1.5 years after their first ever NFT “Blue Prints from the Metaverse”, Rimowa continued its venture into the web3 space with a larger NFT drop: the Meta-Artisan Collection.
For the continuation of their web3 go-to-market, they partnered with the Web3-native digital fashion studio RTFKT. Having already done a suitcase collaboration in 2018 with Supreme, this fits well, giving the brand a streetwear touch and addressing a younger target group beyond business travel.
The pre-launch was accompanied by a strong storytelling component with frequent video snippets and interactive quests to be solved by the community to uncover more details on the drop piece by piece. This created a creative and authentic experience and kept the community engaged while creating a lot of conversations on Twitter.
As a brand in the premium segment, their cabin luggage NFT was high-priced at $3k (~2 ETH) and very exclusive (888 supply). This NFT will have the utility to later claim the physical luggage, similar to prior forging events that RTFKT did with Nike.
Interestingly, they also sold a second-tier NFT at a lower price ($100) and higher supply (2,222), a sidekick called WorkerBot. This enabled a larger audience to participate in the story and made it more accessible while keeping the core exclusive.
The drop itself sold out in 3.5 hours and generated ~$2.6m (~1.7k ETH) primary sales volume, and the secondary market also made as much revenue on the mint day (~$2.4m / 1.6k ETH).
A couple of learnings we can draw from their launch:
- ✅ Immersive mint innovation: Unlike a classical minting website, the mint took place in a virtual 3D experience. This brought the experience to a new level and was well received by the community.
- ✅ Timely raffle-based distribution: To ensure fair distribution, the NFTs were raffled live on a rolling basis. If won, participants had a 5-minute window to mint the NFT. This created a sense of urgency to not opportunistically wait for a quick flip until the end of the mint window.
- ❌ Bound user attention: At the same time, the urgency to mint right after winning the raffle required users to be “glued” to their screen and was perceived by many as a “waste of time”.
- ❌ Technical exploit: While mints were limited to 1 per wallet, a “loopable” exploit enabled some users to bypass that limitation by sending the item to another wallet and just re-entering the raffle.
So who did Rimowa and RTFKT reach with this initiative? With a 70% unique holder ratio, they onboarded ~2.1k holders into the ecosystem, of which 1/3 were already CloneX holders. They attracted a web3-versed holdership, where the average wallet has been active for 433 days, holds a 6 ETH ($9k) balance, a median NFT portfolio size of 95 NFTs and on average 143 outgoing transactions (disclaimer: of course, there could be multiple wallets and outliers).
