Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 564

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This week it was announced that Nike has acquired RTFKT Studios (pronounced "artifact") for an undisclosed amount. When I read the news (official Nike announcement here ), I immediately thought to myself, "Yeah, of course!"

Some of you may remember that I wrote about RTFKT back in April . They are perhaps best known for their digital sneaker NFTs (on the Ethereum blockchain). And so this is an exceedingly obvious and strategic buy for Nike.

But more importantly, I think this is great validation for the crypto/NFT space and further evidence that our digital and physical worlds are continuing to collide in some new and very interesting ways.

What this ultimately means for life in 10 or 20 years is anybody's guess, but sneakers are the tip of the iceberg. And this doesn't necessarily mean that we're all destined to live in some sort of metaverse video game.

Another way to look at this whole metaverse thing is to consider it not as an actual place or space, but instead as a moment in time (Shaan Puri makes this argument here ). Put differently, the metaverse is simply a point in time where we begin to bestow tremendous value on our digital life and our digital assets.

Instagram is one example of this. Profiles have become integral to people's identifies. We use them to vet restaurants. We use them to vet travel destinations. And we use them to vet potential dating partners, among many other things.

So while sneaker NFTs might be a new thing, there's already lots of evidence that digital goods can have just as much value -- and potentially even more value -- than physical goods. I am sure that Nike recognizes this and it's part of why they bought RTFKT.

This is a great tweet and link:

https://twitter.com/SCP_Hughes/status/1470391359957778434

The link is to a figure-ground map of Paris that allows you to filter its buildings by period of construction. Here's what all of the periods and all of the buildings look like:

Once you play around with the map, it will become obvious that the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century was a prolific building period for Paris (1231 hectares of area). This is what Samuel was getting at in his tweet.

I would love to see a map like this for every city in the world.

Today, Amazon ships approximately 72% of its own packages. This is up from about 47% in 2019. Ben Thompson of Stratechery recently published an excellent article talking about why this is important and how the company’s investments in logistics are, yet again, paying dividends.

The foundation of Amazon’s “moat”, Ben argues, is aggregating customer demand. When most people buy something on Amazon from a third party merchant, they think and feel as if they're buying directly from Amazon. Some people probably don’t even appreciate the difference and in most cases it probably doesn't matter. It comes in a box with Amazon's logo on it and that's that.

But it's an important distinction because if you're a third party merchant, Amazon pretty much "owns" your customers. They are the ones aggregating demand. They have the brand equity and loyalty. And if you left the platform, your customers would be unlikely to follow you.

This is kind of the opposite of how Shopify's ecommerce platform works. When you operate a Shopify store you are using their platform, but you are bringing your own brand, web domain, and other assets to it, such that you can now establish a more direct relationship with your customers. This doesn’t mean that Shopify doesn’t have a moat, it’s just something different.

All things being equal, most businesses would rather “own” their customers than not. The problem right now is that shipping and supply chains are no joke, and so there are real advantages to being on Amazon and having them handle your fulfillment. It could mean the difference between getting your products out for Christmas, or not.

So all things are not equal.