Over the years I have seen plenty of truly terrible Kickstarter products, but usually their inherent awfulness allows them to slip beneath the radar without attracting too much attention from a wider audience. However, the following pitch for ‘Kick In A Box’ is so unfathomably bad that it’s impossible to simply overlook it and carry on with my life as if this never happened.
‘Kick In A Box’ is a box that has a spring-loaded base that can be launched via remote control. It’s intended to be used as a prank gift, with you able to press a button that launches whatever’s contained in the box at the individual who opens it. Although it’s a completely inoffensive product, its creators have decided to sell it for 109CA$, which works out at around $80 in the US. However, this isn’t the strangest business decision made by the prank gadget’s developers, with the entirety of its Kickstarter page basically taking the form of a guide on how not to sell your product on the crowdfunding site.
Firstly, there’s the images of the product itself. KICK in a BOX Inc. (the capital letters are presumably used for emphasis) seemingly didn’t have the budget to stretch to actual photographs of people enjoying the gift, so therefore decided to crudely PhotoShop it into a variety of stock images. Here’s the Kick In A Box creeping in on a children’s birthday party, that is also Braveheart themed for some inexplicable reason:
Here it is being enjoyed by a man and also a woman who’s been edited into the image. The caption for this photo on the Kickstarter page reads: “Couples that have fun together, stay together!” so if you feel lonely, I guess that all you’ve got to do is get yourself a Kick In A Box and a good-looking woman will be PhotoShopped into your life:
And here it is being held in a conference room. I don’t get it either.
KICK In A BOX Inc. literally offers zero explanation for this photo of the product being held aloft next to a man in a bunny costume:
But now that we’ve got the appetizers out of the way, let’s tuck into the main course because the video pitch for Kick In A Box is the crème de la crème of awkward product pitches. The producers of the video try to recreate the “hilarity” of the Kick In A Box with the use of actors, but have made the odd decision to hire a guy who looks like he has a basement filled with severed heads. Seriously, it’s as if they held a casting call and in the list of prerequisites, beneath “previous acting experience,” they had written “must also be on the run from the law.” As this man begins to tell his tale of how he’s grown tired of his girlfriend routinely pranking him, it’s honestly a relief that he seeks revenge by handing her one of these crap boxes, and not by throwing her off a bridge.
So there have you have it; the worst Kickstarter project we’ve ever seen. Somehow this mess has raised $3,000 of its $10,000 goal, so if you’ve 109 Canadian dollars just lying around and you also hate yourself, feel free to donate.
