about
the deeper premise is older than the monkey: people pull benign things out of their environment and make them mean something. a cloud becomes a face. a spill becomes an omen. the letters on your hat mean nothing when the machine rolls them; whatever they come to mean is yours, read into them the way meaning has always been read into accidents. we manufacture the accident; you do the rest.
somewhere, a monkey is typing. the infinite monkey theorem says that given enough time, random keystrokes produce the works of shakespeare. we sell the intermediate state: a hat whose letters were struck at random, on the way to a sonnet almost none of them will reach. one roll in four hundred arrives: a VOID hat, with a real sonnet excerpt embroidered where the noise would be.
Objects of Chance is a series of objects made by chance: things with no inherent meaning until their owner gives them one. the first work, 001 · the hat, is a $100 embroidered corduroy cap you don't choose: at checkout, a machine rolls its color and stitched letters at random against published odds. five rarity tiers, common (70%), uncommon (20%), rare (8%), legendary (1.75%) and VOID (0.25%, one roll in four hundred), each own exactly one colorway. a VOID hat carries a Shakespeare sonnet excerpt on the front: the infinite monkey, finally typing Shakespeare. every hat carries the letter-monkey mark on the back, is embroidered to order, ships in 4–6 weeks, and comes with a serial-numbered rarity card and a stitched verification code. future objects will not be hats.
the hat is numbered 001 because it is the first object, not the last. Objects of Chance is a series; future works will be other objects, made the same way: by chance, meaning not included.
a mystery hat. a blind box hat. a blind buy. we call it 001, the hat, because it is the first object and there is only one of it to buy. whatever the name, the mechanic is the same: you pay before you see, and the machine decides.
1. you check out. no options are offered. quantity is the only choice you get to make.
2. at the moment of purchase, a seeded random number generator rolls your hat: first its rarity tier against the published odds, then its colorway, then the letters themselves: random letters in random groups, never more than fourteen characters of front stitch.
3. you immediately receive a rarity card: the tier, a serial number, and nothing else. the color and the letters stay undisclosed until the box is opened.
4. the hat is embroidered to order on a corduroy cap (white thread, five colorways) and arrives in 4–6 weeks. the back of every hat, VOID included, carries the monkey mark: a monkey drawn entirely out of letters.
5. stitched on the left side is a six-character code. anyone can read it and look the hat up; a paper slip in the box registers the hat to you, once, at /claim.
because choice is the product everyone else sells. every other custom hat asks you what you want, and what you want is usually what everyone wants. chance is the only maker whose taste no one shares. no two letter hats are ever the same (the same roll is never minted twice), so the thing on your head exists once, and nobody, including you, picked it.
this also makes it a strange and good gift: for the person who has everything, a thing they cannot already have, because it does not exist until it is rolled.
$100, made to order, ships in 4–6 weeks. all sales final: chance is non-refundable, though defects are replaced. the rarity tier is informational, not an investment. the faq answers the rest.