Have you heard about LA creator The Surgeon?
Dominic “The Shoe Surgeon” Ciambrone, Surgeon Studios is a Los Angeles-based collective of creatives, built to inspire creativity, further the industry, and push the unique and timeless craft of custom shoemaking and design.
The creative artisan creates custom-made shoes, for this reason, called Bespoke, slightly different from Tailor-Made which is referred to as customization after creation.
They fulfill the needs of consumers who want to keep the brand, but at the same time, want to have what no one else has customized down to the last detail, for all intents and purposes non-fungible.
How the idea behind The Surgeon was born? During a trip to New York, he came face to face with Pharrell Williams while visiting the Bape store in Soho. There Dominic realized that some of his favorite artists lived within walking distance of him, and shared the same consuming passion for sneakers. So the idea that struck him was to turn that passion into a business, or rather a top-notch product dedicated to a small audience that had both the ability to understand it and to buy it.
The success of the project is evidenced by the large volume of sales.
In 2017 Ciambrone is universally recognized as the man who changed the rules of the custom game, which before his arrival on the market were nothing more than hand-painted mass-produced models following a particular theme or color scheme. Instead, The Shoe Surgeon was able to impose an idea of custom based on precious and refined materials and a highly sartorial approach.
Something similar is now happening in the digital world, thanks to the aid of NFTs. One of the most interesting projects is that of 10KTF.
The new frontier of personalization
The 10KTF project began in September 2021, when it began releasing information on Twitter. It’s a digital store in New Tokyo, a fictional metropolis very similar to the one in Studio Ghibli’s movie Spirited Away. Wagmi, the shop’s owner, is an elderly gentleman who crafts artisan accessories for well-known NFT projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club, Cool Cats, and 0N1 Force, among others. The earliest collection is presently available for purchase for 1.45 ETH. At the same time, the 24-hour trading volume hit $2.58 million, with a total trading volume of 5,886 ETH ($17 million) for the project.
10KTF uses an ERC 721-compatible smart contract specifically built to allow users to create NFTs derived from their existing NFTs; each of these items is unique and corresponds one-to-one with the parent project.
Some major NFTs projects including, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Cool Cats, World of Women, and 0n1 Force were part of Wagmi-san’s debut collection. They are Wagmi-san’s debut artisan craftworks in their Genesis form.
Owners of 10KTF received an airdrop from Wagmi-san later. These airdrops contain Materials and Tools needed to mint or make, a special line of NFT clothes known as the Blanks.
10KTF x Gucci Grail
The overall project was so successful that a partnership was made with Gucci, in which several NFTs customized by Wagmi following Alessandro Michele’s ideas were launched. Gucci joined Wagmi-san for a partnership in New Tokyo city in late March 2022. Collectors can now add Gucci logoed fashion couture to their picture-for-proof NFTs (PFP NFTs).
The meeting between the tailor and Alessandro Michele results in two outfits available in different colors, inspired by the Aria and Love Parade collections, respectively, reserved for those who want a customized Gucci suit to wear in parallel digital worlds. Digital garments are as exclusive as works of art. Customizable and priceless. To be worn, however, in the Metaverse. The 10KTF Gucci Grail collection now has a floor price of 1.34 ETH and a 2,600 ETH trading volume.
Only five thousand people are involved, so “10KTF Gucci Grail” takes on the sense of a unique work: the singularity of each customer reveals the potential of virtual realities that allow one to be able to design, at will, digital identity in another world.
What’s for the future?
Gucci might have improved 10KTF’s recent popularity, but the next releases, maybe the true drivers of the project’s massive expansion. The project’s timetable has hinted that physical goods might be released to 10KTF owners as well in the future. Will there be Gucci fashion goods included? We don’t know yet, but it’s well worth hoping for.
Consumers now want unique experiences and luxury goods that are personalized, and tailor-made for them, which almost goes to characterize and differentiate them. So the two main keywords of web3 are Ownership and Personal.
The new concept is the ownership experience at a decentralized level but at the same time thought out to be uniquely consumed.
We at MyLime, believe that the digital experience, can be the future for luxury brands.
The level of personalization that can be achieved through new technologies is maximum, and that is why we believe that the ultimate ownership experience, both for consumers and brands, is phygital.
Thanks to phygital, customers can and will enjoy the ownership of assets in both the digital and physical worlds. In addition, the intrinsic value of their assets can be preserved over time, thanks to a digital counterpart that can never deteriorate and will unequivocally be correlated to the physical product.
This is true personalization, the holding of full enjoyment of an asset that is and will only be ours.
