I’m not entirely sure what Snapchat was thinking when it debuted its latest attempt at making money, but considering how many snaps I receive from my friends at the beach, selling a beach towel is totally #onbrand for the messaging app.
You can now buy an official Snapchat beach towel, a blindingly yellow monstrosity, complete with the color filters and text overlay options you see on your mobile device. The towel costs $25, and you can snag it on Amazon.
Amazon
If Snapchat’s towel is as plushy and comfy as those you can buy at your local Bed Bath & Beyond, $25 is a pretty sweet deal. But it’s impossible to tell whether or not the five-foot-long beach accoutrement is high quality, considering the description of the product was ripped right out of chapter three of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
A towel, The Snapchatter’s Guide to Ghost World says, is about the most massively useful thing a Snapchatter can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Ephemera Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Chillzaan IV, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Del’etooine; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy Rio Venezio; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Great Blue Permanatee (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
It’s unclear why Snapchat didn’t launch this new product pivot on Towel Day, May 25, which would make sense if the bros behind Snapchat wanted to pay homage to Hitchhiker fandom. It’s a weird product, perhaps discussed the same day CEO Evan Spiegel filmed this bizarre explanation of the ephemeral messaging app.
The two reviews on the product are mixed—one gave the product five stars simply for nailing the sci-fi references, which is incredibly easy to do if you execute a simple Google search. The other, however, said “Great towel for David Copperfield (the illusionist, not the semi-autobiographical Dickens’ novel).”
If you do decide to snag a towel before they disappear (sorry, I had to), you should make sure to pick up Android footie pajamas and a Facebook-branded Patagonia vest for the chillier months. Because becoming a walking billboard for your favorite mobile technology is always in style.
H/T TechCrunch | Screengrab via Amazon
