Mntge spills about its first fashion NFT and surprise “Ink”
As a hyped streetwear designer, as well as a curator and purveyor of exclusive vintage, Sean Wotherspoon is known for embracing both the past and the future. So why shouldn’t his business efforts?
Enter Mntge, his latest initiative with co-founders Nick Adler, an entrepreneur best known as Snoop Dogg’s brand manager, and Brennan Russo, a former Adidas marketing executive.
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The trio is still feeling the buzz from a hugely successful deb release last week – an initial two-tier offer for Mntge passes that gives exclusive early access to real and digital fashion. Now the team is aiming for the first actual fashion drops for the first quarter of 2023, with four items from Wotherspoon’s personal vintage collection. But that’s not all.
Mntge offered WWD an exclusive sneak peek at what’s in print, and it goes beyond the vintage denim jacket and digital twin that Wotherspoon teased on social media days ago. In fact, there’s an added surprise — their first one-of-a-kind NFT comes with an “ink” bottle in the virtual trunk, and it unlocks a whole new layer of experience that the partners hope can blow fans away.
As Russo explained, “The briefcase opens and you receive two things: It’s part of Sean’s wardrobe and an ‘ink’ bottle, and those two things essentially sit in your wallet as two separate NFTs.” Apply the ink bottle and a designer overlay appears for the virtual garment. The jacket itself also opens, offering a portal to another realm.
The mechanism may feel familiar to crypto-natives. It is akin to “serum” which, when used on Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, creates “mutant monkeys” as variations on the original artwork. Here, the blend of the ink bottle takes the owners to an immersive world full of flowers.
Nor is the notion entirely foreign to Web 2.0 consumers, as social media platforms partner with brands like Gucci and others to bring users into immersive, stylized environments—from lush gardens to mazes—via smartphone cameras and augmented reality. The same spirit of experimentation that drives these campaigns often puts innovative fashion houses such as Gucci, Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana and more at the forefront of Web 3.0 as well.
Of course, owners don’t need to mix the ink and NFT. But if they choose, it’s easy enough to do. “You’ll get a notice to mix, and that’s when you go to a new site and submit both of those [the NFT and the ink]Russo continued. “You send in a wallet, it will read it and burn the two, giving you this brand new, more dynamic, futuristic NFT.”
At the moment, Mntge Ink’s immersive environment is something of a sit-back experience. But the team continues to develop use cases, exploring how far it can push the technology. It hopes to offer an agency in the secondary environment one day, possibly even connecting it to one or more metaverse platforms.
“We don’t own any proprietary software to do this,” he added. “But I think we’re the first to think about clothing, in terms of how to take it from an existing original piece to a more dynamic, futuristic piece.”
So far, it seems the fans are along for the ride.
According to Adler, Mntge passes a total of 1,400 units sold during the first two-stage offering last week. The first phase, offered only to partner communities, moved 1,290 passes, and the second batch, a public draw, moved 110 passes within minutes the next day.
“We saw a crazy amount of entries, 300,000 entries, coming in, and we sold out within four minutes,” Adler added. “And that drove us at OpenSea. I think right now, we did 480 ETH in total trading volume, which if you look up the conversion from ETH to USD, that’s about half a million dollars.” Now only 100 remain, which are reserved in the vault for important contacts, such as partners.
In other words, even before Mntge releases actual fashion — either real or virtual — the venture has already proven popular. In fact, with 1,065 owners, it’s clear that some customers have purchased multiple passes, which explains why some are already popping up in OpenSea’s secondary market.
For Adler and his partners, the traction validates their original concept.
Mntge, a mash-up of “mint” and “vintage”, is exactly what it sounds like, an attempt to bridge the gap between the vintage world and the NFT world. To hear Adler and Wotherspoon’s take on it, it’s a natural fit, and that’s what led to the business.
“In round two [Wotherspoon’s L.A. vintage boutique], I just saw kids coming in all day buying vintage T-shirts. It’s in the middle of covid-19, everyone is masked, and something hit me, Adler continued. “I looked at Sean and asked him about it, and everything he told me a year and a half ago has come true – from the size of the vintage market, to how fast it’s grown, to what’s trending and from things like the Double Knee Carhartt- pants or specific band Ts, and why one was more valuable than the other.”
He saw premium T-shirts spotlighting Madonna, Snoop Dogg and others fetching thousands of dollars. “I asked him why and he started telling me [about] the provenance, the fading of this T, and how come it’s green but was a black T… how these Hanes Ts from the 80s are more durable than the exclusive Ts from 2022, he continued. “I just thought about how these things had such stories to tell and had origins and rarity and properties. It was really similar to what happened in the NFT world.”
For Wotherspoon, it was a similar lightning strike moment.
“I described the t-shirts – that’s something I’m very proud of, you know. I handpick them,” said the designer and collector. “I probably picked through, at my busiest, £10,000 a week to pick the best ones the things for our stores. And I love explaining the character of these T-shirts to people, whether it’s where I got it and where that person got it from, who made it, or just the material makeup.
“It’s the heightened ability to use your senses to experience these objects,” Wotherspoon continued. “And as I’m explaining that to Nick, I kind of realized, ‘Oh, wow, this is similar to how you guys talk about Web 3.0 and the NFT world.’
The vintage denim jacket that will be released via Mntge as its first fashion drop is one that Wotherspoon outbids a fashion label to source, he added. Soon it will be in the hands – and crypto wallet – of a new owner, enjoying its second or perhaps third life on the side of a field of flowers and overlays.
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