How Two Engineers Got Rich Working 1 Hour a Day Making Things Smell Like Shit
Some companies leave us scratching our heads as to how they became so successful. Liquid Ass, a company founded by best friends Allen Wittman, 45, and Andrew Masters, 49, is one of those companies.
Liquid Ass is a product that’s exactly what it says it is: a liquid substance that literally smells like ass. It smells like “butt crack, kind of sewer smell, with a hint of dead animal in there,” according to Wittman.
To get an idea of just how bad Liquid Ass smells: the owners sent NextShark a sample and the moment we opened the package, the whole office starting stinking and two of our writers started gagging. Our team had to quickly open the doors to try to let the smell out.
Since the company’s inception in 2005, Liquid Ass has been a popular product amongst prankers across the world. It’s Amazon sales page is filled with happy customers leaving review gems like this one:
Liquid Ass was invented by Wittman when he was in high school. He came up with it accidentally while experimenting with a chemistry kit his parents gave him, and he used the mixture to play pranks on other students.
Andrew (left) and Allen (right)
About 15 years later, Wittman was an engineer at a trucking company, but his job was in question after he got notice his company would start outsourcing their work. Remembering that he still had the smelly concoction he made 15 years ago in a Visine bottle, he decide to make the best of his last months at work. He first sprayed it in a work hallway.
“I used about half of that, so an eighth of an ounce. It absolutely tore that place up. We got everyone’s attention within 9,000 square feet. The whole thing started smelling like gas. They put a fan out there. People were walking by with their shirts up over their noses. That’s when Andrew was like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this, you can sell this stuff.’
When the two men decided to sell the concoction as a product, Wittman got to work recreating the recipe. However, he ran into trouble because he wasn’t sure what exactly he had in it.
“It took me quite a few tries to come back up with it. I tried two or three times and it absolutely failed, and I was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing different.’ The stuff that I had was about 15 years old. I’ve been out of high school a lot longer than that — I’m 45.”
After Wittman finally got the original recipe down, he and Masters launched their company Liquid Assets in 2005.
With a smell so pungent and close to the real thing, one wonders whether there’s actually elements of the real thing in Wittman’s concoction. He told NextShark that he went through a liability lawyer and made sure they covered everything. They even put it through a number of tests, including skin testing, ingestion and flammability.
“It’s non-flammable. We did tests on some poor little rabbits in Florida. We knew that they’d be fine. They use rabbits for skin testing and irritation because apparently their skin is very sensitive to chemicals and rashes and things of that sort. They mist them with that stuff for 24 hours and they come out smelling like butt crack. It passed all the tests so we went through and made sure everything was good.”
“I had lots of calls from doctors that said, ‘Hey we got a little girl here that was sprayed with your product and I’m nervous.’ I said, ‘Is there anything going on?’ He said, ‘No, I’m just nervous about the situation.’ So I said, ‘Does the girl smell like ass?’ He’s like, ‘Oh yeah. Oh yeah.’ Everything was fine but people get nervous. You can look this up on the web. One of your fellow Youtubers drank an ounce — Shoenice.”
So the bottom line is that there is supposedly nothing harmful in Liquid Ass. However, that still doesn’t answer the question of whether there is actual feces in it. Wittman recounted a story told to him by a customer who was angry at a fine he had to pay to his local electric company.
“So he gets his bill and he’s gotta pay like $200 to $300 for a fine. He’s like, ‘OK, I’m going to write them a check.’ So he took the check and coats it with Liquid Ass and lets it dry. He goes to the the office, which still used those tubes — so you can think of a bank with a teller, the suction tubes to send checks through. He goes up there and he runs the check through the tube. They close it up and they leave. Well, the next day this guy gets a call from the cop who says, ‘Sir you need to come down to the police station immediately.
“He gets there and the cop is looking at him and says, ‘Apparently you put feces on this check’ and holds up a bag, like an evidence bag with the check in in it, claiming that he had wiped his ass with that check. The cop said, ‘We’re going to send it to the lab and have it checked. You’re going to jail if we find anything on this.’
The test came back 100% clean of feces — so Liquid Ass contains no actual feces in their product.
Since its launch 10 years ago, the product has been a success. Though Wittman and Masters admit that they’re not millionaires, the men make more money than their managers did back in their engineering jobs.
“We were working 55 to 60 hours a week normally. Now, like I say, an hour a day, maybe less maybe more.”
Most of their sales come from word of mouth and from pranksters on Youtube using their product.
“We just keep getting better and better every year. We don’t even make Youtube videos anymore. We started doing a couple. Now there’s so many people uploading videos, it’s just taken over everything.”
Surprisingly, the product has other uses aside from an epic prank tool. It’s also been used for medical training in colleges and psychological therapy.
“It’s for simulations. Simulation when these kids are working on dummies — you have to be able to handle that in a real life situation if someone smells, so it gets them better prepared. There’s also another guy that uses it in sort of a psychology scenario where he cures people on drugs to help make better choices, and he uses Liquid Ass as one of the bad choices in his psychology session. There are some real applications with it that go beyond just panks.”
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