What do you do if you’re a European startup competing against the likes of Box and Dropbox, and are looking to make a splash in international markets like the U.S.?
Well, if you’re the Dutch startup WeTransfer (which raised a cool $25 million about three years ago to take the U.S. market by storm), you get weird. Really, really, avant garde-level weird.
The latest overture to the hipsterati is the company’s three video set collaboration with King Krule (which I applaud for no other reason than it lets me write about King Krule on the site).
Here’s the first video from the collaboration between the (Beyonce-and-Tyler-the-Creator-and-New-Yorker-approved) artist and the file transfer and storage service.
On the WePresent “platform” (which, back in my day, we would have called a “web zine”), Krule discusses the process for creating the video — as he will for all subsequent releases — with its directors and creative team.
The first video in the series was directed by longtime Krule collaborators Michael and Paraic Morrissey who work under the nom de video cc. Wade.
The King Krule collab isn’t the first time that WeTransfer looked to cash in on some cultural cache. The company has teamed up with McSweeney’s on a story collaboration called “Clean” written by Shelly Oria and Alice Sola Kim.
Whether or not these forays into the world of the Kool Kidz are the result of a shift in strategy brought on by the company’s relatively new chief executive, Gordon Willoughby (formerly of Amazon), they’re pretty great. (At least, in the sense that we’re writing about WeTransfer for the first time in a few years.)
I can’t say whether WeTransfer’s file sharing service is notably better or worse than Box or Dropbox, but their hipster cred is undeniable. Points to you, WeTransfer. Points to you.
