This is the third in a series of posts introducing altr_, a digital-first fashion house built and owned by creators. Read the first post here and second post here.
In our last post, we talked about why digital-first fashion is the future of fashion, and what differentiates it from purely physical or purely digital fashion.
Now it’s time to move from the abstract to the concrete: what we at altr_ are building to push the digital-first fashion space forwards.
altr_ is a digital-first fashion house built and owned by creators. Our vision is to alter the relationship between creators, consumers, and the legacy fashion establishment, disrupting the very fabric underpinning the industry and changing our perceptions of creation and consumption in the process. By launching a digital fashion house of brands owned and governed by our community, we aim to empower creators, reduce barriers, preserve aesthetic focus, and promote sustainability in the fashion world.
Traditionally, fashion has been a relatively closed industry dominated by well-established rules, norms, and institutions. Creators are perennially undervalued and consumers have low visibility unto the creative journey behind finished products. Moreover, the industry has been a notorious contributor to waste and emissions through its manufacturing and shipping processes. Meanwhile, over the past few years, developments in AR, VR, and NFT technology have expanded the limits of creativity, giving creators the tools to shape their own reality. It is clear to us that this new generation of builders and creatives will create an entirely new cultural world at the intersection of our physical world and the metaverse.
altr_ is about harnessing the power of this new reality and capitalizing on the tenets that make Web3 and the metaverse so powerful as a concept: openness, decentralization, and incentive alignment. Concretely, we are bringing this vision to life by launching a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) whose membership is open to anyone. Members will have ownership and creative direction over the styles and wares of altr_’s native brand and can compete to launch their own sub-brands under the altr_ family. altr_’s creations will live as NFTs in members’ personal wardrobes, and will be portable across various metaverse worlds and social media platforms. Down the line, altr_ will cross back into the physical realm through a network of local producers that meet our sustainability requirements, enabling consumers to extend their experience across the digital and the physical, while avoiding the waste that typically comes with large-scale clothing production.
altr_ is guided by four core values:
Empowering Creators
We aim to propel a new wave of artistry and creativity by resetting the standard for how artists profit from their creations. altr_ is committed to maximizing value for creators, by enabling designers to have control over their creative process and ownership over the IP they create, and by providing them with the technology and tools to seamlessly create, sell, and export their creations, under the NFT format.
Fostering Open Access
Open source and open access are core to our philosophy. We want to eliminate barriers to entry for designers, tearing down conventional requirements in the form of education or background to enter the industry. Anyone, anywhere should be able to create and publish their designs. Moreover, under the DAO governance structure, we will naturally provide a community that fosters collaboration across artists and joint ownership and direction of our brands.
Supporting Sustainability
One of the largest and most exciting opportunities we collectively have in the digital fashion space is the possibility to promote widespread change in the manufacturing and shipping patterns inherent to the fashion industry. altr_ will build primarily for the metaverse and digital spaces generally, but will also enable physical production of our renderings by offering blueprints for on-demand, local production, reducing waste from garment production as well as shipping.
Preserving Aesthetic Focus
We strongly believe that the power of a brand comes from its aesthetic quality and consistency. Legacy fashion brands have cultivated this power through a meticulous focus on aesthetics, a rigorous curation process, and minute attention to detail. These are qualities we should embrace; and while they create a natural tension with our decentralized ethos, navigating this tension successfully will differentiate from other digitally-focused brands.
Through the pursuit of our values, altr_ is changing what it means to be a brand in the modern world.
altr_ is made up of a family of digital-first fashion brands, each on equal footing, defined by their own identity, but imbued with the altr_ values. This includes our pioneering brand, altr_ label, which serves as our primary vehicle to experiment and convey our values as a community. altr_ is also a platform, where creators can access tools to develop and upgrade utility for their users; a marketplace, where creators and collectors can buy and sell fashion NFTs, infrastructure to support the next generation of designers, including via incubation; and finally, a DAO, whose members jointly participate in the value generated by the fashion house and provide artistic direction over the development of its brands.
Can a brand be owned and governed by its users, collectors, followers, and creators? That is the question altr_ is exploring by organizing ourselves as a DAO. Fashion should be accessible, as creators and aficionados, to anyone. In that spirit, membership to the DAO is completely open, and members will be entitled to various benefits: providing input on artistic direction of our in-house brand and admitting new brands through voting; early—and at times exclusive—access to our seasonal collections and limited-edition collaborations; and most importantly, the DAO’s treasury will accrue profits generated through the sales of our digital fashion NFT collections across all altr_ brands. As an altr_ member, you have direct ownership in this community.
What the DAO?
DAO stands for decentralized, autonomous organization. Each one of these words is independently meaningful, and together they form a new paradigm for the organization and coordination of capital and talent, the essential ingredients of any meaningful endeavor. While the word “Organization” is self-explanatory, the other two deserve elaboration. Decentralization is the bedrock principle of any DAO; echoing the philosophy of open source development and distributed, censorship-resistant systems, it enables open participation and provides a structure that prevents any overt concentration of power in the organization.
Automation reflects the principle that new forms of technology can enable entirely novel forms of creativity and performance, while simultaneously contributing to the functioning of decentralized structures. Orca Protocol calls this “Automation at the Center, Humans at the Edges,” in the sense that “DAOs involve people interacting with each other around a protocol with encoded rules”. The automation should only be present insofar as it facilitates the objectives of the DAO, and to that end altr_ is building a platform and tools to enable its creators.
What are the core benefits of organizing as a DAO?
Creator incentivization: Through automated, encoded rules, the DAO will enable us to directly and efficiently distribute sales profits in the form of tokens to the creators responsible for our collections, as well as reward early contributors to altr_’s ecosystem.
Reduced friction in communication and coordination of capital: whereas traditional companies and brands are opaque in their allocation of capital, DAOs are transparent by default. As we raise capital from investors and members, our community will have full visibility—and direct input—over its uses. Moreover, through token-based governance (more on that soon), members can decide on altr_’s priorities and even change the rules of the governance system itself.
Joint ownership: at altr_, we believe that meaningful participation means ownership. A DAO structure will allow any member to participate in the value created by holding our token.
While decentralization can bring tremendous benefits by enriching the creative fabric of the brand, bringing in diversity in opinion and lived experience, and accelerating the development of the altr_ platform and its tooling ecosystem, it also comes with challenges. How does a brand maintain its aesthetic integrity with such diversity of artistic inputs? How does a designer preserve their identity, constructed and displayed through their wares, while an entire community is discovering and forming its own identity? The natural tension that exists between decentralization and an artist’s singular identity is both a fundamental challenge and an exciting opportunity space.
We recognize these challenges and are invigorated by their complexity. It will be up to us as a community to solve them by designing a conducive and sustainable architecture as a DAO, and from the get-go we are enlisting your help to do so. Acknowledging this complexity means that we will progressively decentralize over time, as we start by focusing on the aesthetic development of altr_ label and other brands, before gradually opening up the DAO to everyone. If you are interested in this problem space, give us a shout in our Discord.
We’ve talked a lot about reducing barriers to entry for creators. Part of realizing that mission comes from keeping membership completely open, as well as equal opportunity to join the altr_ family of brands. Even more important, however, will be the tooling we provide creators, which should collapse the financial and technical hurdles of designing fashion. The tools we will provide for free will allow any creator to mint NFTs, sell them, upgrade them, and compose them. We also have a managed service for creators who prefer to offload that complexity entirely—get in touch with us to learn more!
Minting: the altr_ platform will provide creator tools for minting NFTs across different blockchains, with Ethereum and Polygon available from the start. As a creator, you can take any relevant file format and turn it into an NFT that is ready to be sold, as an individual piece or as part of a collection. We will support ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards from the get-go.
Format Bundling & Portability: it’s important for us to provide maximal flexibility to creators; your NFTs should live not only in users’ wallets and virtual wardrobes, but also within third party games and platforms, such as Decentraland, Sandbox, and more. We make it easy to bundle multiple formats into an NFT, enabling them to be rendered in different virtual environments.
Upgradeability: we also recognize that more formats might emerge over time as the gaming and AR/VR worlds continue to flourish, producing new games and virtual realms that may have their own specifications and requirements. altr_ provides a mechanism to upgrade NFTs to incorporate new file formats over time.
Staging Environment & Virtual Runways: down the line, we aim to provide a comprehensive set of tools within the altr_ environment that will replace physical studios for clothing and material design. This includes a staging environment for designers to model their clothes on avatars as well as a design platform to create virtual runways.
Incubation: through our discussions with designers, we’ve recognized the immense passion and talent that is burgeoning in art and fashion programs around the world. We are committed to sourcing and developing that talent through scholarships for high-potential designers, a designer-focused incubator, and a collaboration-focused accelerator program.
Creators need to be able to sell directly to users. They need a venue for exchange where royalties are built in, and where curation and presentation is at the center. Platforms like OpenSea are great as a grand bazaar of collectibles and art, but in the vastness of what’s offered, the focus and emphasis on quality is lost. Our marketplace will be tailor-made for digital fashion: every creator will have their own uniquely-branded storefronts to highlight their collections, while users will be able to create their own avatars, allowing them to easily model the market’s wares. After all, who wants to buy clothes without trying them on first?
Finally, it’s critical for a marketplace to be tightly integrated with the user’s digital wardrobe, and as such users will find their purchases automatically finding a home in their wardrobes. Down the line, we expect users to be able to share and rent out their wardrobe through the same marketplace, and also use it for physical fashion wares as well.
When we started building altr_, we knew from the beginning that we wanted to provide the tools to creators to enable them to directly access users—but it’s not only about reach; at the end of the day, we want to to enable creators to build rich experiences for their users that include real virtual and physical utility. This starts with the user’s virtual wardrobe as the hub for user interactivity, and then extends to other virtual environments as well as the physical meatspace, creating an immersive digital-first experience.
Virtual Wardrobe
Fashion is self-expression, and we as consumers buy clothes to show the world who we are or who we want to be. A recurring critique of digital fashion, and NFTs more generally, is that they are restricted to the small screens in your home or the even smaller screens in your pocket; that the way they exist, in a vacuum—detached from any kind of environment or tangible texture, makes them less real. At altr_, we think that is primarily due to a lack of environment serving to highlight such pieces of digital fashion, as if the walls on which you would hang a canvas did not exist yet. Not only do we need to build those walls, but we need to install the right lighting to bring out the textures and craftsmanship of the art.
altr_’s virtual wardrobe will be the hub where your digital fashion assets live. It serves as your own walk-in closet, where you can store and try on your clothes, mixing and matching on your customized avatar or avatars you bring in from external properties. The virtual wardrobe can also be designed to spec and shared with the world through social media. We are intensely focused on creating the most immersive yet frictionless way to showcase your style and taste both in traditional social media (through lenses and filters) as well as newer metaverse platforms (by keeping all our assets portable).
Digital Utility
One of the most exciting aspects of the open metaverse is the idea that digital assets, in particular wearables, can be rendered in an infinite variety of virtual environments, making for an endlessly compelling creator canvas. At alt_, we are committed to contributing to that vision, and work to ensure that our assets are usable across virtual metaverses and gaming platforms.
Real World Utility
Both creators and users want to express themselves richly across the digital and physical worlds—that is core to our thesis. As a result, we are developing relationships with partners that will allow creators to produce their collections in the real world on the basis of their NFTs, and users to claim or redeem their NFTs for physical wares. More on this in a blog post in the near future!
We don’t believe in a monolithic metaverse, and hence altr_ is not a monolith. Rather, it will be an ecosystem of brands tied together by a shared set of values and a creative vision. altr_ is therefore a truly decentralized house of brands where each brand is an equal partner, fully autonomous; and most importantly, maintains their identity.
Starting your own brand from scratch is a herculean effort. Every new sub-brand that enters the altr_ family will benefit from the altr_ community’s reach and resources. This includes, but is not limited to: product development, engineering, marketing, collaborations with the existing community, and access to our advisor and designer networks.
In exchange, a small portion of the primary market sales as well as the secondary market royalties will be directed towards the DAO’s treasury as well as the core contributors. This reverses the traditional industry model where designers touch only a minority stake of the sales of their products, and further aligns incentives between creators, consumers, and community members, strengthening the connective mesh of the ecosystem.
altr_ label is altr_’s first in-house designed concept, it embodies the altr_ spirit and serves as our primary vehicle for experimentation and for conveying our values and aesthetic as a community.
altr_ label is born out of the social, technological, and environmental conditions of our time; it is a modern approach to the ever-increasing information, entropy, and standardization of our times, trends that are stretching our body envelope as well as our mental health. As a digital-first fashion brand, altr_ label is pushing the limits of digital space as a lens into the future.
Unifying the infinite possibilities of the digital age, sustainability, empathy, and style, altr_ label is our response to the demand for functional, modular garments built for the growing stresses of our environment. It is a brand designed for the future, made of technologically-enhanced, modular layers interacting seamlessly between each other for your wellbeing, yet never compromising on aesthetic identity.
altr_ is one of the first of its kind digital-first fashion houses dedicated to building for creators, by creators. We’re committed to bringing value to designers through incubation, customization tools, personalized storefronts, and ecosystem building. We have so much more to share with you—stay tuned and let's innovate together.
In the meantime, join our Discord and follow us on Twitter, Instagram for all the latest updates.
