Back in 2021, a battle broke out between the two titans of the streetwear industry, Adidas vs Nike. I became its free participant, having bought all these jeeps and gifs from the secondary market. I am a fan of not only cryptogaming, but also streetwear and have chosen as my task to collect streetwear from the world of web3.
And in order to feel all the pain of adidas fans, a retrospective is needed, and it is necessary to consider web3 merch along with NFT and experiences that go into the load. If you don't want a backstory and analysis of events, scroll down to the DELIVERY heading.
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Adidas & Nike
So, 22.11.2021 Adidas publicly enters web3. They do it ostensibly spontaneously through The Sandbox, which publish a tweet with an invitation to its metaverse, and adidas carefully asked the opinion of its audience whether they need it, although everything has already been decided, everything is as we like. And in early December, adidas will announce the mint of the official NFT collection for 17.12.2021/XNUMX/XNUMX
Pretty short timeframe considering they don't have an active web3 community yet. They apparently expected that there were already web3 users among the brand's fans. Yes, it makes sense, but it works for a short time, if you just need a soldout and a small additional royalty from flippers without an active long-term secondary, and then come what may. We are the test and we are adidas, in any case there are holders.
There is a difference that distinguishes the web2 from the web3 approach to the community. Subscribers in web2 are just potential buyers, and the product is created by the company. In web3, subscribers are your family with whom you co-create a product and they, including consumers of your joint product. In some cases, the community even creates it for itself, and the brand only provides support and in some cases guides, and investors add fuel to this fire.
The collection is positioned as a premium loyalty program with access to web3 activities. Nike, meanwhile, is holed up in Roblox and doesn't make any big announcements about their participation in web3 BEFORE 14.12.2021, Nike suddenly buys RTFKT. OG is a studio that has been in the NFT for over 3 years at the time and Nike includes them in their line of brands along with Converse and Jordan. Looks like it was prepared a long time ago and carefully because RTFKT had collabs with Jeff Staple (hello og sneaker collectors). And this is 3 days before the adidas drop.
On 17.12.2021/371/1, adidas is doing a disgusting mint in terms of the technical preparation of the smart contract, and as a result of flaws, one of the hackers was able to mint 0.2 NFTs through their smart contract with a wallet limit of 800 NFT. FUD was dispersed in the community and the price sank a lot in the moment, but was able to recover after a while. The mint was at 1eth (~$0.5). Average price 0.3eth. Periods exceeded this value. Now in the region of XNUMXeth + there was an air drop capsule for holders for XNUMXeth.
Despite not the most successful mint, thanks to the price increase, adidas managed to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the community and regain confidence and earn more than 4 lemons in a year in addition to those $22 million from the primary. Spoiler: the amount is good, but as a metric of the secondary - sadness.
In the meantime, after buying RTFKT, Nike had NFTs in its IP piggy bank earlier, and if you look at them patent and the date of its approval, their endurance is striking. Yes, this is almost 4 head of preparation! But still, these were not branded NFTs from Nike. It's time to fix the situation.
07.02.2022/3/XNUMX Nike launches a collaboration with RTFKT, which was accompanied by a perfectly designed and implemented quest for the community for the revival of the collection. This case will temporarily become the new quality standard in webXNUMX how to make a show. From now on, RTFKT is Supreme with an eye on buzzers in the metaverse. Unlike adidas, there is a strictly defined target audience.
Adidas, meanwhile, is even depressed. They dragged on with the roadmap, with the utility, the community building clearly let us down and there was some kind of confusion in the ranks of the web3 division, after Nike's super successful steps.
Adidas was forced into a waiting position until the MNLTH revival, the showdown was accompanied by a mystery. As a result, the monolith revival quest lasted 2 months and generated insane royalties, and all this time adidas was silent and watched in a daze. The monolith included cryptokicks, a skin vial, and another Mnlth 2. A kind of magic nesting doll for scaling the ecosystem of digital goods. Cryptokicks is the one patent from the 19th.
What does adidas do?
They drop a mysterious capsule with unknown contents to the holders and copy the steps of Nike) It was felt that the published roadmap was changed due to the MNLTH quest. Merch was prepared for a very long time. Departure dates were postponed more than 3 times. It was expected that everyone would be able to receive the merch in April / May, and this is a complete package. Today is November and only in October I received one sweatshirt. The remaining 3 things will most likely not come this year. In general, from that moment on, adidas simply accepted defeat, gave up the championship and began to follow Nike and fork their methods. However, unfortunately, the same thing happens with offline business. Fake-ups in marketing strategy, the pursuit of fleeting trends and a disregard for heritage, which fails to create a dedicated community of collectors. This from year to year only narrowed the market share.
Delivery. We waited! Six months after the announcement...
Yeah cool! Web3 merch is really cool. The physical feel of a digital asset is more than simply buying the same useless thing online. Thanks to the limited edition and the utility of the NFT itself with its interoperability, this gives something special. Feeling of belonging to the general movement and something like immersiveness. The line between possession of digital and physical objects is blurred. Here they are real post-retail and omnichannel. (It would seem that)
At the level of perception, you feel a digital object as well as a physical one, and this is not a copy, but a unique object. For myself, I concluded that Merch, quests and IRL events are still the best ways to convey the value of digital property.
But this is when everything is done well, but adidas would not be adidas if it hadn’t been screwed up somewhere:
The guys apparently forgot what they were doing or where they came. As if something went wrong and sent a hoodie just with a print. The address of the smart contract and the logo of cool dudes… Yes, cool. I have bayc, gmoney, punks comics on my sweatshirt. But at the same time, they used old, ordinary tags, RFID technology and indicated a retail price of $70, while hoodies are sold everywhere as an exclusive gift merch for $0.
The cost price, taking into account the average margin for textiles, adidas has 500% -800% in the region of $10-$15. How could this be allowed? It was as if they hit me with a frying pan during sleep and woke me up.
For $800 + $200 (royalty) for each NFT you get an absolutely basic, damn it, hoodie with a standard tag, a price tag that comes from $70 and RFID. Welcome to Web2!
What could be done better in relation to the community?
- Experiment with NFT id instead of ancient RFID.
- Definitely new unique tags. This is a classic, you need to know this.
- Do not indicate the retail price, or indicate not in dollars (this is hardly a customs requirement. I have not seen this on textiles from different countries, but here on you) or at least not in such a prominent place.
- What did RTFKT do? Released sweatshirt with AR tags for the projection of mechanical wings.
- What did Azuki do? Released NFT PBT (physical backed token) skateboards with chips tied to physical objects.
- Use more technologies: NFC, which would activate something, or AR. Well, really, it feels like I didn’t get web3 merch, but just a mug from work on February 23rd. We are here about the future.
- Forge merch FROM NFT and modify NFT metadata. From a picture to a gif, or something would happen in the picture, some kind of trace, abrasions, so that the evolution of the subject is felt and thus the story goes on, and not just handing out merch to NFT owners.
- More intrigue and experiences: I remember only 1 experience with prada, when everyone was offered to take a photo for a common collage, which was then put up for auction, and the winning contestants received part of the profits and participated in the Prada photo shoot remotely. It was interesting. Thank you for this! And what they are doing now is trying to keep up with RTFKT, but more on that below.
- Community activation. RTFKT has done this better than adidas through (and more) creator economy and gamification.
- Promotional videos from adidas, firstly, are rather weak compared to the competitor, and secondly, they are not enough, and some collabs are questionable. The same collaboration with Wagmi United and the ozweego promo campaign have no experience. Regular NFT collections carry out similar activities only in this case the big names.
- In general, it was not possible to create a network effect as they can do in web3. There is a feeling that the outsourcing of web3 experts did not work properly.
- Who considered supply and community goals to them? 80k NFTs are issued for 30k audience. And at that time 10k-12k was considered OK. Some took risks and made 20k. Adidas believed in themselves and set 30k. Apparently they expected that they would be able to get up to 150k+ audience, but something went wrong. The only way I can justify this is that they have no intentions to increase the initial supply even in a few years, when the community grows many times and the Supply metric / community size comes to the average for the market, but so far it looks like everything was done in in a hurry with a firm intention to fly to the peak of the hype, and there we will finalize the strategy on the go, correct it. Again, I am describing this from my belfry and I cannot state, apart from some of the described facts, what and how is happening in their inner kitchen. But from my experience of participating in projects, I see some patterns and put forward assumptions about possible motives and the state of affairs.
What is the main difference between the exit strategies of ADIDAS and NIKE brands in WEB3?
Adidas obviously spent less time planning and did all the steps on its own behalf. They attracted web3 natives, invested in yuga labs, gmoney communicates with the adidas community on spaces, but at the same time associated all the failures with their brand. The guys involved seem to have nothing to do with it. They do their job and seem to be of high quality with varying degrees of involvement. For web2 it would work, but not here.
Even Twitter used the official one, which provoked a clash of web2 and web3 audiences. The first ones did not like that their favorite brand was associated with some kind of NFT, about which they heard that they were laundering money through it, this is a bubble and is used in fraudulent schemes, and not even environmentally friendly. In short, there was plenty of hate. The second is the organization of the mint and the overall strategy. As a result, with $24mn primary, only $4.7mn secondary (~20%). Extremely low rate. Earned only on sale. Well done che! Only the community left too few Xs, and this is also undesirable to allow. Win-win we did not feel. It would be better to release 12-15k NFTs, earn more on the secondary, most likely, and later expand with an additional collection.
Nike alone from monoliths and content that was distributed for free earned more than $ 25 million in resale. But in general, with other collections, about $ 100 million are secondary, which accounted for more than 50% of all revenue and it remains active.
As befits a family business, Nike decided not to involve anyone, but simply bought and included RTFKT in their family and gave them support and maximum freedom of action and in case of failure, the negative would be absorbed by them, but they did everything very cool and did not disappoint, although it wasn’t without fakups (mint of sweatshirts went even worse than adidas, but they managed to get out of the situation beautifully by apologizing. Again, this was done by RTFKT, not Nike, and a clear association of these two brands as a whole has not yet appeared in the mind) . For a long time, there was no mention of the web3 direction in Nike's official accounts. In addition, they have decoupled the web2 and web3 channels with the RTFKT Ready Audience they have marinated for years. All communication went through RTFKT. True fans, crypto-collectors and alphas of all stripes gathered there.
After Nike tested everything on RTFKT and were convinced of the success of the first steps, they went in and took all the laurels for themselves. The runaway success was written about as Nike's achievement, though RTFKT had to do all the dirty work. To date, the collection sizes of these brands are incomparable. RTFKT (Nike) has 10 times more merch and NFT than adidas. By all measures, Nike makes adidas with a difference in sensations of 5-10 times.
What's next?
These brands are still at the very beginning of their journey into web3, but the gap between them is already palpable. Adidas needs at least one year to catch up and I'm still waiting for the rest of the merch to arrive. Iconic adidas firebird suit and gmoney-like beanie in collaboration with iconic web3 brands, etc. holders of the founded token were presented with a token with a capsule, then more merch is expected in it. It sounds like a fashion tablecloth or a lifetime subscription to exclusive merch. Unboxing scheduled for 17.11.2022/XNUMX/XNUMX promo on of. website.
And I'm still hoping for adidas to be rehabilitated in web3.
Fortunately, they worked on the bugs and make it interesting with online and offline quests. Now that's another matter! 8 quests for the meta game. Some clues are hidden in the blockchain and you need to decipher them, some in the discord and website, and something in the real world. Generally scattered throughout the ecosystem. Keep going like this!
But RTFKT should bring me the same hoodie with AR tags.
Nike also launches footballverse in the official trailer promo there is an easter egg with RTFKT.
Thanks for the tip Daniil from the chat @RTFKT_Studios there actual news on RTFKT and not only.
During the preparation of the material, it became known that Nike announced own platform Dot Swoosh, Web3 ecosystem. Which puts them one step above adidas.
You can already register on the site, full access will open on 18.11.2022/3/XNUMX, and the first release of the digital collection is expected in January. The task of the platform is to educate Nike fans and integrate them into webXNUMX.
Then there is Lacoste, which has opted for a long-term strategy during the lull and actively engaging the community in building the brand on web3. We looked, analyzed the errors and act as is customary in web3. They vote, build the community, encourage activity, and together create the image of Lacoste in the web3 space.
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