SPEAKER_00
Welcome to the Joy Joya podcast where jewelry is joy and everyone is encouraged to add more polish and sparkle to the world with topics ranging from marketing tips to business development, best practices and beyond. This is the go to podcast for ambitious jewelry industry dreamers like you. Hi I'm your host Larissa Wurstiek.

Through this podcast I aim to empower and inspire jewelry entrepreneurs and professionals so they can thrive while adding more beauty to the world. I am passionate about digital marketing for jewelry brands and I am excited to share my passion with you. As we all know jewelry is joy so I'll gladly seize any opportunity to talk about it.

This is episode 181 and today I'm going to be sharing my interview with Oliver Moroni the general manager of web3 and NFTs at Cameo. You probably just heard that sentence and felt your brain melting right? What are all these acronyms? I am done. I am tuning out.

So many words that probably sound foreign to you. Stop. Please keep listening and watching if you have even an ounce of curiosity about web3 and NFTs and if you want to know what's in store for digital marketing, for customer engagement, for community building in the future then please check out this interview because we break down everything into really easy to understand terms. I saw Oliver speak at JCK this year and then subsequently reached out to him because I really liked his no-nonsense, non-pretentious ways of explaining things.

I thought he would be the perfect expert for my audience and I was so grateful that he agreed to do this interview with his unique background in media and sports journalism. He's not a typical Silicon Valley tech type who only knows how to speak the language to other tech industry people. In this episode, Oliver explains web3 and NFTs in the simplest terms possible for our beginner listeners and viewers.

He also explains the potential that NFTs can have for jewelry brands as well as how they can fit into a digital marketing mix and elevate the customer experience. By the end of this episode, you'll have some great resources and know how to take your first steps to learning more about NFTs and how they can support your marketing efforts. But before we get to the solid goal of this episode, I'd like to remind you that this podcast has both an audio and video component so you can either listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch on YouTube by searching Joy Joya.

I love creating this content as my active service to you, my awesome listeners and viewers, and you can support the podcast for free by taking the time not only to subscribe, but also to leave a rating and review on iTunes, which helps other jewelry dreamers find it too. In this segment of the podcast, I give out my Sparkle Award for the week. During this segment, I highlight a jewelry brand that's impressing me with their marketing.

The Sparkle Award is also interactive, so you can visit SparkleAward.com to nominate a jewelry brand that's inspiring you these days, and I might feature your submission on a future podcast episode. This week's Sparkle Award goes to Valerie Madison Jewelry because I love how this brand is engaging on TikTok.

And if you've been looking for examples of how you can be a jewelry brand on TikTok and connect with your target customers and really create unique content, then you need to check out Valerie Madison Jewelry on TikTok. So if you're not familiar with this brand, they're an engagement and everyday fine jewelry brand based in Seattle and founded by black Latina jewelry designer Valerie Madison. They have 4,917 followers and more than 130,000 likes.

This fine jewelry brand is absolutely killing it on the platform. Their videos feature things like customer stories, new product launches, behind the scenes videos, along with videos of the designer herself talking about the products, and those are my personal favorites. As I mentioned, you can visit SparkleAward.

com to nominate a jewelry brand that's inspiring you these days, and I might feature your submission on a future podcast episode. All right, let's discuss some recent news related to jewelry or marketing. Each week I share my thoughts about three relevant articles and you can get those links by visiting joyjoya.

com slash sign up. Once you're on the VIP list, you'll receive our weekly digest filled with new episode announcements. So the first article comes directly from the Pinterest newsroom.

Just a few days ago, the platform announced that it's leaning very heavily into its shopping experience and improving it for the brands and merchants that use Pinterest to connect with their customers. So they recently released several new innovative merchant features to help retailers realize success on the platform. I'm going to mention three of those.

So number one, product tagging on pins. This is Pinterest shopping feature that allows merchants to turn their lifestyle pins into shoppable pins and it helps pinners move easily from inspiration to action. So with this product tagging feature, merchants can add products from their catalog to their seen images.

Number two, video in catalog. Pinterest is continuing to invest in video with merchants by enabling video assets in their product catalog and giving pinners a view of the product from multiple angles when making a purchase decision. And we all know that that's super important with jewelry and showcasing all the details and features of a jewelry piece.

And then number three, the shop tab on business profiles. So merchants can create a more inspiring storefront and for those pinners who are kind of at the stage where they are ready to buy, they can immediately go to that shop tab and take action and make a purchase. The next piece of news was actually a tweet.

I've recently gotten back on the Twitter platform lately because there's so much exciting marketing news and industry news on there. I was an early adopter of Twitter back when it first came out and then I kind of left the platform for a while and lapsed, but I've really been interested by it lately and have been coming back to engage with it again. So this tweet comes from social media expert Matt Navara and he just basically shared a really helpful visual graph that shows the most popular platforms for us consumers who watch live stream shopping in 2022.

So if you're looking to try live stream shopping, adding it to your marketing and customer experience mix, if you listen to my episode 172 called live stream shopping for jewelry brands, you may be wondering about the most popular platforms for us consumers who watch live shopping in 2022. So according to this graph from Matt Navara, the top one is Facebook live followed by YouTube live, then Amazon live, Instagram live and TikTok live. I was honestly very surprised to see Instagram as the fourth on the list, but it also does make sense because most of the live stream shopping events that I personally follow and check out are happening on Facebook live, so I can definitely see how that is the most popular platform.

And then finally, the last article comes from readers digest UK, and it's called how to improve email deliverability and inbox better. When it comes to email marketing, one of the top gripes that I really hear, especially from small jewelry business owners is they don't want to annoy their subscribers and or they don't really think they have anything important to say or share in regular emails. But I'm here to tell you and to confirm what this article says, that emailing less frequently is actually counterproductive and hurting you more than it's helping you.

This is a really great quote from the article. I'm literally just going to read it because I could not have said it better. So quote, erratic broadcast activity, so like not having a consistent schedule with how you connect through email can lead to lower email sender scores and IP rejection or rapport IP reputation, maintain a regular schedule with your emails to avoid sending spikes.

When you send emails consistently to your subscribers, they begin to expect your emails and trust you better. Wait too long and recipients will forget they were interested in subscribing in the first place. On the other hand, sending emails too frequently increases the likelihood that they will annoy your subscribers or end up in the spam folder.

End quote. When you send less frequently, I'm talking about once a month, whenever you feel like it, there's actually a very good chance you'll end up in spam or just ignored because people don't even remember that they signed up for your emails. It's kind of like, I don't know, in dating, let's say you're kind of dating this flaky person and they just call you whenever they feel like meeting up for a drink, but they don't have any sort of consistency.

You're not going to trust that person. You're not going to trust that they're actually in it to get to know you. And I feel like it's the same with email frequency.

So keep a regular cadence of once a week or if you can't maintain that once every other week because that once a month schedule is hurting you more than you think. As I mentioned, if you want to get the links to the articles I share in this segment of the podcast, you can become a JoyJoya VIP by visiting joyjoya.com slash sign up.

Okay. Without further delay, let's get to my interview with Oliver. Hey, Oliver.

Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited to have you as a guest today.

SPEAKER_01
Thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate it. I'm a big fan.

I've watched a few of them now and kind of got privy to what, how, how your interviews go and I love the conversation. So excited to get started here.

SPEAKER_00
Awesome. So tell our listeners and viewers a little bit about your position at Cameo Pass. What do you do there?

SPEAKER_01
What's your job? Yeah. I'm a fan of Cameo, which is the, you know, a lot of people know us as like the video, basically getting a celebrity to, you know, wish you a happy birthday or an anniversary, things of that nature. So we're basically a marketplace for a ton of different celebrities across the board, whether it be an athlete or a musician or, you know, one of your favorite stars that you see on TV.

And you can request them to do a video and so I've worked at Cameo almost three years now and my current position at Cameo is a head of Web3, everything Web3 and NFTs. And so I co-founded our entry into NFTs and for people who don't know that's a non-fungible token called Cameo Pass. And so that is, I moved into this role about eight to nine months ago, had been working on it previously for about, you know, another six months to a year, kind of on the side as I was working at Cameo.

But yeah, that's kind of my role.

SPEAKER_00
That's really exciting. Yeah. So how did you first get involved with Web3 and NFTs? What like drew you into this space?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So I was in a previous role. I was a sports journalist.

I covered basketball and I got into Cameo by managing sports talent on the platform. So you know, your favorite athlete or whatever I would manage. And outside of my work time, I would spend basically, like you can kind of see my backdrop, I've got a bunch of like sports cards.

I'm not a huge memorabilia person. Like I know enough athletes to not really ask for like autographs or things like that. But I always found it super interesting to collect sports cards because it's almost like you're investing in a player and their potential long-term trajectory as like an athlete or, you know, what they turn into essentially.

And so, you know, I love that aspect of it. And NBA Top Shot was like one of the first ever NFT and Web3 kind of platforms out there brought to the masses. And a friend of mine was in very early and he was also into sports cards like me.

And so we were chatting back and forth. He's like, hey, I found this thing called NBA Top Shot. It's like these digital highlights that you can own and they have different numbers to them.

And I at first I was just like, you're crazy. Like this is this doesn't make any sense. Like why would I pay $100 for like a highlight on the Internet? It doesn't make, you know, I can just watch it on YouTube.

But in the back of things, you know, that's how I got into it. And as I started to understand like sports cards, digital highlights, like all this stuff is basically the same. Like a sports card doesn't necessarily have any value.

The value is being placed on it by like what the market deems it to be. And so you start to understand like whether it's digital, whether it's physical. Yes, you can hold one and the other one you can't technically hold.

You start to understand though, very quickly that the digital aspect of this just makes things easier and more streamlined. And so that's what really drew me into this entire space is the idea that I could buy a highlight of my favorite player, not have to deal like right now I could take a car off my desk. I wouldn't know the condition it's in.

Like I couldn't tell you. I would have to send it into like a authenticator or a grader to get it graded and then hope it comes back in the right thing. And then I would have to list it on eBay.

And then I don't know my eBay listing, maybe below other people's listings. I don't know who's actually selling for what. I don't know what the actual value is.

And so what NFTs does it like, it basically streamlines all that. I buy the highlight. I know exactly what the highlight is trading for via all the other like the marketplace.

And so I can then either trade it, sell it, keep it, whatever it may be, but you always have that like value attachment to it based on what you're buying. And so that's what intrigued me most about it initially. And over time, I started to realize that people were building massive communities around this space.

Some of the friends, like some of my closest friends today are from Top Shot a year and a half, two years ago when we first started. And so we all are in this like group chat and it's just really fun to be able to be in a community of people very similar to your country club or, you know, like even when you go to JCK, there's all these little clicks of people, right? They all work in the same like space and know each other very well. And they see each other two, three, four times a year.

It's the same concept just digitally. And so that's what really got me involved and started in a Web three. And from there, I started buying what they call, like, what they call, what most people will call traditional NFTs or Ethereum based NFTs.

So it's a cryptocurrency that's widely used for NFT purchasing, buying and selling and trading. And so I got into that and the same group chat that I had from the NBA Top Shot stuff just kind of migrated over to that slowly. And so we're all doing the same thing.

And every day it's a new experience. It was fun. It's exciting.

And that's how I got into it.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah. That's sports card analogy. I would have never thought of it because I personally am not a big sports fan, but it makes so much sense the way that you just explained it.

And it all seems like such a natural fit for you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01
No, it, you know, and you can parlay this into whatever business kind of use case you could use, you know, even jewelry. It's like, I don't know the condition of the jewelry when I'm looking on like a secondary marketplace of any sort. I have no idea if I'm going to, if it's real or if it's fake or if it's, you know, knocked off whatever it may be.

And so I think NFTs and Web 3, what it does is it just digitally translates a lot of this stuff. And you can combine the two. I think that's what a lot of people are trying to come up with, you know, solutions for is this idea that you have this physical good, like a trading card that's graded or authenticated.

And then you also have a digital asset version of it so that you can like easily buy, sell and trade it without having to ship it to somebody or deal with like the back and forth of like all the different questions and things that could come around it. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00
So for many of my listeners and viewers, I feel like especially in the jewelry industry, people are trying to still figure out like, what does this mean for us? Like we don't really get it. And I'm sure people who saw you speak at JCK, they got a little bit about a better understanding, but not everyone could be there. Yeah. So can you please explain Web 3 and NFT and like the most simplest terms possible for the beginners out there?

SPEAKER_01
Totally. So I think the, the, the best explanation that I've been given and the way that I term it is it's a digital collectible. Just as you would, you know, a sports card or a piece of jewelry or whatever it may be fine art, it is just a digital version of that.

It is a collectible and the monetary, like I said, the benefit of like the blockchain, I rarely use that term anymore just because it's thrown around so vaguely all the time. But the idea behind it is that every transaction is tracked and you can see that it's, it's all transparent. And so you always know the value of the product you have in NFTs.

And that is like the big benefit to what this has produced or what this has turned into. And I would say for the listeners out there who don't know what NFTs are, the easiest way to explain it is just, it is a digital collectible. And that, that's like the best way that I can describe it.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Can you give some examples of like what they look like, like what someone would find if they were out looking for an NFT?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, if you're out looking for an NFT, there are many mainstream artists that are now doing NFTs of some sort. You know, there's, there's quite a few out there. Oh my gosh, I'm blanking on some of the names, but some, a lot of people buy it based on the art.

So whatever the image you're buying is the running joke is that you are buying a JPEG that is like the, the big joke in, in NFT and Web3 land. And so if you can picture like any generalized picture that you have, like I've got this like like Mike poster in the background, like that's, that's not an NFT, but it could be like that could be something you could potentially turn into one or you could purchase from somewhere. And so there's those sort of opportunities.

There's also like, as I mentioned earlier, I think there's a lot of companies out there that are starting to do this physical and digital transition very well. Adidas recently did a drop about six months ago ish and they did a track suit on a board Ape. And if you bought the NFT, then you also received the in real life track suit.

And so it was this combination of having a physical item with the digital item. And there are all sorts out there. A lot of them may look not appealing to you.

And that is totally fine. There are a lot of NFTs out there that are just created by random people. And you can, you could scour the internet for hours and hours and hours and days and days and days of NFTs.

And there are so many out there that it is hard to discern. I would say if you're looking into specific collections or specific artists, you know, guys like Damien Hearst have his own collection and he's done physical and digital. And what's brilliant about his is you can own the digital version or you can turn in your digital version for a physical version.

And so that is one way people are utilizing NFTs. And so, you know, a guy like Damien Hearst, there's quite a few out there that are, are utilizing this technology and finding new ways to kind of innovate around it. But NFTs can look all shapes and sizes like the art that you have in your background right now could easily be an NFT.

There's actually, it's called Artblocks. It's all generative art is what they call it. So it's like computer generated art based around like a line of code.

And people are just absolutely, they go crazy over these Artblocks pieces. And some of these are going for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the idea behind them is that they are, like I said, computer generated to an extent, but they're all very unique to one another.

And so you could own a piece of art like that. And there are digital frames out there where you can implement your NFTs. But the big, like the core of this and the thing that I said at JCK too, I chatted with Mark Cuban like two years ago and we were chatting about NFTs.

And the big takeaway that I had was like anybody between the ages of around like 20 to probably 35, like they likely don't own a home yet. Like the percentage is probably pretty small. They may or may not actually own their car.

So like the most valuable item they own is likely like their phone. The thing that everybody uses 8, 10, 12, 14 hours a day. And if you take that in a nutshell and you think that that's just going to continue and you think like this idea of social media representing who you are or what you do has an impact, then NFTs is kind of centered around all that.

The idea that your phone now has these digital assets that you can buy, sell and trade, and then it can also represent your personality. Why are board apes the popular thing out there right now? Well, I mean, there's a couple of reasons. First of all, they sold at the right time.

A lot of people were really, really interested in what they kind of came up with and their strategy and approach. But when you really think about it at the core, it's like I have an image that also M&M and Snoop Dogg and all these other big celebrities out the Jimmy Fallon, people like that have as their profile picture. And now I am in a club with these people and they have a Discord channel where all these celebrities are in there, Steph Curry, all sorts of different names from all landscapes.

And all of them, if you chat with the original board apes that still hold their apes today, they have all built businesses, brands, companies, things around being a part of this community. And I liken it very similar to like a country club or your high-end gym membership or owning a Lamborghini or things like that. I know the Lamborghini thing is a little overplayed, but the idea is that there is a Tesla Motor Club, right? And if I own a Tesla and the neighbor down the street owns a Tesla, there is a chance that we already have some common denominators here in our personalities that make a lot of sense.

And so if you kind of gravitate towards that, you understand that your phone is probably the most valuable asset that you own if you're in that 20 to 35-age bracket. You start to really quickly understand that there's this massive potential for your personality on the internet and what that looks like and what that could appear as. And that's where I think the beauty in this has started to shine.

And people are starting to notice that there is a massive industry out there for building a community around the images. It's not necessarily the images you're buying. The board ape is not worth $200,000, but being involved in their community absolutely could be, right? You could build a business off of it.

You could learn, network, grow. You can attend an event with people that you would have never thought you would have attended an event with. There are many different like benefits to owning any specific NFT that you potentially buy.

And so that's where I think the value truly is.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah. That's such a great point. But one sentence that you said, it's not necessarily about just buying the image, but buying into the whole community.

And on the flip side, I think, and you can either affirm or deny this, when a brand is approaching, should we create NFTs? How should we do it? Thinking about the greater ripples of what that can mean and the community that you can build around that.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I mean, that's the most important part to a brand being successful in Web 3 and NFTs is understanding how this all works and plays. There are brands out there that have launched NFT products.

I won't name names, but it's just an image of their brand logo and they stick it on a bunch of images for people to potentially buy. And they may sell out. They may make a significant portion of money.

But now that the easy part most of the time in NFTs is actually selling out because people are buying into something that they don't know what the possibilities are. But the hard part is actually keeping that community happy over the long term, just like you would in a normal business. Investors will jump into almost any company at this point in this day and age that has any potential or promise.

But now the real fun starts when you've gotten that investment money and now what are you going to do with that long term? And so I think the same thing applies to NFTs in the way that you have to be very, very smart and have a plan of how you're going to approach this. If I was a jeweler out there right now and I had, let's just say I was a one man show entrepreneur. I had an Etsy shop with jewelry that I was selling and I was doing OK for myself, but I wanted to expand.

NFTs could be a really intriguing way to do it. The big point would be how do you scale digitally versus the physical items that you're doing? How do you connect the dots? There are many different ways that you could approach it. But first you would start out with strategizing a plan just like you would normally doing a business.

You're not just going to launch a store and a product overnight. You're going to come up with, this is how I want it to launch. And ultimately it really comes down to your ability to understand this space.

And so everybody who's like, hey, I want to build a business around this. I want to do this. I want to do that.

The biggest suggestion is spend two to three weeks diving in on OpenSea and on some of the marketplaces out there, looking at some of the projects that have done well, looking at why they've done well. Going into Discord is like a communication tool that everybody in NFT land uses. I don't particularly like it, but everybody uses it.

And you can join a lot of communities through Discord and see the interactions and see what people are posting about. And that gives you a really good sense of what you're trying to build and what this could potentially look like for you. And from there, then you can strategize and say, okay, I've got this Etsy shop.

I'm building these pieces of jewelry. I'd really like to add a digital piece to it and then send people the physical version with the digital piece. And I think that's the tie-in that a lot of brands are still missing is you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

You just have to be smart and strategic and understand what you're doing and the long-term ramifications of what you're doing. And as long as you're caring, understanding, you want to make sure that it comes across genuine. I know it sounds bad, but it really should be from the heart.

It should be something that you truly believe in. Otherwise, you will get burned. And so that's, I think, there's a huge risk and also a massive reward for NFTs.

And I look at some famous people out there like Gary Vee. Some people love him. Some people hate him.

Either way you look, though, he built an NFT project solely off of giving access to himself. And he's done a really good job of giving that access to his NFT holders. The interesting part about it is the time and effort and energy that he's spending on his NFT project.

I would love to ask him this, but I bet you it's 5x more than he had ever done previously. But I also believe it's probably 10x more rewarding for him monetarily. And so there's obviously, like I said, that kind of scale that you have to weigh yourself and figure out what makes sense and what doesn't.

But there is a lot out there if you truly believe in what you're doing and scaling it in the right way.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Before I ask you my next question, there were a few terms you said, I'm worried some people might not know what you're talking about. Yes. So give like a one sentence summary of what OpenC is.

SPEAKER_01
Yes. Okay. So OpenC is basically a marketplace where you can buy, sell, and trade NFTs. It's the eBay of NFTs.

I think that's the easiest way I could kind of like showcase that for people. And so you can go there. They have statistics and rankings of all the NFT projects out there.

You can look at any NFT that you possibly want is all on OpenC.

SPEAKER_00
So if someone wanted to go see what this was, that would be like a great place to start and just look around.

SPEAKER_01
Just look around. Just browse. You don't need anything to start.

It is as simple as going to the website and just checking it out. No, I'm not paid by OpenC. No, I have no endorsement deal with OpenC.

It is just the place that a lot of people go when they're first starting out. And yeah, you can basically buy, sell, and trade any NFT out there via their platform.

SPEAKER_00
And then you also mentioned Discord and you said it was like a communication tool. How is it different though from say like DMing on social media or like a collaborative tool like Slack or something like that?

SPEAKER_01
So with NFTs, it's kind of like, you know, you have to digitally verify that they own an NFT. A lot of communities like to verify that you own the NFT and you get access to specific channels. So think of Slack with the idea that you also need to verify that you own X NFT.

And I know that sounds crazy right now, but I almost, I look at it like, okay, I got a membership to like a really high end exclusive, you know, luxury gym somewhere in order for me to go into the gym and actually speak to people. I have to have the membership and I have to like type in my phone number right to ship. It's the same thing just digitally in Discord.

And so you can join their Discord a lot of the times. You can actually join into their group. It's very, it's structured similar to Slack where you join into like a company profile or whatever it may be.

And then inside of that, there are all these channels and with Slack, you can also lock channels and things like that. And so you only have access to a specific number. And if you own a specific NFT, then you get access to specific channels inside of their Discord.

And so what you end up seeing is these group chats that are developed around the owners of the NFT and then also just the greater community. So some projects lock their entire Discord up. The only way you get access is by owning their NFT.

Some open it up to the public on some scale, like they have one channel open so everybody can see stuff. And then the rest of the channels are locked only for holders. And so that's kind of how they're structured.

And as I said earlier, like this, the board Apes Discord, it is, I believe, open to the public to an extent. You can see one channel and then the rest of them are kind of holder channels. And so you can kind of see it's so funny.

You see sub communities built as well. Like, you know, if I have a cheetah ape, then I'm in the cheetah ape, you know, group. And so you'll see people create their own businesses that all own cheetah apes and it's like part of the business.

And so that's kind of the process behind Discord and what that actually is. It's just another way of communicating. But it does a good job of integrating the NFT verification aspect of it.

And that's why I think a lot of people use it currently.

SPEAKER_00
That makes a lot of sense. So can you give some examples of product face brands you mentioned to Ditas as one? Are there any others that you think are really doing a good job with this?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there's there's a few out there. I mean, I think Budweiser has been pretty interesting. They have like beer.

eat is so sorry, I'm going down a rabbit hole. I think people are like, oh my gosh, what is this? There is something called ENS. It's like a theorem name services.

Long story short, just think of like the, you know, grabbing a website, like the name like you go to go daddy.com and you type in like Oliver's, you know, shop or whatever.com and you buy that name.

The same thing applies to like ENS. It's like essentially your name on the blockchain. So not anything don't.

Yeah, that's that's what it is. And Budweiser did a really cool activation with this idea of beer.eat. So they bought the name beer.eat and they utilize it in a lot of their branding and marketing and things like that.

They have their own discord channel. They give access to specific events that they do. Access to like celebrities, things of that nature.

And so they've done they've done a pretty good job of like integrating their brand. And I thought what was cool is when they initially dropped, they did like the historic beer can beer bottles of all the different kind of like looks over the years. And so when you went to buy their NFT, you got one of the couple hundred different types of Budweiser cans there possibly could be.

So I thought that was cool. Nike has obviously been really, really instrumental in the space, not through their own company, more so through a company they acquired called Artifact. Artifact does it's like a game studio studio.

And they acquired them about a year, year and a half ago. And they have launched their own like avatar characters. They kind of look like, you know, Sims in a sense.

And so if you own one of them, you get access to like Nike shoes for them. You can like dress. There's all sorts of ways that you can kind of integrate with with their platform.

They've done like digital apartments for like a metaverse kind of situation. They've all sorts of crazy stuff. But I think Nike's been really, really innovative in their approach.

And then I think outside of that, like there are some mainstream brands that have yet to do much as like their own NFT project. But I think there are some out there that are doing, I would say even celebrities to an extent that are doing interesting concepts around just access. I use Gary Vee all the time as the example, just because I think his project.

Is it's very easy to see the direct correlation between what you're buying and what you're getting. And that I think is sometimes really hard for somebody to kind of swallow is like the understanding of buying an NFT and then seeing whatever value comes out of it. You have no real idea unless it's laid out for you.

And I think Gary Vee does a really good job of like laying out, hey, this is what you get. I mean, he specifically, just to give your listeners some examples, he does these. He has different tiers of NFTs.

He's got like ones called gift goats. They're all animals and characters around different kind of like things that you get. And so gift goats, you get a gift every month, air drop to you.

So like he'll have an artist do a piece of art and he'll send it to you. Then if you are a FaceTime, if you own a FaceTime frog, you get five FaceTimes a year, I think with them or something like that. And so that's the benefit of owning the NFT, but it's very clear, right? It's like right front and center FaceTime frog.

I get five FaceTimes with them and you can see how many have been redeemed. Courtesy of the blockchain, what people talk about all the time. So when they are redeemed, they show that on your NFT.

They show that they've actually been redeemed. And so it's really, really cool because, you know, maybe I'm somebody who wants one FaceTime with Gary Vee just to say I had the experience and then I want to sell it because I don't want to do the other four. Well, you can do that, right? And everybody knows that you've used one of them and you have four left.

Whereas like if I was to go and sell a gift card with $25 on it, there's nobody in the world that would believe me outside of the person that sees the back of the barcode and then just, you know, could potentially steal it from you. So that's the benefit or the beauty of it. And like I said, I highly encourage anybody who doesn't know anything about NFTs.

Gary Vee's project is called VFriends. You can see kind of what he's done. He created a conference around it.

So once a year, there's a big conference and he does talks for three days. And anyone who owns a VFriends gets access to it. And that's kind of how he's built up his brand and what he's doing in this space.

And there's a lot of companies out there that are trying to figure out what to do, how to do it. And I think it's good. We don't need a bunch of companies just jumping in and just throwing their name in the hat just to do it.

You really want to be, like I said, very strategic and smart about how you're operating this. And yeah.

SPEAKER_00
That makes so much sense. I think the thing I struggle with with NFTs, being like a consumer of them and trying to understand them and see the value is at least in this industry and jewelry, looking at examples of brands that are trying to do it or even me going on open sea and like searching jewelry. I'm just like, oh, great.

Like I don't like what you said, I don't really know what I'm getting out of this besides like a picture or something like that. And so I struggle to really justify buying it because I don't really understand like the long term value of it. But the examples that you just described make so much more sense to me.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. And I think Intel, a jeweler really steps in and like puts a stamp on what this could potentially look like. That will still be unknown, right? And I think, you know, you can always do research.

You can always browse, open sea, things like that. You have no idea what you're getting unless you really do your research and hone in on stuff and like see the value. I think, yeah, for jewelry, it's very difficult because there isn't many examples out there currently.

And I think it's important like someone will do it. And I'd say the closest thing to it probably is like, you know, I think Prada is coming out with something soon. And there's a lot of luxury designer brands that are coming out and doing stuff.

I think I just saw Meta or Facebook coming out with something where you'll be able to buy like Balenciaga. And a few other like brands basically with like a potential avatar. And so that's potentially on the horizon.

And there's a couple other out there like MBA Top Shot is created by a company called Dapper Labs who operates a different blockchain completely separate from Ethereum. Sorry to throw even more lingo at your listeners, but the idea is that you could purchase it as simple as just buying with a credit card. See, like remove NFTs, remove all that.

It's just a digital collectible. You're using credit card. It's in US dollars.

There's no extra like, you know, friction. And their whole idea or product is that it's still on the blockchain. It's still transparent and visible.

It's just not you wouldn't be able to see a lot of those on OpenSea. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So because it's on a separate blockchain, these are a little bit more difficult to potentially look at. You log into an account like you normally would with like an email.

It shows your NFTs there. You can still display them. You can still, you know, use them however you want to.

But Dapper created this sub product called Genies. Or I think they invested in it. And Genies is very similar to like a Sims.

You have your own avatar. You can dress them up with your own, you know, wardrobe, things like that. And so I think at some point in the future, you're going to start to see digital, but wearables become a thing.

And that's also where jewelry could potentially take shape is by offering digital wearables, even if it's not like some high profile, big, expensive NFT that, you know, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or a few thousand dollars. It could be something as simple as, hey, there's, you know, if I, if I get a genie character, I can add my favorite jewelry from my favorite jeweler on there for 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 100 bucks, whatever it may be. And then the concept behind that really is that you can trade those.

You can buy them, you can sell them, you can trade them. I think what a lot of companies have missed out on and what something that is is so undersold, I think in the, in the NFT space is that you create more value for yourself if you do it right. And what I mean by that is like, if I'm a jeweler and we do these digital wearables, let's just say for genies or whatever, people can buy them and let's say I buy it for $20 and there's only a hundred of them.

And so as time goes on, people see that I'm wearing it and the value starts to go up or whatever it may be. That person can then remove it from their character, sell it. And the company that created that jewelry can install a secondary percentage going back to them.

And so what I mean by that is like right now, Rolex, for example, sells their Rolex watch to one customer, one customer gives them the money that it costs for the Rolex. And then that's it. Rolex doesn't see another dime from that Rolex ever again.

Whereas with this model, they get it from customer A and then customer A decides to sell it to customer B. And now Rolex is getting a 5% secondary number off of that sale. And so every transaction that happens, most of the time, most NFTs will have a secondary percentage that goes back to the collection itself.

And so that's not a current usable strategy with this whole genie idea yet. I'm just throwing that out there as an example. But the idea of NFTs that you can create long term value just off the same product being bought and sold and creating demand off of that initial sale is the interesting part to me.

And where I'll use the example again, like Gary Vee, he launched his NFT project and he's done more monetary value for himself and his project off of secondary sales than he did off the initial primary sale. And it's substantial money. Now, is he putting a lot of that back in? Of course, it's just like any business.

But the idea that he's creating value, people see the value and now there's a premium on that product and he's being rewarded for that premium, that just isn't out there currently. There is no reward for creating a great product outside of customer retention. And this is a way to kind of scale that opportunity.

SPEAKER_00
It makes so much sense. And now, especially in fashion and jewelry, the resale market for things like you use the example of Rolex, that's a huge, highly acceptable thing with consumers and it's just becoming more and more popular. So there is a big missed opportunity with that.

You're totally right.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I think that's the takeaway for me is if you have a sought after product, if people love your product, you already have a community. Whether you think so or not, you already have one.

It's just a matter of how you take it digitally and how you open that up to potentially more people. And it was funny at the JCK talk, there was a lot of people afterwards that were asking me questions about how they could install their own NFT project around their jewelry business or what they're doing. And the thing I always say is try it with one product or try it, do a very small scale solution.

And if it works, it's a great spot to be in because you can always do more. You can never scale back though. If you launch, this is the thing I see a lot of brands do lately is they come out with a collection of 10,000 NFTs.

They can't even support 10,000 people. So that's the big key here. I think if you're a jeweler, it's like release a limited edition 10 or 20 or 100 and see what happens.

See if the market takes in what you're selling. And I think as long as you integrate your initial community into what you're doing digitally, it will work out to your favor.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that's just sound marketing advice in general, testing your market for a product market fit. I mean, it all applies. We're we're using all these words that people are probably like, what? But the theories behind them are like age old.

Yep. Yep. So for people listening to and watching this podcast, their interest is piqued. They're curious about it.

What are some good resources for them to maybe get started and begin like dipping their toe into this water?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, I would say there's two main forms of connection that people use for NFTs. One is Twitter. Just search NFT.

Just follow the biggest collections out there. Follow some of the big names. I've given you a few as we've talked about it, you know, like Gary V.

Kevin Rose is another one. He's a very, very reputable founder. He's created his own project, actually a few projects now.

Alexis O'Hanion is another great one. He has like an NFT, like a Web 3 NFT fund that he's funding some really cool stuff with. So I'd suggest following those sort of like influencers and names and then secondarily to that.

OpenSea, I referenced earlier. There's a few others that are pretty good. Like NFT now is like a website for news and information.

Would highly recommend that. There's a few others. I think it's like, I can't remember the name of it.

I think it's Daily Trader or something like that. There's one that kind of follows the statistics a little bit more closely, which is really interesting. And then last but not least, I would, anybody who's interested in NFTs, look at the top five or 10 on OpenSea over the past year, go to their collections, follow them on Twitter, join their Discord and then just watch, just take in what is being done.

You don't have to fully understand all of this to get what is going on. I think that's like, they could be talking in lingo like I'm talking about. But as you mentioned, like when you really dwindle it down, it's pretty similar to just business in general.

There's a couple of additional things that I think, like I said, it's like this combo of a country club slash, I don't know, clique, whatever you want to call it. And people like to be a part of that stuff. They just do.

And it's like, I talk to all these four tapes all the time and then they're like, yeah, I've been in it forever. I love being in it. And I couldn't tell you that I'm not jealous of that situation.

I absolutely am. It's like I would love to be a part of that. Who wouldn't want to be? I think just to get the experience nonetheless.

But that would be my recommendation. There's not too many current, I'd say outside of like your NBCs that report like very, very big NFT kind of crypto news, things like that. There's not too many current like news outlets to go to to kind of follow all of this closely.

And there's so much going on that it's really hard to keep up. So I would highly suggest, like I said, top five to 10 projects out there over the past year. You can go actually, I'll specifically walk you through it.

You go to openc.io. There is a the second tab in it says stats. There's rankings.

You click on rankings and it says top NFTs and there's like little filters and it says last 24 hours. And all I would do is go down to the very bottom under last 24 hours. It says all time.

And I'll just list off for you. Crypto punks, board APO club, mutin APO club, art blocks curated, azuki, clonex, sandbox, moonbirds, doodles. Those are like the top eight to 10 currently.

And I would just click on each of those projects, look at the art that's being created around it, join their discords, follow them on Twitter. And then from there, Twitter is great at just, you know, the algorithm and letting you know what you want to look at. And so once you follow those, you will start to see a lot of trending topics around it.

You can kind of follow around those. But I would say if you're really interested in doing this or looking into it or just want to do some research and have some fun, that would be my suggestion is go to those top projects, follow guys like Kevin Rose, Alexis, people like that. And yeah, if anybody has any questions, I mean, I have my own Twitter and we have our own projects.

So we're always eyes and ears and whatever any questions anyone has, happy to answer them. But yeah, that would be my suggestion.

SPEAKER_00
Well, thank you, Oliver. This has been so informative. I learned a lot.

I feel like your approach to talking about this is really straightforward and down to earth. And I'm not like seeing a lot of that out in the world. So I hope that my listeners and viewers learned a lot too.

I really appreciate your time today.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, thanks a lot for having me.

SPEAKER_00
I appreciate it. Is there anything else you want to share about like where people can find you? Anything exciting going on in your work?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, at Oliver Moroni. So that's my at on Twitter. You can follow me there.

I'm pretty active on Twitter. Other than that, I mean, really at Cameo Pass, everything that we do cameo pass related is kind of under myself and a few other co founders wings. And yeah, that's that's pretty much it.

We're doing a lot of different things with our project. And yeah, looking forward to to what's to come in this space. And hopefully there's a jeweler out there that's like listening and is like, hey, I'm going to do this.

And if you're that person out there, I'm happy to answer questions. Amazing.

SPEAKER_00
Thanks, Oliver. What did you think? If you'd like to connect with Oliver, ask him questions, learn more from him. The best place to visit him is on his LinkedIn profile.

So if you search Oliver Moroni, you'll find him there. You can always email me, Larissa, that's L A R Y S S A at joyjoya.com. If you loved this podcast, please share it with a friend who'd appreciate it. And don't forget to subscribe as well as leave a review on iTunes to purchase a signed copy of my book, Jewelery Marketing Joy.

Visit joyjoya.com slash book for all the information. Thanks for listening.

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