These Start-ups Had a Pretty Cool Post-It-Art War

Samsung Accelerator (top left) and the Daily Burn (bottom left, right) Photo: Olidegaldo/Instagram; Emily Duong

Emily Duong, at the time an art director for the Daily Burn, a fitness company, was looking out her office window on 26th Street and Sixth Avenue last December when she noticed a Post-it Santa in the window of digital agency Flightpath across the street. Convinced she could do better, she and her team of designers put up a Super Mario Post-it window and tweeted a picture of it to her neighbors: “You just got 1UP’d!” Flightpath responded by adding a full holiday window, complete with menorah and Christmas tree.

It was on. Next, Duong and her colleagues created an image of the internet meme Nyan Cat, its rainbow tail stretching across five windows. But competition arrived from an unlikely direction: not across, but up. Five floors above the Daily Burn, the Samsung Accelerator had created a two-story mural of a unicorn, vomiting a rainbow.

Next, Cocktail Kingdom, on 25th Street, made a My Little Pony cartoon. Samsung did a tribute to the Donkey Kong arcade game. Flightpath struck back with a Star Wars window. The most ambitious endeavor by far was Samsung’s Broad City window, a two-story extravaganza. But Duong sees things differently: “I think we won.” 

*This article appears in the December 14, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.