About (tl;dr)

As fashion product creation moves onchain, consumers can invest into products with transparent value distribution, verifiable footprint, and creator attribution.

Crowdmuse is a multi-sided marketplace for creators to collaborate on products with communities, brands, and suppliers.

We are building onchain coordination rails that lower the barrier for creators and brands to launch their own sustainable fashion collectibles.

When creators join Crowdmuse, they are able to create a profile, add their digital assets for licensing, and get matched with other creators, makers and brands to collaborate on products.

When collectors pre-order products on the Crowdmuse Marketplace, funds are automatically distributed back to the creators and brand involved based on their proportional contribution.

By providing better financial incentives and more visibility into product value flows, we aim to attract brands, designers and suppliers from the traditional fashion world as they recognize the potential that web3 technologies unlock. These brands and designers would in turn onboard members of their communities through crowdfunded drops.

Since the last time we participated in Gitcoin beta round a few months ago, we have publicly launched the Crowdmuse Marketplace (beta 1.0), onboarded our first 100 collectors with our Crowdmuse genesis drop (sold out within 5 hours of release), and dropped a zero waste t-shirt in collaboration with Friends with Benefits and DECODE as part of FEST23.

Over the next 3 months, we will show the potential of the Crowdmuse protocol with proof of contribution (and impact!) through a series of digi-physical fashion collectible drops with our favorite web3 communities.

Key product features in the beta marketplace include:

• Pre-order and revenue splits: creators, brands, and suppliers can avoid upfront costs by enabling pre-orders to fund product creation costs from product sales. This reduces waste by ensuring that garments are only manufactured once they are sold. Combining pre-orders and programmable revenue splits helps transform the traditional ‘push system’ (stock model) into a ‘pull system’ (stockless model) of made-to-order manufacturing, ensuring a more sustainable approach and a positive working capital process.

• Multi-sided marketplace: The blockchain can bring greater efficiency and liquidity to the creator economy, not only allowing for better matching of creators and brands with suppliers but also resulting in increased growth and fairer revenue sharing among contributors. This leads to a circular economy as suppliers are better able to repurpose their supply to the network of creators. Our multi-sided marketplace enables a collaboration graph with suppliers and producers bringing their made-to-order capacity onchain with verifiable footprint standards like energy credits and water consumption.

• Creator portfolio and licensing: creators can mark the originality of their creations on the public ledger and can receive perpetual royalties as brands and other creators remix their creations. Creator and manufacturer profiles to showcase and license digital assets such as 3D zero-waste designs and sustainable manufacturing capacity.

Background

Fast fashion is a symptom of poor incentives. Currently, the fashion industry faces several problems:

Lack of education, resources, access to supply, and upfront costs

Fashion, like many other consumer goods verticals, has been going through a digital transformation as adoption from a digitally native audience of creators and consumers soars. This is impacting not only the design and production processes but the entire supply chain and those involved within it.

Difficulty in accessing reliable suppliers and resources has hindered designers and brands from fully exploring their product potential, leading to the protectionism of supply networks and challenges in supplier management.

The industry is beginning to shift towards a more sustainable and positive working capital model, moving away from traditional stock-based systems to presell, preorder, made-to-order, and minimum-order-quantity manufacturing.

This allows designers and brands to receive upfront payments from orders, reducing the need for upfront investment in stock inventory and enabling a more efficient production process.

Supply chain transparency, gated footprint data, and fragmented digital assets

The challenge of implementing sustainable business models that are economically viable has grappled consumer markets, particularly fashion for a decade or more. Existing solutions are yet to scale sufficiently to meet customer needs across the demand curve.

Customers are increasingly conscious of their purchases, but reliable supply chains require collaborative networks of suppliers and producers to achieve scalable sustainable production.

Web2 software solutions have attempted to bring visibility to a product's provenance and footprint, but they lack standardized and complete data sets, making it difficult to verify sustainability claims and achieve clear transparency and visibility in the supply chain.

Progress is further hindered by the vertical integration of fast fashion companies, fragmented data sources, and lack of shared incentives.

IP development and commercialization

Creators often struggle to protect their Intellectual Property (IP) from appropriation by larger brands and cannot sufficiently monetize their creations without centralized distribution channels.

Sustainable suppliers and producers find sufficient demand at higher costs until they can scale their technologies and commercialize their IP.

The emergence of NFTs has opened up new opportunities for creators and makers to utilize decentralized distribution channels, monetize their work directly, and capture revenue across the demand curve.

Solution

Crowdmuse’s programmable human-centric incentives enable each product contributor to monetize their creations and own their data and IP.

Crowdmuse lowers the barrier for co-creation by:

• Reducing upfront costs through revenue splits
• Multi-sided marketplace with modular supply capacity
• Creator monetization through IP licensing and subscription

Reducing upfront costs through co-creation and preorder drops

Co-creation refers to the process in which a brand or multiple creators co-design a product with input from their fans. As designer collectives and micro-brands bring their products and suppliers on-chain, they transform their individual supply chains into a supply web with multi-directional interconnections. By sharing supply and production risk, the collective capacity can scale sustainably without the need to push manufacturing costs down in vertically integrated supply chains.

Crowdmuse utilizes the blockchain as a distributed order book of skills to streamline co-created and co-owned products, allowing creators to earn revenue based on their contributions and enabling artifacts to be authenticated to their profiles.

Creator artifacts and skills can be plugged into multiple product creation flows, meaning that a 3D designer can plug their digital assets into another creator network to create an entirely new product.

Limited edition product drops on the Crowdmuse marketplace help mitigate upfront stock costs and meet desired order numbers before production and delivery.

Multi-sided marketplace with modular supply

In order for the multiplayer creator economy to thrive, a multi-sided platform is needed to enable the various market participants to easily transact with each other.

The blockchain can bring greater efficiency and liquidity to the creator economy, not only allowing for better matching of creators and brands with suppliers but also resulting in increased growth and fairer revenue sharing among contributors.

Using our multi-sided marketplace, suppliers, and producers can bring their made-to-order capacity onchain with verifiable footprint standards like energy credits and water consumption.

With increased sustainable product supply options in the market, on-chain product provenance and certification provides transparent sourcing standards and footprint insights, while consumer ownership incentives serve as a market demand signal to larger brands.

Supply Webs Supply access and manufacturing are made possible through our growing supply network, providing made-to-order, high-quality, sustainably manufactured garments.

• DECODE is a New York-based zero-waste micro-factory and fashion company. Danielle Elsener developed DECOD[ECO]SYSTEM, a set of tools to address all facets of Zero Waste applications in the Apparel Industry.
• [a]industri is a Sweden-based micro-factory and designer collective for physical and digital garment production. It is a team of fashion designers, expert machinists, cutters, pattern makers, and digital designers from 6 different countries, led by the reputable fashion designer Rickard Lindqvist.
• Rapanui is a UK-based manufacturer and producer of lifestyle, urban apparel wear that utilizes certified sustainable materials and circular production models.
• Younergy Crypto provides tokenized solar credits and calculates CO2 avoided based on high resolution local grid intensity to measure energy footprint of manufacturers.
• Earthist Network is a community of regenerative hemp farmers and environmental stewards exploring novel applications of hemp across textiles, construction, and cosmetics.

IP ownership and licensing models

With onchain creativity, creators can mark the originality of their creations on the public ledger and can receive perpetual royalties as brands and other creators remix their creations.

Creator contributions are linked to products, with proportional revenue splits and licensing royalties for their contributions and remixes.

Suppliers and producers can commercialize their sustainable materials, patterns and technologies through drops, and scale their production through recurring revenue and collective fundraising.

The Crowdmuse Protocol enables creators to collaborate on product drops by contributing their creative assets and production techniques, while retaining ownership through decentralized identities.

Roadmap and budget

Plans for 2023 (enabled by Gitcoin Beta Round + GG18)

We imagine a world where our values are programmed into the products we create and consume.

Over the next 3 months, we will show the potential of the Crowdmuse protocol with proof of contribution (and impact!) through a series of digi-physical fashion collectible drops with our favorite web3 communities.

These drops aim to show the power of on-chain coordination to incentivize regeneration through batched material sourcing, open source zero-waste design, composable IP licensing, modular supply chains, verifiable certificates, and fair compensation through the entire value chain.

Milestones:

• Launch several on chain fashion collectible drops with high profile communities to increase awareness of web3 positive-sum incentive mechanisms.
• Work with network of sustainable material suppliers and micro-factories to scale up tech/production
• Enable proof-of-impact certificates and footprint certification standards, experimenting with verifiable certificates for supplier/manufacturer material quality, material waste, carbon footprint, water consumption, and working conditions.
• Work with DECODE on footprint certification showing the impact of zero waste
• Work with Younenergy to measure solar energy consumption for garment production
• Experiment with made-to-order incentives to grow network of micro-factory nodes
• Kick off creator fund to experiment with sustainable material and production practices

Gitcoin Grant budget allocation

We’ve only used 30% of the funds we received in July from Gitcoin beta round, and will use the remaining and additional funds from GG18 for the following:

• 40% to upfront costs for sustainable material costs and zero waste manufacturing
• 30% to develop proof of impact certificates with partnering manufacturers
• 30% reserved for creator fund for experimental drops

Features

• Graph Paper Capital Accelerator: One of ten teams to be accepted into GPC 1 cohort and backed by GPC fund. Read more here.
• How I chose among the 649 projects in Gitcoin’s Beta Round by Carl Cervone
• ImpactDAO book by Kevin Owocki
• Seed Club SC05 Cohort Crowdmuse fashion collective, Signature Capsules was a part of SC05 accelerator:'Promising on-chain organizations building with community ownership as a first principle'. Read more.
• TECHUNTER Functional Apparel Magazine feature 'Wearing Tomorrow'.
• Augmenting Culture: The Emerging Field of Digital Fashion 1kx web3 fashion landscape
• General Magic Impact DAO Landscape Tokenomics & Applied Research
• Multiplayer Creation: Unlocking Participatory Media 1kx co-creation landscape

Crowdmuse Resources

• Crowdmuse whitepaper 1.0
• Reinventing the Renaissance: The next wave of the creator economy
• Redeemable Phygital NFTs with co-ownership incentives
• New Era of Decentralized Brands
• Fashion has a new face. And it’s multiplayer.
• Regenerative incentives for IRL products

Team

Eiman Soliman, Maryam Maz, AJ, F00A, Tyler Scharf, Gabriel Hyun, Bertil Tandayamo, and many more brilliant contributors and creators.