Proposal: nouns.shop 🚀

[D_A_N_I_T]

The project is an eCommerce platform to sell Nouns related merchandise.

There will be 2 stages to the project, which will allow us to get up and running quickly and then further the development with unique features that will enhance the user experience.

Origin of the Project:

One of the keys to the culture around Nouns and to proliferate them onto the world, is to create physical manifestations of them in the real world. I see the great interest in merchandise from the Nouns community and holders, therefore I propose to start an online store for nouns merchandise with amazing swag for everyone to use in the real world, both for fractional owners, full owners, and anyone else who likes the nouns!

nouns.shop will have amazing high-quality swag, customized and branded with the Nouns figures and with the Nouns DAO logo.

We envision nouns.shop to be the official Nouns merchandise shop. Our goal is for it to host all future merchandise drops for nouns. For example, if the DAO approves the creation of custom-made merch by an artist, we will be adding the product to nouns.shop to make it easy and consistent to shop for cool merch.

What is it?

The Nouns.shop will include different customized products that were selected based on a survey that was passed around the community.

The items are made on-demand to eliminate unnecessary waste. The goods will be sent out within 5-10 days.

The store will initially include: high-quality clothing, personalized for each noun and size and color.

Embroidery \ Silk printed T-shirt = 24 USD \ 0.0071 ETH

Embroidered \ Silk printed Hoodie = 60 USD \ 0.018 ETH

Note: some nouns have more than 6 colors in this situation, we will recommend using silk printing to achieve all colors.

Note: some nouns have more than 6 colors in this situation, we will recommend using silk printing to achieve all colors.

Future products:

Along with more garments styles, we plan to add custom made garments with embroidery logo from the high end brand nakedcashmere.com these are going to be our premium products and will sell at an estimated price: 500usd- 200usd- 350usd

2. Creative one-of-a-kind 3D printed creations

My specialty is working with 3D printers, I’m best known for my researches and work around 3D printed fashion (watch my ted.talk therefore I would love to have 3D printed creations using the 3D nouns project files.

The product the most of you voted for was a 3D printed portrait of nones framed and a 3D printed colorful noun figure to be placed on your desktop.

Prices and simulations will be available soon.

3. Branded Ledger Nano X with the DAO’s logo

Ledger offers customized Ledger hardware wallets. I think it is fun to have branded ledger with the nouns DAO logo. We will need to order 300 pieces in advance. What do you think about this?

Customised Ledger Nano X = 105 USD \ 0.031 ETH

4. Fun accessories including stickers of the Nouns, hats, and socks.

Embroidered Socks = 30 USD \ 0.0088 ETH

Embroidered hat with Nouns logo = 36 USD \ 0.011 ETH

Each package will be gifted with 5 stickers

Phone cover 18 USD \ 0.0053 ETH

Project Ethos

We are concerned about making an environmental impact, all of the fabric, products and packaging will aspire to be sustainable and clean as much as possible. To kick-off fast we will start with this mission in mind and will constantly improve over the months.

The better the quality, the longer the product lasts; For example, most of the garments I’ll select are made of natural sustainable cotton \ Naked Cashmere\ 100% Recycled Cotton jerseys. These garments are high quality they look amazing and very comfortable as well as are sustainable by design and made to be used for many years.

The 3D printed materials that I’m using are bio-degradable made by corn, some of them are made from old waste. ALL of the 3D printed objects are potentially recyclable.

Our goal is to use on-demand manufacturing. By choosing print-on-demand, we choose apparel that’s created only as the order is placed, creating less fabric waste than conventional manufacturing.

These are recyclable and We offer free shipping to all orders over 50 USD

Scope of the website project

Stage 1 (1 month to launch)

Objective: Speed to market.

Breakdown:

• Building a basic website that includes the following pages:
  • Homepage
  • About
  • Contact
• Adding online shop functionalities:
  • Shop page
  • Single product pages
  • Variations structure (colors/sizes/options)
  • Account
    • User details
    • Addresses
    • Payment methods
    • Orders/Order History
    • Individual Order View + Order Status
  • Login/Registration flows
  • Category views
  • Cart
  • Checkout
    • Card payments via Stripe
    • PayPal payments
    • Crypto payments (BTC & ETH)
  • Order Confirmation
  • Shipping settings & tracking
  • Guest checkout (without the need to register)
• Email setup
  • Creating the required email notifications for the shop (orders, logins, shipping…)
  • Connecting to Sendgrid to ensure deliverability of email notifications
  • Connecting to email service (Active Campaign) for additional communications
    • Newsletter set up
    • Building nurturing sequences
    • Abandon cart sequence
• Designing the platform taking inspiration from Nouns.wtf
• Populating 1,000 products - an initial number of 10 product types for 100+ nouns (by the time of the launch) + Adding 10 variations per day, for the new daily noun.
• Structuring the user flows throughout
• Testing
• Push to live!

Stage 2 (The core of the offer - 2 months after stage 1)

Objective: Enhancing capabilities to improve user experience through custom flows.

Breakdown:

• Custom User Flows
  • Build your own Noun
    • Step 1: Visual interface to choose the components of the noun (compared to the current tool, which just has dropdowns)
      • Share on Twitter (optional)
    • Step 2: Choose the products
    • Step 3: Preview the products with the newly created noun
    • Step 4: Checkout.
  • Randomly Generate a Noun
    • Step 1: Click 1 button to generate a noun
      • Share on Twitter (optional)
    • Step 2: Choose the products
    • Step 3: Preview the products with the newly created noun
    • Step 4: Checkout.
• API Integration to pull in new Nouns on a daily basis which will automate the creation process of new products on the shop and will allow us to have new Noun products available as soon as they are released for auction.

Opportunities:

Special editions: artists and designers are welcome to upload their products into the http://nouns.shop/ and sell their products and creations. With a vision to be the official marketplace for nouns merchandise in the future.

We are here to improve! Let us know what features you want nouns.shop to add!

Who is building this:

Danit: Hi, I’m Danit. I’m a fashion designer and a pioneer in 3D printed fashion. In 2015, I made international headlines for being the first designer in the world to create an entire collection using desktop 3D home printers.

I filed 2 patents about soft 3D printable materials. I believe that 3D printing opens up fascinating new opportunities in fashion, combined with the power of NFTs my vision of downloading and printing clothes is closer than ever.

In 2018, I was recognized as one of Europe’s Top Women in Tech by Forbes. In 2019, the BBC named me as one of the 100 most inspiring and influential women in the world. I’m based in Tel Aviv Israel. I graduated from Shenkar college of engineering and design. In 2021 I opened the first 3D printable fashion NFTs store. I was fascinated to learn about the nouns movement and want to contribute so I can learn more about how the DAO is operating from first hand. I’m passionate about making these cool merch for the cool nouns!

You can read more about me here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danit_Peleg

Vito: Built his first website at 14 years old on GeoCities & then started building websites for clients as a freelancer while touring the world as the leader of a rock band. This eventually grew into an agency with a team of 12 based in London building 800+ websites and online shops .

Before he founded Atarim.io to redefine the way web agencies work: now allowing 5,000+ web agencies from around the world to collaborate with 105,000+ of their clients through his platform. To continue on the mission of empowering website owners and agencies to collaborate, he recently launched Bertha.ai - the first AI-driven content creation tool for WordPress (The biggest open source project in the world). Intrigued by the vision of Nouns, he is excited to work on his project and bring his team, which currently manages hundreds of websites, to accelerate the build of the shop.

Compensation:

Danit:

• Project management, shop implementation, UX, Initial tests & runs for product quality check samples: $30k
• Monthly operations / Merchandise curation / customer support: $6K/mo
  • Prepayment for 5 months, or some other way for the DAO to pay monthly($25K)
  • A new proposal will be issued after 6 months to continue engagement
• Prices of products on the site will be at COGS + 50% margin which will go to the proposer (price examples above are including the margin)
• OPTIONAL: Branded Ledger inventory (minimum 300 pieces): $36,178 (link to Ledger price sheet)
  • Sales of Ledger will be offset in the next proposal (e.g. if 87 pieces are sold for $10K, then this will “earn” the DAO 2 more months of maintenance at $5K/mo)
  • Co-Branded 2020.pdf

Vito:

• Stage 1: Online shop with initial 1,000 products (10 product types for 100 nouns): $10k
• Stage 2: Custom development of noun creation and product customisation as well as API integration for product automation at scale (for daily creation of nouns): $30k
• Maintenance of website: $2K/mo for 5 months or some other way for the DAO to pay monthly = $10K

Total:

• The total cost for the project, including 6 month maintenance and operations:
  • $110K (~32 ETH)
    • (optional) + $36,178 for Ledger inventory (~10.5 ETH)

Road Map

• [x] Run a survey to learn about product-market fit: I ran an objective survey to learn about the product-market fit. 15 nouns from the community answered the survey and I learned that 14 of them want to get their noun merch to their mailing address.
• [x] Buy nouns.shop
• [x] Post proposal on discourse
• [ ] Produce prototypes of the product and some of the core functionality of the shop
• [ ] Get the proposal on-chain
• [ ] If the proposal is accepted- Progress updates will be sent once a week
• [ ] Design and order the first bunch of inventory, packaging, produce the swag.
• [ ] Launch website 1.0 on https://nouns.shop/
• [ ] Stage 2 - Customised flows (enhanced playground) and API integrations
• [ ] Send the new extended proposal to the nouns DAO to extend the contract to maintain the website for the next 6 months.

We are ready to kick off. We will start working on it on the same day we get the approval from the DAO.

Potential ideas for the future:

1. Add more products to the platform
2. Improve the packaging and garments labeling
3. Invite artists and designers to join the platform and add more products to the website.
4. For a celebration, I am thinking about creating a custom-made circular, 3D printable fashion NFT collection inspired by the nouns community, style, and mission this collection will make headlines!
5. Create wearables for the metaverse with the noun garments

Some of what you guys said in the survey

“Cool af! Even more amazing if i can use crypto to buy it. And if you want access to the store, you need to have the Noun DAO nft”

“I’d love it. I think each Noun should have a kit available for sale to anyone who wants to buy it. Further, it would be great if I could create a Noun and order a lot (via something like nouns.wtf/playground)”

“Hope fractional owners can receive something too”

Thank you for reading and would love to get your feedback!!
Danit & Vito

[Noun12]

The detail of this proposal is fantastic, thank you @D_A_N_I_T and Vito. I also love how thoughtful you are about producing to order and limiting waste. And you guys are a great team that I hope we get to work with. When you reached out to me a month ago, I gave vague and pretty useless feedback but it set the gears in motion in my head and my thoughts are hopefully more useful now!

Questions

• How does the functionality of this site compare to off-the-shelf solutions and existing sites? I am less familiar with what is out there and want to understand the context of this offering.

• How do you think this offering compares vs Nouns DAO just partnering with Metafactory.ai who already has a lot of this infrastructure and is itself a crypto-native organization and DAO?

• I love the idea of merch but I am trying to rationalize the cost ($110k for Phase 1 and then ongoing maintenance and more Phases) vs the actual demand for Nouns merch right now or in the near future. If you say $50 per tt-shirt, we’d have to sell 2.2k t-shirts to get to $110k. I know I would buy 100 t-shirts for myself but I another 2.1k seems like a lot. Can we leverage this infrastructure in a way that makes sense? Will we be able to?

• Re: the nature of the merch on this site. The best aspect of Nouns is that it’s sui generis. But the merch proposed here looks and feels basic. I would rather fund something that is built on unique, artistically wrought merch where each piece has a personal touch, has energy, humor, etc rather than than something where the products feel rote. Is there a way, as part of this proposal, to bring in designer talent almost on-call to produce must-have merch where each piece is distinct (and scarce)?

This

vs

This

• Following on that angle and the idea of on-call designers, it could be something like each Noun can pay 0.5 ETH to have the designers drum up a custom idea for a series of merch for their specific Noun (t-shirts where the shirt looks like my shirt and my beautiful mug is pasted into the middle for instance as a simple example and then a message about the importance of drinking while DAOing). So the designer gets the 0.5 ETH and then 10% of each sale and you could price these types of goods up so that Nouns.shop still earns the same gross profit %, adjusting for the designers take. More brainstorming aloud here, but curious on your thoughts.

• How will you handle customer data, retain data, and protect users’ privacy? As a crypto-native, when people’s real addresses, crypto addresses, and other doxing information get collected, I want to make sure anything I am involved with is a responsible steward. I would advocate for minimal viable data collection (Web 3 sign on rather than email?) and minimal viable data retention. E.g. 1 week after delivery, a customer’s address data is permanently deleted. I don’t know who handles this issue best or what best practices are from a cypherpunk POV but a starting point would be to not do the things that Ledger does.

[davehaber.eth]

Nice work, Danit and Vito.

What ecommerce platform were you planning on using? Something proprietary from Vito’s agency? Something opensource that has a broad developer community? Something 3rd party? Would be great to have more details about the 3rd party ops and logistics vendors that you’re considering for payment processing, shipping, etc.

Interesting business model: seems like you’re proposing to charge the treasury to build and manage the site and develop the merch, and also proposing to keep all the profit from sales. Did you reduce your up-front pricing to account for the back end sales? (It seems to me that since Nouns is CC0, anyone could build nouns.shop on their own dime and keep the proceeds, but if NounsDAO is funding the project, shouldn’t the ecosystem receive at least some of the profit from sales? Or could there be a piece of the upside that is donated to charity in the name of NounsDAO?

Admittedly, when it comes to the store’s pricing model, I’m conflicted here: one model could be that the products sell at cost, to maximize the proliferation of Nouns merch (which feels more aligned with the mission of extending the Nouns universe),… alternatively, perhaps the merch are veblen goods and priced at a high premiun (which feels more aligned with the current value and market adoption of the NFTs), although for that to be true, I agree with the need for less « standard » merch design, but I’m the last person to be giving out fashion advice

FWIW, I agree with Noun12’s point about privacy and data retention.

Lastly, could the branded Ledger wallets be tested at a lower volume? I realize that ordering a smaller lot size will increase per unit pricing, but will also reduce risk of taking on too much inventory. That said, there has been discussion about the NounsDAO giving away Ledger keys, so maybe there’s a way to work this into the model. Maybe « buy one, gift one », or simply earmark XK of the wallets for promotional giveaways?

Thanks for all the work you’ve out towards this, so far. Excited to see this proposal and project develop, and you can be sure to count me as a customer when this launches! If I can support you in any way during the project, please reach out!

[comtechnet]

Luv the innovation in general - becoming the Ralph Lauren of Crypto Merch. DeMerch I would generically “label it” (c what I did there).

But - HOW does the little guy (like me) - get connected with some of this success. I’m desperately trying to get connected to one of these succesfully projects. I need 1 1/2 eth per month to stay afloat (above water = my nut). Otherwise - I continue with my Web2 trading $ for hrs work I do.

Its a super idea - and super creative = but piles up cash/value accruing to the founders = breeding continued resentment to the little guys of “decentralized” left out land - like the slaves in ready player one who had to “work” playing the game to pay off debt or get back in the game (ok - i’m exaggerating to make a point).

We need to be purposeful - about “helping” the unable to participate due to lack of funds - very much like the AXIE scholarships - we need that and should “promote” it big time as a way for those unable to participate to “get a piece”. I’ll gladly volunteer and be the first scholarship recipient - where do I pick up my Noun! (c what I did there - read as humor).

With Crypto Luv / CTN

[D_A_N_I_T]

Thank you so much for your feedback Noun 12, indeed you brought very important topics!

1. Stage 1 of the build is not going to look much different than a standard e-commerce website (except for the high quality, custom, design and UX, inspired by nouns.wtf), but the infrastructure will prepare us for stage 2 - which is a fully custom build and user experience to the nouns. Creating our own environment rather than sharing data and relying on 3rd party tools will allow us to create any functionality that we want to have (rather than being limited by the off-the-shelf, standard, capabilities that others offer). We have many ideas for future features and we are also for cool ideas coming from the community.

2. Collaborating with Metafactory is a great idea and you can see this concept written in our proposal (Potential ideas for the future), I believe it’s not conflicting with our proposal in order to work with Metafactory.ai the nouns need someone to represent the needs and to design this project with metafactorey, I believe I can be that person to create both real life and metaverse clothing with and without Metafactory.

3. I agree that we’ll prob won’t have thousands of sales from day one, but we will have 1,000+ products, to keep up with the daily Nouns. That requires a proper management system as well as a few automations to allow the shop to remain fresh daily. so please note that these costs are mostly going to kickstart and build the platform, once it will be live it will make a profit for the long run. I believe when more and more nouns will share photos with the garments it will bring more traffic and sales. We can consider a short decentralized marketing plan but I’m not sure if it’s standing with the DAO vibe. What do you think? We can also share revenue from sales and use it to reduce the price for the next extension proposal in the next 6 months.

4. I agree with you that These designs are basic but the product-market fit is important at least for the beginning. What you see in the proposal got the best rates from the survey that I ran. Most people voted for embroidery pieces over the other options. Therefore these are going to be the bread and butter and the plan is to add more cutting-edge designs.

   

BTW the samples are going to be here in a few days, I would love to share with you the quality and style!

5. Sounds great. I love this idea. As I mentioned, any designer that wants to participate is welcome! Also, we would love to get ideas and references from the nouns and we will make their dreams a reality

6. From a data point of view, knowing our community, I don’t think that a lot would be happy to share their addresses and email addresses with one of the big companies - we’re part of the community and understand it’s needs, which means we can think of creative ways of gathering only the required data to execute the orders and then remove them forever.

Thank you for taking the time to share thoughts and questions.

---

[D_A_N_I_T]

Dear Davehaber, Thank you for your feedback and for taking the time to help us shape up our proposal. see our comments below:

1. We are going to use WooCommerce, which has the broadest capabilities currently in the e-commerce space. This is an open source project with a huge community behind it. It will also allow us to further expand the shop and the user experience as we please. And will give us the ability to manage such a huge number of products without things getting messy.
   This also means that the data is not held by one of the big ecom platforms and will give us the freedom custom-code to minimise the requests for data and even come up with some creative ideas (like creating guest checkout or maybe not forcing the use of emails as proposed in one of the other comment here).
   For payment processing, we’ll use Stripe and PayPal (as the common processors) and for crypto, we haven’t made a decision yet, there are a few options with interesting APIs that we will explore if/once we get the project going.

2.First of all I love the idea of donating half of the profit!!! Any Ideas what charity the nouns DAO are mostly interested in? I’m also open to share revenue from sales and use it to reduce the price for the next extension proposal in the next 6 months but if the project will be very demanding in order for me to be full time involved in the project I will maybe ask for an higher rate but we will know that in the next proposal.

3. We are going to have both premium and more accessible pricing points. Later on, we plan to have some special editions and we will Mint some of the garments as an NFTs it will have to include the gas fee so it will be more exclusive and expensive than the rest of the items at the store.

4. At the survey that I made only one out of 15 said that he wouldn’t like to share his address with us. But From a data point of view, knowing our community that is constantly growing, I don’t think that a lot would be happy to share their addresses and email addresses with one of the big companies - we’re part of the community and understand it’s needed, which means we can think of creative ways of gathering only the required data to execute the orders and them remove them forever

5. In our proposal we were referring to the advanced option of both package and wallet branded. The minimum for that option is 300 units. If we choose the standard option the price will be the same but the minimum to order is 50 units. Please note that the price we wrote is the price we got straight from ledger pdf.

   

Thank you very much for your support!! Would love to know if you have any other question that we didn’t cover

[D_A_N_I_T]

Dear comtechnet, We love collaborations if we will work on this project, I’m sure we can make you involved in the project somehow Thanks for the vibes!

[4156]

Thank you for the very detailed and thoughtful proposal. I’m short on time lately so please forgive me if this was already covered as i didn’t have a chance to read all the amendments. If you want to discuss further please find me on discord and we can chat via voice.

1. ‘official’

• there shouldn’t be an official nouns shop. the whole point of public domain is to encourage healthy competition and stamping something as ‘official’ undoes this work. nouns.shop should compete via the novelty and quality of merchandise, rather than via an official designation from the dao

2. scope and cost

• there are places where a subsidy from the nouns DAO treasury makes a lot of sense, namely novel and unproven business models that present substantial risk to the builder. ‘merch’ imho is not one of these. nouns IP in the public domain is already a form of subsidy to sellers of merchandise, and given the lack of competition at the moment, i would expect healthy competition to emerge here naturally. just last week visualize value sold hundreds of noun hats in 1 hour with nothing more than a few tweets and a shopify store. perhaps a better way to ‘derisk’ the entrepreneurs is via a significant reduction in scope. rather than trying to take on the building of novel infrastructure and multiple product lines simultaneously, set up a shopify store and start with one very thoughtful product. if further derisking is required, a subsidy of 1-3 ETH feels more appropriate than 32 ETH.

3. design quality
   given the credentials of the authors, i suspect that the underwhelming design quality in the examples could also be related to scope. imo, working on designing one epic and unique product would be a great starting point. the authors have very interesting credentials and it would be a shame to see those get lost in generic screen prints and embroidery. in the context of open source IP, most things will get commoditized. think about the intersection of nouns & your brand and build accordingly!

[mach]

agreed, given the background I think just starting up a 3d printed noun store would be novel, fun, and an easier focus for this project.

[comtechnet]

Wisdom “you” convey (Yoda)

[D_A_N_I_T]

Thank you guys for your thoughtful feedbacks!

‘Official’: I agree, honestly I didn’t mean “Official” in like an exclusive way of thinking.
We’ve seen that there’s a need for the proliferation of Nouns onto the world, so the proposal is a take on that. But I do agree that since this is an open-source project, there’s no place for the term “official”.

‘Scope and cost’: That’s great - this means we have a basic proof of concept to build on top of, but just posting a few products on a Shopify shop is not our end goal:
Beyond the “standard” products that we believe many would like and want, there are a few unproven, innovative, concepts that we would love to experiment with which we bring forward in the proposal:

• Create a unique platform that streamlines the creation of Nouns and transforms them into products. We will custom build the functionality and the user flows to accommodate this, empowering the community to design on their own, turn memes into cool swag, within the platform, as well as spread the word about Nouns, creatively with special editions.
• Incorporating bespoke and exclusive products by different innovative designers that will be offered through the platform, is to bring in as many creative minds as possible to the project.
• Incorporating 3D products that will bring in my experience, and I also know that this is something you’re a pro in I’m in touch with Floyed and looking forward to using one of the features that will be included in the application!

‘design quality’: These are all just basic mockups and ideas that I created based on the research and survey that I conducted within the community (Mostly answered by Noun Owners replied - Which is still not many as we’re all a new community here but still gave us an idea on what people want and like that’s why I suggested this direction on our draft.
In a few days, I’ll get the samples from a few key designs to make sure that the quality is in line with what our community expects. I’m fortunate to have plenty of experience curating and delivering extremely high-quality pieces which I’m excited to bring to this project as well.
More so, I’m with you on the same page on bringing my creativity more to the front. But I want to give back to the community and support a larger audiance with also more commercially available merch. I believe that since this is a growing community there’s a place for us all to give ideas and feedback and make this a lot more than “basic drops on Shopify”. Anyway, I like the nouns. I want to create projects that give great value to our community so I appreciate all of your feedback!

The next step for me is to tighten up my draft proposal so everything will be clear and simple, Thank you!

@D A N I T