Richard's blog

Yesterday a guy in Adidas (of all places) directed me to MSY in Box Hill to buy some computer stuff I need. He was raving about how cheap it is. He was raving way more than he raved about any of the Adidas stuff. So I thought I should check it out.

I went to their website. It is a true study in absolute shitness. You can do better than this with a five-year old chimpanzee and Microsoft Word. I don’t know how they managed to block out half their heading but they have. Of course, it’s perfect branding for them – it says cheap, it says Asian (this is a definite positive) it says cheap and cheap some more. I don’t know why anyone would go into computer hardware, it’s such a race to the bottom – margins are wafer thin and the stock’s superseded almost as soon as you’ve bought it. Great for the consumer though…

What I’m trying to work out is, did these guys:
a) slap up the shittiest website they possibly could because this is genuinely the extent of their style
b) maintain a shitty-looking website because at some point they realised that having a shitty website was the perfect way of saying “we are Asian and we are cheeeeaap”
c) pay some branding consultants a quarter of a million bucks to do market research and then engineer them the shittiest looking website since the early 1990s.

I’m guessing it might have started out as a) but progressed to b) or c) because these guys are obviously not amateurs – ten years in the game, 17 stores (they even give you how many square metres the store is – so useful) and big expansion plans too.

In any case, I love their branding and they’re totally getting my patronage!

–UPDATE–
I have just discovered that MSY’s website and PDFs are so unreadable as to have spawned their own fanpage, which takes MSY’s data and puts it into a more legible, aesthetically pleasing format… hilarious… check out MSY but Readable