To understand the brand Advisory Board Crystals – or Abc. to those who know them – it perhaps helps if you don’t think of them as a brand at all. Based out of Los Angeles, Abc. makes detail-orientated hoodies and T-shirts daubed in psychedelic patterns or layered with asymmetric vinyl printing and enigmatic typography. It also dabbles in selling charms and healing crystals (a DIY bracelet set retails at $85), under a New Age meets vaporwave, abducted-by-aliens aesthetic, and has garnered a reputation for creating tight runs of products that immediately sell out. But there’s a little more to it than that.

Founded by Mr Remington Guest and Ms Heather Haber – who met in 2015 in the backseat of an UberPool and hit it off so much they started a relationship and a business together – Abc. is unusual. “It’s hard to explain what we are,” Mr Guest tells us over the phone from California. “Like, is it a brand? Is it a feeling? Is it an idea? Is it a series of projects? And that’s something we’ve always grappled with.”

They shrug off the streetwear label (“What does that even mean anymore anyway?”) and are particular about not being too tightly defined. “We don’t just want to be like everyone else, selling things just to sell things. We do things in a different way.”

Any hoodie-flogging enterprise that positions itself as “not like other brands” runs the risk of sounding insufferably pretentious – a vacuous, pseudo-enigmatic LA vanity project about crystals and tie-dye sweaters that nobody asked for. However, Mr Guest and Ms Haber are so likeable, and Abc. is so fascinating once you dig into it, that accusations of this feel misplaced.

First, there’s the crystals. Abc. resists the Goop-esque associations “crystal culture” has, and instead proposes the idea that crystals are cool simply just, well, because they are. “We both liked crystals, but we didn’t want to associate with being that kind of person,” says Ms Haber. “Instead we see them as sculptural objects or pieces of art readymade by the Earth. People can just take what they want from it.”

Whether it’s the idea that a lustrous chunk of quartz has innate healing powers or you just like the way it looks, Abc. isn’t afraid to go there. That’s why on its website you’ll find a packet of labradorite beads (said to be excellent for honing one’s intuition) alongside a DIY bracelet kit of manmade Swarovski crystals. It’s contradictory – a bit daft, even – but that’s entirely the point. “We love playing into the irony and the tongue-in-cheek aspect of crystals, like what they can represent,” says Mr Guest.

Somewhat refreshingly, Abc. doesn’t send its products to influencers, and it doesn’t pay for Instagram marketing or advertorials. “We don’t even know how to do any of that,” laughs Mr Guest. “We started with no money, no real plan, no one else helping us, except us two doing everything. Most brands these days [are founded by someone] who’s a descendant of someone, or they have a lot of celebrity support. We never did.”

Instead, the couple rely on the reliable if old-fashioned idea that if the product you’re selling is impressive, people will find it anyway.

And the product is impressive, which is why we’ve collaborated with the brand. As part of its “Planet Saving Information” capsule, Abc. has created a new hoodie in a tan colour exclusive to MR PORTER. It’s still just a hoodie, sure, but it sings with detail, featuring a luminescent vinyl print achieved through a complex printing process incorporating “a proprietary glitter” that the pair discovered in an LA print shop, and has printing over the seams as well as inside-out sewing. There’s also the small holographic authenticator that the brand puts on everything it makes, as well as the clear eyelets they use for the eyeholes.

“The manufacturing process is quite a situation when we go into it,” says Mr Guest. “No one wants to do what we ask, so we have to find very specific [manufacturing] partners to work with. Everyone gets mad at us, but it’s really worth what comes out of it. We see a garment as its own work of art, and we like to experiment and try do as much layering as possible, so it feels multi-dimensional.”

And Abc. is, at its core, defined by multi-dimensionality. Sometimes to an almost frightening degree. Back when the couple started the brand in 2016, Abc. created a T-shirt that functioned as a kind of initiation test. If you could crack it, you could join their fictional cult. Inspired by a mysterious online group called Cicada 3301 that became known for running a global hunt to find the world’s brightest minds by setting various elaborate cryptography tasks, they did the same, but with clothes.

“We put [this puzzle] on a T-shirt, and we said anyone who could decode it, they would become part of the ‘Invisible Gypsy Mafia’, and two people actually managed to do it,” they both say. “They had to find a code and some hidden numbers in a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that we’d put on a shirt, and then it led to a phone number in Palm Springs where we’d put an answering machine. It was really out there.”

They’re not a real cult, though, they assure me. At least, not yet. They do, however, mention the Source Family, a secretive spiritual commune based in the Hollywood Hills in the 1960s and 1970s, as something that has fascinated them both in recent months.

“There’s this undertone in our whole brand about cults, but very abstractly, like a cult of information,” says Mr Guest. “We’re always trying to find like-minded thinkers.”

They cite their customers as everyone from schoolteachers to wives shopping for their husbands or mothers wanting something for their kids. “We just want to make things, and whoever likes it, that’s it,” says Ms Haber.

So, no plans to run away into the hills and start a commune?

“I mean, I guess it feels like our fans are now a bit of our little cult, because we do have superfans,” says Ms Haber, half-laughing. “A small tight group that understands everything we do. And, of course, it would be cool to grow that.”