The Lore

Misfits Labs is a picture company in Chicago.

The name is intentional. Misfits — because the best founders and the best creatives share something: they've spent their lives being called different, odd, eccentric. At some point, those labels stop being a weight and start being a compass. Our best work is for people on the other side of that shift. The ones who stopped trying to fit in and started working to stay free.

Misfits Labs makes pictures for founders, artists, and businesses. Both still images and moving images.

Most people will never experience what you've built in person. They'll meet it through a picture. Online, on a billboard, in print. That picture is the handshake, the first impression, the lasting record. It shouldn't just show what you offer — it should capture the feeling of it and reveal the heart of it. Its idealized truth.

I was a kid making pictures before I was anything else. Before six years co-founding and leading marketing for a venture-backed tech company — before learning how founders think, what's at stake when you're building something from nothing, and how wide the gap can be between what a brand is and what its visual assets look like.

Misfits Labs is what happened when I came back to pictures.

The company is built for the mission of exploring and enriching the human condition through visual art. We create great pictures at a profit, if we can. At a loss, if we must. But always great pictures.

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— Erikc Perez-Perez, Founder & Director