Forward*: My name is Mark Mastrandrea. Along with Jeff Cole, we’re the co-founders of IKONICK, Sneaks of Nature, and Metarelics. This is a peak into our journey and our thoughts on the future.*

In the summer of 2016, we started a side hustle in our small beachfront shack in Carlsbad, San Diego. I (Mark) remember those times like it was yesterday. We were under-incentivized, under-utilized (and broke), but aggressively investing in our skillset. I was managing an artist and saw a hole in the affordable art market. Jeff saw the attention arbitrage of popular Instagram content, with a focus on motivational quotes, memes, pop culture and photography. We married the two concepts and started what would be one of the most recognizable art brands in the world, IKONICK.

This creative endeavor coincided with the rise of the greatest D2C sales platform to ever exist. Every dollar invested in Facebook and Instagram’s ad platform returned many multiples in revenue. We fully leveraged its capabilities. We honed our targeting, AB tested our creative, and scaled across 1000+ SKUs. Our content and reach, both owned and paid, attracted an audience of millions. We parlayed that success into big name licenses with the NBA, Monopoly, Muhammad Ali, and many more. Ultimately, our hustle led us into a business investment from (in our minds) one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation, Gary Vaynerchuk.

During the period of 2016-2021, IKONICK would grow into a household brand name with art in hundreds of thousands of homes and offices around the world. Inspiring and motivating the world to keep going.

It was early 2021 in a meeting with Gary where we learned a lot about the world of NFTs, crypto, and web3. He told us that this was a space to watch. That this was the future. That the opportunities to combine collectibles, provenance, ownership, community, and utility would be the building blocks for the next great social movement. We took this conversation very seriously.

We listened. We watched. We experimented. (Unfortunately, we didn’t buy any Crypto Punks, but that’s a story for another day). In late 2021, we launched the IKONICK NFT initiative. We airdropped a free NFT to consumers that purchased a $500 gift card to the IKONICK store as well as auctioned off a 1/1 collaborative piece. We wanted to explore the implications they could have on the relationship between artist and fan. We provided physical works to those that purchased digital works. We were ahead of the game.

However, at the time, the infrastructure and legal loopholes made collaboration and royalty splitting a nightmare to execute. We ultimately decided to discontinue the IKONICK NFT initiative. We negotiated a deal to buy back the 1/1 collaborative piece and gave the 73 additional holders a bridge into our next chapter. We were still bullish on the future of NFTs, but it was back to the drawing board. What were we missing?

In early 2022, we created Metarelics. We began to build a team that was native to the web3 space and spent months really understanding the social dynamics that were at play. As much as this space was about the art, it was more so about the community. We took that very seriously. To seed our community, we began hosting semi-private 30-minute zoom calls with our initial supporters. They became a regular occurrence and most of these people are still with us today.

We learned so much from those calls and are entirely grateful to everyone that participated in them. They started our journey.

We then launched our 1000 unit Relics Pass Collective in March of 2022. The core of Metarelics. A group that would learn and grow with us and each other. This was not just a gathering of folks with a common interest. We wanted to create a space where our members were able to bond over an exchange of value. And while we were hard at work creating ways to generate that value, we also understood that of equal importance was the ability to empower others to create it along with us.

We’re incredibly proud of the Relics Pass community. A group of individuals that are passionate about improving themselves and the lives of others. A group of individuals that value the opinions of others while holding strong to their own beliefs. A genuinely fun place to hangout and a welcome environment for those that need it the most. To be honest, this community has grown into something we really could not have imagined. It’s a group that has far exceeded our expectations and one we know we can count on to build with us for the foreseeable future.

To you all, we’re extremely grateful for your support and are excited for the future.

In the NFT world, late 2021 and early 2022 can be classified as the Utility meta. Airdrops, IRL events, alpha groups, mentorship, and more. What utility does this NFT provide me? People were starting to ask questions.

We were in a unique position. It’s surprisingly challenging to ship artwork around the world. We had the experience and optimized supply chain in place to accomplish this. So, we provided utility. We created an application on Shopify (s/o to the blockchain team) that would allow a user to verify the holdings of their crypto wallet, and print their favorite NFTs on high quality canvas. We were the first to do so while leveraging the actual content of the consumer's wallet.

This was important. It allowed us to offer one of the first true token gated utilities for physical artwork. We provided free prints for our own community and utilized the tool to partner with other token based communities. We ushered the NFT space into our ecosystem with the promise of affordable high quality canvas art. It worked. Orders came in from official partnerships with the likes of VeeFriends, MV3, and consumers across the globe.

Six months into building Metarelics, we found ourselves asking this question quite a bit. Were we an NFT print business? Many people certainly thought so. Were we a strong community? Our Relics Pass holders certainly thought so. Were we a mysterious web3 collective backed by a physical art company? That was one way to look at it.

IKONICK had built a strong brand foundation on inspiration and motivation. What was Metarelics?

After some contemplation, long nights, and a lot of caffeine, we came to the conclusion that Metarelics was best known across the broader space as an NFT print utility. It would be incredibly challenging to both push the boundaries of those commerce based possibilities while building our Relics Pass collective to its full potential.

So we made a decision that will provide clarity, direction, and the ability to formalize our grand vision.

The Relics Pass is now at the core of IKONICK. While still referred to as the Relics Pass, all communications, branding and partnerships will be with Ikonick.

Along with this announcement, we’re excited to unveil the new vision for IKONICK. We’re no longer just an art company. We’re building something much bigger.

An incredible transition is commencing. Over the next five or so years, the world will slowly but surely move away from the social platforms of the past. The social graph that Facebook built, the one that enabled IKONICK to grow into what it is today, will be a relic of the past.

We’re moving towards a world of data sovereignty. Individuals granting access to apps and services, not the other way around. We’re replacing the idea of ‘logging in’ with ‘connecting to a wallet’. The web will be wallet aware.

Advertisers will scramble to reach their target customers as programmatic advertising takes a back seat to data portability and privacy. In return, communities will be empowered.

Web3 enables this, but web3 is not the solution in and of itself. There are many inherent problems with the way the web3 space is laid out today. Scams, rug pulls, hacks, anonymous founders, VC incentives, ponzis, and an inherent desire for ‘more’, make this space tough to navigate and frictionally hard to access.

With the Relics Pass collective at its core, IKONICK is transitioning from a canvas art company, into a brand inspiring individuals to pursue a growth mindset. We will accomplish this through art, technology and media.

We’re creating a space to welcome individuals looking to better themselves, enabling them to connect with like minded individuals. We’ll push the boundaries on how web3 technology can empower communities and creatives. We’re creating best in class ecommerce experiences. Artists, entrepreneurs, developers, athletes, students, and the inherently curious. We welcome you to grow with us.

As we build this community, we’ll showcase the power of aligned incentives, tokenized artwork, decentralized storytelling, community governance, data portability, and the blend of physical and digital.

One of the features that we’re excited to develop on IKONICK is a brand + artist launchpad. We believe that IKONICK is in a unique position to enable brands and artists alike to enter web3 in an authentic, consumer friendly way.

In the next few years, the convergence of technology, community and personal ownership will enable mass market consumerism of digital goods and services; many of which will link to physical goods and services. IKONICK is positioned to become a trusted platform, providing brands and artists with a full suite of development and creative services to go from idea to execution.

Grounded in all of this is IKONICK’s library of 1000+ pieces of art. The culmination of years spent developing our own IP and working with major brands on officially licensed collections. The NBA, Monopoly, Upper Deck (Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, LeBron James), Peanuts, and many more. We know that for us and for our long term partners, the connection between physical and digital commerce is of great interest and importance.

We’ll be announcing some of the first brand partnerships to launch on IKONICK shortly. More details on our development timeline are coming soon. Of course, our Relics Pass holders will receive first access and exclusive pricing to any project launched on the Ikonick launchpad.

The launchpad will also serve as a consistent place for Relic Reserve collections.

Relic Reserves: 1000+ unit collections that are provided free or at a heavily discounted price to our Relics Pass holders. These occur at a rate of at least twice per year and are created or curated by Jeff Cole. The Relic Reserve collections allow us to partner with amazing artists and explore technical innovation in NFTs.

We’re super excited to announce our next Relic Reserve….

Garrett King, aka shortstache™︎, has been a pioneer across design, photography, and storytelling for the last 10 years. As an influential leader, he continues to challenge and push boundaries in the way one looks at and innovates within the creative landscape.

Relics Pass holders can look forward to the next Relic Reserve collection, featuring shortstache™︎ launching this holiday season. More details to be shared after the Sneaks launch.

Just last weekend, I was stopped in the Scottsdale Fashion Square Mall from a fan who saw our web series in 2018. We constantly get reminded how much impact the raw, unfiltered footage of our journey had on people's lives. Unfortunately, the pandemic forced us to take a step back from those plans. As we move forward, we’re excited to bring back various forms of our original content: podcasts, short-form video, blog posts, threads, creative social content and more. This is going to be a large focus of ours.

We’re committed to push the boundaries on content creation, building our top of funnel addressable audience while driving more value to our most engaged fans, holders, and community members.

Attention is the most valuable thing someone can provide to our business. We know that in order to receive that attention, we need to provide high quality content, products, and services. IKONICK Media will position us to execute efficiently in all three buckets.

The Relics Pass is the core of IKONICK. The top of the value chain. All benefits, governance, utility, and future initiatives starts and ends with you. That will never change.

In the coming months, we’ll begin ushering in the new era of IKONICK. It will be done with a focus on community design, partnerships, and innovation.

As we continue thinking about the design of our community and the subsequent implications it has on operations and growth, we feel that we’ll need to explore ways to expand beyond the confines of Discord.

Owned platforms that can provide unique experiences, content, engagement mechanisms, and economic incentives. A place where the benefits that IKONICK provides will be easily accessible, safe, and secure. There is much more to come here. From a design perspective, this is one of the most exciting questions to attempt to answer.

What experiences can we build that align with how individuals and communities want to spend their time in digital spaces? We’re giving ourselves permission to answer this question.

Successfully answering it starts with onboarding. The addressable market for crypto native audiences is small, but it doesn’t have to be. Web3 is tough to navigate and frictionally hard to access. IKONICK will act as an onramp. Starting with the IKONICK wallet. Coming soon, we’ll enable newcomers to engage with web3 experiences in a similar way that they’ve always accessed the web. Excited is an understatement.

Ultimately, the community will dictate a portion of the future of IKONICK. We’ll set the stage, provide guidance, and create ways to empower community members. All while aligning ourselves with the best partners, creatives, and resources available. One thing we do know is that like-minded partnerships will be imperative to how we grow the Ikonick universe; we’ve got some great ones on the way.

It’s not lost on us that we haven’t mentioned Sneaks of Nature once in this manifesto.

Sneaks, while powered by IKONICK, is a franchise dreamed up and created by Jeff Cole. IKONICK is in a position to support the development of Sneaks, but the franchise will grow well beyond the confines of what we’re building at Ikonick.

These characters will be household names. Seen throughout food, toys, apparel, events, television and one day the big screen.

Partnerships and ancillary products will begin rolling out this September on Sneaks of Nature’s official website.

Stay tuned to @sneaksofnature on Twitter and Instagram for more updates.

The core benefits of the Relics Pass will not change, they’ll only grow.

• Free & exclusive access to all things IKONICK via a new token gated solution (coming soon)

• First access and discounted pricing to the IKONICK Brand + Artist Launchpad (coming soon)

• Two+ Relic Reserve collections per year.

• Free Sneaks of Nature mint and the ability to mint an additional at a discounted price.

• Exclusive access to the Relic Room

• Live Events

• And much more..

Rooted in physical art, IKONICK’s canvas art business is not going anywhere. Beyond the natural extension of aligning digital art with physical art, we’re still one of the most recognizable canvas art brands in the world and we’ll continue to push that boundary.

We look forward to going on this journey with you. If you loved us for our art, you’ll love us more for what we can provide outside of it. This is just the beginning.

Now, back to work : )

Forward*: My name is Mark Mastrandrea. Along with Jeff Cole, we’re the co-founders of IKONICK, Sneaks of Nature, and Metarelics. This is a peak into our journey and our thoughts on the future.*

In the summer of 2016, we started a side hustle in our small beachfront shack in Carlsbad, San Diego. I (Mark) remember those times like it was yesterday. We were under-incentivized, under-utilized (and broke), but aggressively investing in our skillset. I was managing an artist and saw a hole in the affordable art market. Jeff saw the attention arbitrage of popular Instagram content, with a focus on motivational quotes, memes, pop culture and photography. We married the two concepts and started what would be one of the most recognizable art brands in the world, IKONICK.

This creative endeavor coincided with the rise of the greatest D2C sales platform to ever exist. Every dollar invested in Facebook and Instagram’s ad platform returned many multiples in revenue. We fully leveraged its capabilities. We honed our targeting, AB tested our creative, and scaled across 1000+ SKUs. Our content and reach, both owned and paid, attracted an audience of millions. We parlayed that success into big name licenses with the NBA, Monopoly, Muhammad Ali, and many more. Ultimately, our hustle led us into a business investment from (in our minds) one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation, Gary Vaynerchuk.

During the period of 2016-2021, IKONICK would grow into a household brand name with art in hundreds of thousands of homes and offices around the world. Inspiring and motivating the world to keep going.

It was early 2021 in a meeting with Gary where we learned a lot about the world of NFTs, crypto, and web3. He told us that this was a space to watch. That this was the future. That the opportunities to combine collectibles, provenance, ownership, community, and utility would be the building blocks for the next great social movement. We took this conversation very seriously.

We listened. We watched. We experimented. (Unfortunately, we didn’t buy any Crypto Punks, but that’s a story for another day). In late 2021, we launched the IKONICK NFT initiative. We airdropped a free NFT to consumers that purchased a $500 gift card to the IKONICK store as well as auctioned off a 1/1 collaborative piece. We wanted to explore the implications they could have on the relationship between artist and fan. We provided physical works to those that purchased digital works. We were ahead of the game.

However, at the time, the infrastructure and legal loopholes made collaboration and royalty splitting a nightmare to execute. We ultimately decided to discontinue the IKONICK NFT initiative. We negotiated a deal to buy back the 1/1 collaborative piece and gave the 73 additional holders a bridge into our next chapter. We were still bullish on the future of NFTs, but it was back to the drawing board. What were we missing?

In early 2022, we created Metarelics. We began to build a team that was native to the web3 space and spent months really understanding the social dynamics that were at play. As much as this space was about the art, it was more so about the community. We took that very seriously. To seed our community, we began hosting semi-private 30-minute zoom calls with our initial supporters. They became a regular occurrence and most of these people are still with us today.

We learned so much from those calls and are entirely grateful to everyone that participated in them. They started our journey.

We then launched our 1000 unit Relics Pass Collective in March of 2022. The core of Metarelics. A group that would learn and grow with us and each other. This was not just a gathering of folks with a common interest. We wanted to create a space where our members were able to bond over an exchange of value. And while we were hard at work creating ways to generate that value, we also understood that of equal importance was the ability to empower others to create it along with us.

We’re incredibly proud of the Relics Pass community. A group of individuals that are passionate about improving themselves and the lives of others. A group of individuals that value the opinions of others while holding strong to their own beliefs. A genuinely fun place to hangout and a welcome environment for those that need it the most. To be honest, this community has grown into something we really could not have imagined. It’s a group that has far exceeded our expectations and one we know we can count on to build with us for the foreseeable future.

To you all, we’re extremely grateful for your support and are excited for the future.

In the NFT world, late 2021 and early 2022 can be classified as the Utility meta. Airdrops, IRL events, alpha groups, mentorship, and more. What utility does this NFT provide me? People were starting to ask questions.

We were in a unique position. It’s surprisingly challenging to ship artwork around the world. We had the experience and optimized supply chain in place to accomplish this. So, we provided utility. We created an application on Shopify (s/o to the blockchain team) that would allow a user to verify the holdings of their crypto wallet, and print their favorite NFTs on high quality canvas. We were the first to do so while leveraging the actual content of the consumer's wallet.

This was important. It allowed us to offer one of the first true token gated utilities for physical artwork. We provided free prints for our own community and utilized the tool to partner with other token based communities. We ushered the NFT space into our ecosystem with the promise of affordable high quality canvas art. It worked. Orders came in from official partnerships with the likes of VeeFriends, MV3, and consumers across the globe.

Six months into building Metarelics, we found ourselves asking this question quite a bit. Were we an NFT print business? Many people certainly thought so. Were we a strong community? Our Relics Pass holders certainly thought so. Were we a mysterious web3 collective backed by a physical art company? That was one way to look at it.

IKONICK had built a strong brand foundation on inspiration and motivation. What was Metarelics?

After some contemplation, long nights, and a lot of caffeine, we came to the conclusion that Metarelics was best known across the broader space as an NFT print utility. It would be incredibly challenging to both push the boundaries of those commerce based possibilities while building our Relics Pass collective to its full potential.

So we made a decision that will provide clarity, direction, and the ability to formalize our grand vision.

The Relics Pass is now at the core of IKONICK. While still referred to as the Relics Pass, all communications, branding and partnerships will be with Ikonick.

Along with this announcement, we’re excited to unveil the new vision for IKONICK. We’re no longer just an art company. We’re building something much bigger.

An incredible transition is commencing. Over the next five or so years, the world will slowly but surely move away from the social platforms of the past. The social graph that Facebook built, the one that enabled IKONICK to grow into what it is today, will be a relic of the past.

We’re moving towards a world of data sovereignty. Individuals granting access to apps and services, not the other way around. We’re replacing the idea of ‘logging in’ with ‘connecting to a wallet’. The web will be wallet aware.

Advertisers will scramble to reach their target customers as programmatic advertising takes a back seat to data portability and privacy. In return, communities will be empowered.

Web3 enables this, but web3 is not the solution in and of itself. There are many inherent problems with the way the web3 space is laid out today. Scams, rug pulls, hacks, anonymous founders, VC incentives, ponzis, and an inherent desire for ‘more’, make this space tough to navigate and frictionally hard to access.

With the Relics Pass collective at its core, IKONICK is transitioning from a canvas art company, into a brand inspiring individuals to pursue a growth mindset. We will accomplish this through art, technology and media.

We’re creating a space to welcome individuals looking to better themselves, enabling them to connect with like minded individuals. We’ll push the boundaries on how web3 technology can empower communities and creatives. We’re creating best in class ecommerce experiences. Artists, entrepreneurs, developers, athletes, students, and the inherently curious. We welcome you to grow with us.

As we build this community, we’ll showcase the power of aligned incentives, tokenized artwork, decentralized storytelling, community governance, data portability, and the blend of physical and digital.

One of the features that we’re excited to develop on IKONICK is a brand + artist launchpad. We believe that IKONICK is in a unique position to enable brands and artists alike to enter web3 in an authentic, consumer friendly way.

In the next few years, the convergence of technology, community and personal ownership will enable mass market consumerism of digital goods and services; many of which will link to physical goods and services. IKONICK is positioned to become a trusted platform, providing brands and artists with a full suite of development and creative services to go from idea to execution.

Grounded in all of this is IKONICK’s library of 1000+ pieces of art. The culmination of years spent developing our own IP and working with major brands on officially licensed collections. The NBA, Monopoly, Upper Deck (Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, LeBron James), Peanuts, and many more. We know that for us and for our long term partners, the connection between physical and digital commerce is of great interest and importance.

We’ll be announcing some of the first brand partnerships to launch on IKONICK shortly. More details on our development timeline are coming soon. Of course, our Relics Pass holders will receive first access and exclusive pricing to any project launched on the Ikonick launchpad.

The launchpad will also serve as a consistent place for Relic Reserve collections.

Relic Reserves: 1000+ unit collections that are provided free or at a heavily discounted price to our Relics Pass holders. These occur at a rate of at least twice per year and are created or curated by Jeff Cole. The Relic Reserve collections allow us to partner with amazing artists and explore technical innovation in NFTs.

We’re super excited to announce our next Relic Reserve….

Garrett King, aka shortstache™︎, has been a pioneer across design, photography, and storytelling for the last 10 years. As an influential leader, he continues to challenge and push boundaries in the way one looks at and innovates within the creative landscape.

Relics Pass holders can look forward to the next Relic Reserve collection, featuring shortstache™︎ launching this holiday season. More details to be shared after the Sneaks launch.

Just last weekend, I was stopped in the Scottsdale Fashion Square Mall from a fan who saw our web series in 2018. We constantly get reminded how much impact the raw, unfiltered footage of our journey had on people's lives. Unfortunately, the pandemic forced us to take a step back from those plans. As we move forward, we’re excited to bring back various forms of our original content: podcasts, short-form video, blog posts, threads, creative social content and more. This is going to be a large focus of ours.

We’re committed to push the boundaries on content creation, building our top of funnel addressable audience while driving more value to our most engaged fans, holders, and community members.

Attention is the most valuable thing someone can provide to our business. We know that in order to receive that attention, we need to provide high quality content, products, and services. IKONICK Media will position us to execute efficiently in all three buckets.

The Relics Pass is the core of IKONICK. The top of the value chain. All benefits, governance, utility, and future initiatives starts and ends with you. That will never change.

In the coming months, we’ll begin ushering in the new era of IKONICK. It will be done with a focus on community design, partnerships, and innovation.

As we continue thinking about the design of our community and the subsequent implications it has on operations and growth, we feel that we’ll need to explore ways to expand beyond the confines of Discord.

Owned platforms that can provide unique experiences, content, engagement mechanisms, and economic incentives. A place where the benefits that IKONICK provides will be easily accessible, safe, and secure. There is much more to come here. From a design perspective, this is one of the most exciting questions to attempt to answer.

What experiences can we build that align with how individuals and communities want to spend their time in digital spaces? We’re giving ourselves permission to answer this question.

Successfully answering it starts with onboarding. The addressable market for crypto native audiences is small, but it doesn’t have to be. Web3 is tough to navigate and frictionally hard to access. IKONICK will act as an onramp. Starting with the IKONICK wallet. Coming soon, we’ll enable newcomers to engage with web3 experiences in a similar way that they’ve always accessed the web. Excited is an understatement.

Ultimately, the community will dictate a portion of the future of IKONICK. We’ll set the stage, provide guidance, and create ways to empower community members. All while aligning ourselves with the best partners, creatives, and resources available. One thing we do know is that like-minded partnerships will be imperative to how we grow the Ikonick universe; we’ve got some great ones on the way.

It’s not lost on us that we haven’t mentioned Sneaks of Nature once in this manifesto.

Sneaks, while powered by IKONICK, is a franchise dreamed up and created by Jeff Cole. IKONICK is in a position to support the development of Sneaks, but the franchise will grow well beyond the confines of what we’re building at Ikonick.

These characters will be household names. Seen throughout food, toys, apparel, events, television and one day the big screen.

Partnerships and ancillary products will begin rolling out this September on Sneaks of Nature’s official website.

Stay tuned to @sneaksofnature on Twitter and Instagram for more updates.

The core benefits of the Relics Pass will not change, they’ll only grow.

• Free & exclusive access to all things IKONICK via a new token gated solution (coming soon)

• First access and discounted pricing to the IKONICK Brand + Artist Launchpad (coming soon)

• Two+ Relic Reserve collections per year.

• Free Sneaks of Nature mint and the ability to mint an additional at a discounted price.

• Exclusive access to the Relic Room

• Live Events

• And much more..

Rooted in physical art, IKONICK’s canvas art business is not going anywhere. Beyond the natural extension of aligning digital art with physical art, we’re still one of the most recognizable canvas art brands in the world and we’ll continue to push that boundary.

We look forward to going on this journey with you. If you loved us for our art, you’ll love us more for what we can provide outside of it. This is just the beginning.

Now, back to work : )