Originally published November 16, 2022 on Linkedin
At the end of ’21 we felt the undercurrent of brand strategy shifting. By the beginning ’22 we set out to build on a single thesis: Brands will need to sell more digital products and they will need to do it on the blockchain.
With the blockchain being so nascent to brands, the fragmentation of the technology alone presents a learning curve that is too steep for some of the greatest brands in the world to pick up with ease. We thought, “What if we created a platform that handled the complexities of the blockchain, making the high-functioning enterprise employee at a large brand unaware they were even operating on #web3?” That is how we came up with the passion that lead to building Cake.
Yesterday’s announcement of Nike creating digital collectibles is a huge signal for what is to come. Nike is a trend setting organization and a visionary with scale, and here they are taking on a brand new endeavor that speaks to a net-new purchasing experience for their audience. There is no doubt they will also be attracting a large swath of new collectors who weren’t in the physical shoe purchasing game, simply because this audience is a motivated persona who will never miss out on being involved in community building for historical moments — such as this. It is a timely move for Nike. Their supply chains were disrupted, their workforce is distributed and they needed to reinvigorate their customer base that has the baked in passion for their vision. The digital collectible move for Nike is paramount at this time.
At Cake App, we had the privilege of showing a newly incubated shoe company, headquartered in Shanghai, how to use digital collectibles to sell physical products and grow brand awareness. EQLZ transitioned from being new to #web3 to front-running Nike on this announcement and doing exactly what Nike is setting out to do; build a passionate community of consumers and let them influence the creation process earlier than ever before. Below is the example of EQLZ and a theme we will begin to see across all brands in the space.
In the middle of July, EQLZ Society was announced. The value prop was simple:
Many people who collected the NFT were unaware of EQLZ at the time. They liked the art, they enjoyed the trading experience and they had to make a crucial decision; were the buyers of this collectible going to sell it for its potential value and utility or were they going to hold onto it?
What did it mean to EQLZ if they sold it? They would receive a 10% royalty of the secondary sale price due to the collectible being on the blockchain. What did it mean to EQLZ if they held it and redeemed a shoe? They would be engaging and experiencing the level of detail EQLZ put into their brand and product long before they even put a shoe on their foot.
Less than 30 days of the original sale date, the EQLZ shoes were capable of being claimed. Less than 45 days from the redemption window opening, they had been shipped and received on doorsteps across the world.
60 days from the release, and EQLZ was discovered by hypebeast where it was dubbed the “worlds first Metaverse sneaker accelerator” along with sightings at NYC Fashion Week.
Here we are 90 days later and the community is working together to create a storyline that will drive the marketing campaign and vibe of EQLZ’s next big endeavor as they bring newly created and yet to be released shoes to the hardwood. For the first time ever, consumers engaged with art, then a product and are now on the inner track of building and creating shoes that will be distributed globally. All of this is possible because a brand decided to explore the opportunity of interacting with the personas that advocate for the metaverse and they did it all using the Cake App.
The impact? I will let you see for yourself. Below are tweets from the EQLZ twitter showing how the crypto twitter space fell in love with the shoes, the details and the overall brand of EQLZ.
