 or ~$7,000 USD. Despite not being available in the US and Gragg having less than 20,000 Instagram followers the chair sold out thanks to Muddycap’s following.
^{It is unclear how many total chairs were made available.}

To guarantee profitability for both Muddycap and Gragg, all chairs were custom-made and manufactured upon order. Therefore, not only was $0 spent to build up a waitlist of engaged customers, but they didn’t have to spend any money manufacturing the product until they had received payment. It may have cost a bit more to custom build each chair upon order but it significantly lowered the risk for both parties.