Since he started in 2004, Lindland’s company has grown, changing its name from Cordarounds to Betabrand in 2010 to reflect its new, expansive offerings, and clearing almost $10 million in sales last year. Not bad for a business that was mostly conceived as a lark. While the clothing is still whimsical, the tactics behind it aren’t. Lindland has taken everything he’s learned about e-commerce and the physics of the internet and is using it to create a company that is challenging the design process and trying to recalibrate the way fashion is made.

The first thing I noticed when approaching Betabrand’s storefront in San Francisco’s Mission District last fall was the company’s van. Parked at the curb, it featured two men in shiny clothing courting a white tiger and a foxy lady, while a white owl flew overhead shooting lasers out if its eyes. It was like a Dungeons & Dragons illustration someone might draw if they did too many Whip-Its while watching Napoleon Dynamite. Inside the store’s display window stood a four-foot-tall replica of the Golden Gate Bridge where shoppers could snap selfies when trying on the costumier lines of clothing in front of a rotating cast of inflatable monsters that includes a Godzilla, a Bigfoot, and a hanging monkey. A huge mural of Santa Claus impaling Dracula on a giant candy cane advertised Santa Slays Halloween, Betabrand’s first videogame.

The storefront and the website are sort of opposites. While the display window contains a replica skyline, Betabrand’s homepage looks like any other online retailer, with professional photographs of attractive people wearing its clothing. But when you start clicking on those items, the stories pop out — about how a hoodie can turn you into a mercenary, or how a fabric coated with super-reflective glass nanospheres can repel paparazzi or how a jacket shields subway riders from a “category-5 snot storm.” The site’s Model Citizen section hosts a collection of what is basically user-generated advertising: Devotees send in photos of themselves trekking across Iceland in an absurdly shiny disco suit (#discotrek) or BASE jumping off the top floor of a hotel. When users started submitting videos of themselves skiing out of helicopters in a Betabrand jumpsuits, the company took its YouTube Channel one step further and created mini commercials for new lines, interviewed well-known comedians wearing Betabrand garb, and made “behind the scenes” videos about the making of its products.

Seeing the clothes in the Betabrand’s boutique, however, is sort of like seeing marionettes with their strings cut. Dress Pant Sweat Pants, such an amusing idea online, just look like a normal pair of sweats. Well, actually they look like pants, but I guess that’s the point. Above the racks of Dress Pants Yoga Pants (their version of Dress Pants Sweat Pants for ladies) and Gay Jeans (which reveal a set of rainbow threads just under the surface) are the company’s headquarters, with a dozen workers toiling at their desks, standing or otherwise. Behind a station of disco clothing — pants, shirts, hoodies, and even a jumpsuit made out of shimmering material that’s a cross between lame and mylar — sit the store staff. On the other side of a rickety wall the brand’s designers, pattern makers, and seamstresses mock up about three new prototypes a day, which are then voted on by customers to determine whether they get mass-produced. At any time, any employee can become a guinea pig. On the day I visited, Lindland, who stands about six foot three, was called down to be measured so they could size a garment for taller dudes.

The space is an amalgamation of internet startup and brick and mortar: It houses a successful e-commerce retailer that encourages users to submit ideas for clothing designs that the company will manufacture if enough people buy it in advance; it is a fashion supplier for people who want clothing that serves a specific function; and it is a boutique of outrageous apparel for techies scouring the Mission for something hilarious to wear to a theme party. It’s not all things to all people, but it’s all things to the people in its orbit.

When San Francisco saw yet another influx of tech workers a few years ago, Betabrand was in a position to capture a new audience — an audience that lived on the internet, enjoyed its wacky bent, and was seeking a kind of practicality and comfort that wasn’t being addressed by other clothing companies. This was around the same time that Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn, and Yelp were gaining tons of attention for their huge IPOs. In the spirit of maximizing press potential, Lindland created the Executive Hoodie, a hooded sweatshirt made out of pinstriped blazer material, an official sport coat of Silicon Valley, and launched it concurrent with Facebook’s IPO in 2012. Its tongue was both firmly in its cheek and sticking out at the rest of the tech world. Subsequently the company started to specialize in what it calls West Coast Workwear: Bike to Work Pants, to ease a cycling commute with a “slightly higher back rise that is optimal for crack-coverage”; Dress Pants Sweat Pants; Sons of Britches, pants for the “amateur stuntman lifestyle”; and a Ping Pong Polo shirt, for the type of people who have a ping-pong table near their workstation because they don’t want to seem so stuffy that they go to an office, or so square that they have to put on big-boy dress-up clothes.