Why You Should Reignite Your Interest in Digital-First Fashion with Richard Hobbs, BNV | Seamless

Welcome, Richard, to this Seamless interview. It's good to see you again. We've obviously known one another for a few years, so welcome today to Seamless.

Thank you for having me, Michael. It's a pleasure to catch up again after, wow, 7, 8 years, I guess, was the first time you did PI Apparel in Hong Kong. It must be around that time, 2016 or '17, maybe.

That sounds about right. I think 2017. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, thank you for inviting me then because I was your sort of MC for that first one and we sort of stayed in touch. Paths have drifted and crossed back again, which is great. So glad you're back at PI and I'm still doing the same old stuff. And yes, let's, let's have a chat.

Amazing. So look, let's start with this. For those of our readers that perhaps haven't met you before, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and how your career path has led you to where you are today with BMV?

Well, very interesting. Literally just before we spoke, I just posted on a very old friend's LinkedIn comment because they were asking for advice for their son who was going to university in the college in the US to become, um, a science and a space scientist, however you want to call it. And actually, that's what I went to university to do, to study astrophysics. Um, so the fact that I ended up in the fashion industry was quite weird, but essentially it was this looks like it's a lot more fun, and that's how I ended up in the industry. And that was a long time ago, and that sort of took me through various things, including in retail, moving to London, getting involved in the jeans business, and then moving to Hong Kong, still in the denim business, and working, I would say, mostly on the back end of the industry, so sourcing manufacturing logistics, but also managing both design teams and merchandising teams to basically put collections together and get them where they needed to be at the right time. And then do all the other boring stuff like, where are we going to make this, how much is it going to cost, what are the minimums, and lining up production capacity and buying fabrics and all the stuff which I know a lot of your people are actively involved in. And sort of that was my sort of journey and then got involved in all sorts of different aspects of the business, starting brands, owning brands, premium denim, semi-luxury, streetwear, action sports. So I've covered a lot of different categories over the time and I've gone down the bottom as well. I've been sourcing stuff for the big names at high volumes at very low prices. So I've seen all aspects of that side of the business and understand how it works and right the way through to distribution and retail. I started a retail business in China in collaboration with American Rag from LA and broadened that out and started a trade show in a similar vein, which was eventually sold. And we brought about 100 brands into both Hong Kong and later into China and across the region. So a very wide and varied course of interaction with the fashion industry. But I think probably going back to the scientist in me, I was always interested in technology and how the— what is actually in many cases, um, an archaic structure for a lot of the processes in the fashion industry could be improved, um, certainly made more efficient, sped up through the application of technology. And actually, that's why I started B&B around a similar time, 2016. Was there's a lot of technology out there which, if applied properly, could really make a difference, could probably make an impact into the fashion industry. Um, and that's when I sort of got digging deep into 3D product creation. And I think that's how we first met, and that's, you know, how I got involved at the time. And, and I remember even then, back in 2017, and the subsequent event, which was the year later, I think, talking about how you know, the, the possibilities that now existed through the application of 3D product creation, not just to speed up the design and development process, but then to take that creative output or the technical output and use it in other areas. So into internal validation, into marketing, and where I am now, which is into the next sphere, which is how you can use digital assets in ways above and beyond what people, let's say, have normal expectations around. So very quick synopsis of 35-plus years of the journey, but, um, hope that sort of gives some— I guess it gives some validity to my, my knowledge and background when, when I'm talking about it, because a lot of people working— I would say not a lot of people working, there's a lot of people that touch on the concept of digital fashion and talk about disruption and, you know, switching things up, but actually you need to understand a lot about how the industry functions and also a lot of the mindsets and personalities and the— ego is the wrong word, but, you know, the passion and the belief that comes along with being in the fashion industry. So hope that's a good starting point.

It is, it is. You've been up to a lot over those 35 years. I love, I love at the beginning when you were like, um, I started off in space, but I thought that this industry was going to be a lot more interesting. I'm not sure people would agree with that. Space seems like, space seems like it would be, well, otherworldly.

But, um, don't get me wrong, I thought fun, definitely space is way more interesting, but the fun part was fun. Okay, I was hanging out with cool people. I was going to Florence for the weekend, go shopping. I was hanging out with models and famous people. That was a bit more interesting than maybe doing another 7 or 8 years of, of maths and physics before I became an actual scientist.

That makes sense. Okay, well, um, you've obviously touched upon this, um, a little bit. You mentioned that you founded BMV. Can you tell us a little bit more about, uh, what BMV is, how it's evolved, and what is the the vision of BNV for this industry?

What the title is, in the title, Brands and New Vision, BNV, that's what it stands for, and that was the original concept, is right, brands, new processes, and having a vision. And the vision at that time was, yeah, what can we do to make things better? And that's still very, very valid, and right through to the areas of impact, which I can touch on a bit later. So originally it was Okay, 3D product creation. How can we remove the slow parts, the, the initial sampling, the revised sampling, the salesman, some all of these things which could be done virtually? And at that time, the tools that were coming through that were available were actually getting better and better, but demonstrating fashion and material physics and fluidity and all of that stuff. That was like, that was the first light bulb moment. Okay, we can actually make stuff virtually and go— what I wanted to do was go right to the point of customer sales. So don't make anything until you sold it, and then only produce what you've sold. And that was the original business model. In the process of building that, I started looking into blockchain, because in 2017 they had what they called the ICO sort of phase of, um, initial coin offerings. And I went to California and hung out for a little bit and tried to meet people and understand, and came back completely confused and convinced that it was all a load of rubbish. And, uh, it was a— but I stayed with it, and I wish I'd stuck with it more at the time and talk to maybe some more, some better people. Um, but the concept of tokenization, meaning NFTs as they were called and still are to some degree, and provenance that you could actually record and put on chain immutably where stuff came from, how it was made, who was involved in it, and that tied into smart contracts. So, um, so Ethereum being the sort of underbelly of everything that's got smart contracts. So what I felt there was, here's an opportunity to actually shift the reward structure in the fashion industry, because often the people that are probably the most creative and do a lot of work are at the bottom. They're the fresh graduates, they're the interns, they're doing a lot of the grunt work, let's say, and they don't get paid, not, not in real terms. And then at the very top of the tree, the big bosses, the corporations— what I mean, as a prime example, you could be a freelance designer, and I've got personal knowledge and experience in France. You could design something amazing, be paid $300 for, for your work, and that item could sell a million units, but you won't get anything else. But putting that involvement into a smart contract for a digital asset that could potentially be connected to a physical asset would change that paradigm. It could actually reward people properly for their, uh, creative— and that's one of the things that stuck with me. So what we started was, right, if we make digital product, we tokenize it, we enable it to be sold and traded, and then at some point in the future somebody will work out what to do with it, you know. And at that time people were talking about the metaverse and the fact that you could move into games and you could do that. That was sort of a little bit pie in the sky, but I've always stuck with the opinion that that would have— something would happen where my digital assets would have additional value. Some of that could be related to what's commonly referred to as digital twins, because the product that you purchase could have a digital version and vice versa, and there will be ways to do that. And that's what we started to build was like, okay, let's just build this product. We'll work with brands, we'll have a marketplace, we'll build different things around it. And we started evolving that over a period of time. We managed to secure investment, um, and be able to then focus on actually building that in 2021, 2022. And then the market changed, you know, the metaverse died, NFTs became a curse, um, but we still believed in that vision, the long-term vision that what we needed to build was an ecosystem, an ecosystem that could link digital fashion with physical fashion and In my mind, the big connection was changing the way that brands and consumers connect. So historically, brands and their creative directors and their design teams and their owners come up with concepts and collections, and then they get funneled through this long cycle until they eventually turn up at retail, accompanied by advertising campaigns and promotions, and you're basically Tried to be convinced as a consumer that that's cool and I should buy it. Then we got to the world of social media and instant gratification and e-commerce sort of changing the way that that worked a little way, but it's still very much driven by brands dictating the stories and the message. And everybody talks a lot about co-creation as a concept, but it's actually really difficult to execute in the real world because who are you gonna talk to? Who are you gonna listen to? How are you gonna filter all of that? And then what are you gonna do? Are you actually gonna make stuff? Are you going to change your design DNA and your manufacturing resources to be able to cater to somebody or a group of people that likes to— Digitally, you can do almost anything with almost zero cost. And now with the application of AI tools that enable that enhanced level of creativity, and I, and I call them tools very specifically because they are a tool, they are not a replacement, they're something that people should use. You might have to change your mind about what your role is and what your tools that you use. You know, before, you know, sketchbook, Photoshop, Illustrator, CLO 3D, Browzwear. Now there's this other set of things that need to fit into that with all of the other tools there. But if individuals as either creators or merchandisers or marketeers can embrace those, those agentic tools and the, um, and the AI elements then, you know, that's, that has to be the future. So I think I've probably gone a little bit off track there, but essentially what, where we are now is we're very close to being able to, um, talk openly about the ecosystem that we've been building. And the ecosystem is that combination of how brands and users, or brands and participants, can connect in different ways. It's underpinned by our coin which is called Fash. It's a cryptocurrency. It's, uh, going to be built on a layer 2, so, um, EVM chain, which means we can subsidize the gas fees and make it very relatively fast and quick. And we built our user-generated content platform that enables both humans and also agents to create using the tools that we've got. So that's taking items of clothing broken down by sections of, you know, hats, eyewear, accessories, tops, bottoms, shorts, pants, etc. And each one of those can also be then customized through color, pattern, texture, plugins that could be music related, that could be art related. If you're in Web3, PFPs can all be plugged in as graphics or art into these things. And then be able to share that and monetize that creativity through various elements, including games, which is there. And I guess the big shift which we, we are now making, which elaborates that whole ecosystem concept, is we're making our platform open source, which means that anyone with the, the skills, the development skills, can actually feed off of everything that we've created to actually build a retail store, a catwalk show, a stylist book, you know, all using the resources that we've been building over the last 5 or 6 years.

Nice, nice. Well, look, there's, um, a lot of things that have come out of this that, um, I'm going to ask you about— the co-creation element, the AI, um, element, and more. I guess I do want to ask you this though, off the bat. I think, you know, a lot of the people that will, uh, watch this and read about this interview, you know, they are from brands. A lot of them did try and launch something in this space. And I think a lot of them see it as being a bit of a flop. There was high— oh, sorry, low ROI, high hype. Why should brands still bother? Really, I guess I wanted to ask you.

Why should they bother? They need to commit to it. Not in a massive— I think part of the problem, if we're going back 2.5, 3 years ago, which is, you know, when everything was super buzzy and hypey um, was lots of people saying, you must do NFTs, you must be in the metaverse, you've got to be involved in gaming, uh, this is the future, it's all going to happen. And everybody expected that to be around the corner, and it wasn't. It was never going to be around the corner. It was going to be a long-term thing. So a lot of it was pressure from outside forces, whether that be the media, agencies, um, just people probably like me. I was probably one of them saying, hey, you should do this. But I think a lot of people jumped into it because they felt that pressure, and it was something you had to do, even if it's just for PR purposes, just to show that you're engaged in that space. But very few of them thought about that. Okay, how does that all join up? What, you know, okay, we're gonna do, um, an NFT as a, as a piece of clothing or a membership token or, um, an event which can be tokenized and do that. That's, that honestly, that's easy. That was the easy part to do, is that, okay, but then what happens? What do you do with that digital wearable? What do you do with that membership token? How do you join that all up and link it perhaps back into your traditional CRM or, you know, other elements of your business and bring it all together? And I think that's where the disappointment came, because it was, yeah, we're going to do this, it's going to be great, but then unless you work out where you're going to go next, and that didn't have to be definitive. It just had to be, we're going to commit to building this digital element to what we do, and it's going to evolve because that is one of the key elements of technology, is it changes so fast you have to be able to move sideways, pivot, for want of a better term. But sometimes if you pivot too much, you just make yourself dizzy and you go around in circles. You've still got to have some sort of path that you're, you're looking towards. And I've got to say, probably most people around that time didn't have the vision or the path. Um, and a lot of people that were in, I would say, not similar but sort of running in the same race as us, um, have changed and moved in different directions and focused on different areas. And I like to think that we've at least stuck with that ecosystem vision. Which is taking us there. And what I've said for the last few years, I don't want to sell this to anyone. I don't want to get any brands try, uh, work with us. I mean, we'll talk to them, but by all means, but I want to be able to demonstrate to them, here is a way for you to actually monetize. And for a lot of those big brands, it's probably not relevant at the moment. It could be in, in a year or two's time. Um, the ones that I see it being are smaller perhaps younger people that have embraced that extension of digital product creation into other areas, um, are using AI in super fast ways because you can build an AI model for your business. And obviously people have been doing that for over 2 years now since sort of ChatGPT first came on the horizon, and everybody, right, whoa, we can get rid of our customer service and we can improve some of these things. And a lot of them have been working, I would say, carefully and slowly and thoughtfully about how to integrate AI into internal processes. But actually, some of the stuff that's happening, like there'll be new stuff that comes out today or tomorrow, which you're gonna go, wow. I mean, video, text-to-video now is getting so good that, and, and with API calls, so you actually can trigger it to happen. You know, the moment you have to sit, sit down and you still have got to have the mindset of a someone who's creating a video and putting all these things together. but actually soon you'll just be able to type in, make a video, da da da, and something will come out which will be functional and with a little bit of polish could actually be amazing. So these are the things where I think the people that are more nimble and more flexible and fast are gonna be able to embrace that and do really interesting things. And over a period of time, they will filter into the toolbox of the bigger brands to be able to do, or the bigger companies to do something with, or the agencies that are selling them the services to do all that, depending on how they are. I do think there will be a shift that it's going to be so easy to actually be very creative and very, provide very good functional output in-house. So that will change the relationship, I think, between the larger brands and the agencies that they might work with. To be much more responsive and much faster and different metrics, different KPIs have to kick in.

Absolutely. And you, the other day on our prep call for this, you touched upon it a moment ago when you said, you know, you're not actively going after brands at the moment. You'll obviously talk to them, but that's not part of your plan right now. You said the other day that you have kind of switched to a model where you want to build first and convince late. Later. And I wondered, how has your approach to that kind of external validation evolved, especially when you engage with more skeptical brands?

It's not easy. It's definitely not easy. And there we have to sort of, we have to have some belief that what we're doing is going to work and it will bring value. I would say we have a nice group of people that we use as sounding boards. So what— one of the things I've been focused on building is what is the BNV Foundation. And the reason it's, it's set up as a foundation is primarily linked to the, the issuance of the coin. But what we've done with this is we've built, um, first of all, a committee of people from cross-section of the fashion industry, the, the crypto world, education, sustainability, um, product design. And then we're gradually rolling that out to what we call the next level, which is the BNB100, which is going to be a maximum of 100 people on top of the 20, again with different areas of expertise and field. And where we bounce ideas off some of those people in specific areas, like say whether it's token related or fashion related. That's our sounding board, if you like. But again, it's more of a feedback mechanism rather than going into doing a hard-headed pitch in a boardroom. You need to sign up to this because we're going to do it. It's more like, what do you think of this? How do you think this might work? What might be the reaction? And then we take that on board. So Yeah, that's— sometimes you have to have belief in your own vision and capabilities. Yeah, because otherwise you're just going to be focus groups and A/B testing to your— to the end of your life, and nobody comes up with anything new. So I think sort of that's where we are. Like I said, I've been around the block a few times, and I've— over the— over those decades, which I have to keep reminding you, um, sometimes I've been too early. This could be another one, you know. I've done businesses or particular projects when, you know, a year and a half, 2 years later, somebody else has done something and made a lot of money out of it, and I'm going like, but that was my thing, I did that first. You don't always, you know, sometimes it's always best to be second, but I always want to be the one that's sort of pushing the envelope and being a bit more creative.

So yeah, that's the good thing with this too, is that I think there are a lot of companies that were in the same sphere as you that have either completely failed or they've completely changed what they're doing now. So you're playing the long game, which it sounds like is the right thing to do. And kind of a link to that, I mean, you obviously know, know this, but, um, I obviously, uh, worked for The Fabricant for 2 years, um, and one of the biggest things that we saw at the time and the biggest challenges that the development team came up against was the friction to onboarding. You know, if you want this to be kind of like a mass market adoption, you need to remove the friction so that us or me, the Web2 crowd, can easily onboard and understand the Web3 world. And I'd love to know, like, what have you seen as being the biggest pain points in that area and what have you done to try and combat it?

The— what you're really talking about is this world of Web3, which is tokenization and wallets and seed phrases and crypto and tokenomics and all of these phrases which in mean nothing to most people. However, those in the Web3 bubble think it's everything. And the, the biggest challenge is keeping those people happy, you know, by doing the things, because they're an important part, especially when you're launching. You need some of these people to be supportive and be involved in what you're doing. But actually onboarding people from, um, you know, they're dismissively referred to as normies by the Web3 crowd, which is, you know, pretty rude if you ask me. But let's say the Web2 audience, um, I mean, it's— if you go through the process, if I said, right, and at any time over the last 4 or 5 years, okay, this is what you need to do to get into Web3, okay, you need to download a MetaMask wallet, And that was the only one at the time. Now there's, there's other options. Ray B. Phantom. You need to get the plugin on your browser. You need to have it on your phone. You need to start it up and you need to write down a 12, maybe even 24-word seed phrase and lock it away in a safe and don't lose it and make another copy. Well, whatever you do, don't put it on your computer because then somebody could hack it and you can lose everything. And then you need to go and start an account with an exchange, which is gonna be a nightmare depending on where you live because of the KYC process until you can get there. And then you can buy some Ethereum. And then if you want to buy something else, you've got to either swap it or bridge it, and you will give up within the first 3 minutes because it's just far too complicated. It's full of jargon, it's full of acronyms. And that's still been the, the case for a lot of people. Now, what we focused on 2 years ago when we sort of said, right, now we know what we're going to do. We're not going to sort of keep selling NFTs of digital fashion. We're going to build something. And that was a key point. Make it very accessible, make it mobile, make it non-custodial, meaning anybody can sign up. You just need a login. So take it to today, and we haven't pushed it too hard yet because it's still, um, going to be all linked when they— when the buttons all get pressed at the same time. But if you go to bnv.fund, just type it in, bnv.fund, um, that's— we have an agent there. The agent is called Nova, and Nova knows everything about BNB, everything about the next stage of what we're doing, which is brand coins. And you can also have a chat about football or whatever else you might be interested in, because it's sitting on top of the large language models and it can have that. But its task is to help onboard normal people the Web2 people into Web3 in a real simple way. And basically if you say to Nova, hey Nova, and actually if you've got voice activated on your computer, you can just speak to it. Say, hey Nova, tell me. The good thing with LLMs is I don't know if you ever use Google or one of those things where you talk and it transcribes into, but it often, it just comes out gobbledygook and you have to retype the whole thing. The good thing is if you're talking to an agent which sits on an LLM, the translation or the transcription is perfect. I'm sure you're using various transcription models, but now it's so easy. You can actually have a legitimate conversation and not worry about whether it's interpreted your grammar or your accent correctly. You can do that in any language. You can actually talk to the agent in Spanish, in Italian, in Japanese, in Swahili, and say, "Nova, can you help me open a wallet?" It will say, "Sure, Europe." What's your email address? Give it your email address. Within a few seconds, you will get an email from our partner, which is a company called Third Web, and it will say your, your account is being generated. Here's your 4-letter passcode. You give that 4-letter passcode to, to Nova, just typing it back in, and your wallet's there. And it's— you can see it, it pops up there. And that's easy.

You're in.

You haven't had to write down anything. It still belongs to you. Any assets that go in there. And guess what? We will start giving you some assets. We will start delivering things to you for the process of coming on board. And at this stage, it's just this really simple way to actually get that next— the next stage is, is a big step. And that's honestly, Michael, with, with all respect, that's probably another hour-long conversation. But I think it might be something that if your audience is, is interested, I'm more than happy to do a follow-up. But that's, that's when we talk about BrandCoins, which is our, our model for brand engagement in Web3, which is where we can demonstrate, um, value, return on investment, KPIs, all the bits and pieces that brand custodians and marketeers would be more interested in rather than saying eyeballs and, um, social shares. It's going to be a bit more than that, and that's being done at the moment and is where the other big part of what the most important thing that's happening with tech at the moment is agents. And that's where we're really going to be focused on how we roll out what we can offer to the brands that we work with, to the customers that we work with, and the wider sphere, you know, by building something that actually anybody can tap into.

Yeah, which is great because that's what I wanted to ask you about first. Well, next. Even, obviously, agentic AI is really changing a lot of ways in which we are doing business nowadays. It's something that wasn't available when I was working at The Fabricant, or at least not in a, not in a way that was kind of like a mass adopted. So I want to start with something a bit more general. You know, you've just mentioned that you're integrating agentic AI to support everything from marketing to wallet creation. More generally, what role do you see these agent networks playing in the future of brand building?

I see two main areas where I can see them being very productive-culottes with the right management and with the right input. And management is about input, it's about prompting, and it's about tailoring the the character and the memory and the brain of the agents to work in ways. So autonomy means essentially once it's released, it can— it should build its own thing, it should work on its own way. But it's important how you configure that before it goes off. You know, you bring up your child from the age of 0 to 18 or 21, and when you release it into the world, you hope that it's going to be a nice person, it's going to do good things.

Fingers crossed.

Yeah, but you've had 21 years to get that right, and you've had lots of support from teachers and mentors and whatever. With, with agentic agents or autonomous agents, you can do that in a matter of minutes, you know. Okay, there has to be some forethought because you don't, you know, you don't have a child just like, like you think about it, you know, what are we going to do? So you do some of that preparation, but once you launch it, that's like going from 0 to 21 in a matter of minutes. So then it's going to learn, it's going to react, it's going to— now the way I see this working and what we're building is this creative and marketing, um, set of agents. So, um, and I'll give you a sort of— and this is not public yet, but this is sort of pretty much how it's going to work— is as a brand, you would have either a collection or season, or just the brand as a whole concept, or a single product. And you would provide to our agent, our creative agents, the tools that they might need— visuals, text, backstory, objectives, targets, key CTAs— all of the stuff that you might need as a creative element, ideally built around our concept of co-creation, which enables people to interact with certain things to actually build things and promote it. The creative agent network comes up with those concepts, bounces them back off each other, you know, it's validating things, it's doing that A/B testing within itself and through different channels. And it can be cross-checked and cross-referenced with, with the brand founders or the brand principals, with ourselves, however much you want to have that. And then once that's established, and that can be just pure text, it can be static images, it can be videos, it can be all the— it gets handed over to the marketing team. And the marketing team is a series of agents with particular focus around different channels. Some could be on Instagram, some could be on Twitter, some could be direct mail, some could be, you know, the sky's the limit— Discord, Reddit, wherever you might have an audience that wants to be connected. And new ones will come along. Configuring that's not easy, but it is doable. And then those agents all have their individual character. They will have got, again, a backstory, something about them. They'll have their look and their vibe and their feel, and they'll have certain things about them. And they will take that creative content but customize it for themselves and for the channel and for their audience. So you're not just, here's the ad, stick it, stick it, stick it, and hope that it works and people respond to it. You're actually fine-tuning and tailoring that messaging and that communication constantly through that process. So maybe your campaign runs for a week, and, you know, within that time you might do 20 different iterations of it as you're fine-tuning it, but it's all being done autonomously because they can track what the response is and what the results are. The big difference, and this is a leap for, for many people, is those agents can have wallets. So those agents can actually be on Crypto Rails, which is the, you know, the, the best term to describe. So they can actually be earning and rewarding and incentivizing people through that whole process. If somebody's talking, I say, hey, I love this, how do I get it? That agent can actually handle that transaction for you. Although, you know, normally they might say, oh, you need to go to the website and then, you know, to register an account and then you'll have to do that. No, no, tell me you want this one, I can help, I can get it for you now, we'll take care of it. This is the strength of what can actually— and it's not like pie in the sky, it's all very close. I mean, we're working in the framework that we're working for our agent deployment. Is doing a big upgrade, hopefully any day now, within the next few weeks. And that's when we will redeploy our network of agents with these additional tools. And as a sort of another example, um, and this is sort of— this is in the pipeline— but if I'm having a conversation with an agent on Instagram, that's fine. It can— it remembers me. It can have that conversation with me, and I can come back a week later. Hey Richard, how you doing? Good to see you, blah, blah, blah. If I'm having this conversation with the same agent on Twitter, there's no correlation. It doesn't connect me. In the future, it will be able to pull those two together. There's a little bit of tech that has to, you know, it's not straightforward, but your touchpoints with the agent, and by that agent, your connection to the brand or the product or the activation that's being undertaken, has these multiple interconnected touch points. So when you talk about marketing, and, and the other thing with agents is they don't need a salary. You know, if you were—

that's the plus—

paying an influencer, I say, hey, I've got a million followers, you need to give me 10 grand and a free pair of shoes, and I'll stick up 3 posts, and maybe you'll get something back in return. And even then, it's almost impossible to track whether the, the eventual sales come from that. Agents don't need that. They could all be paid based on performance. If they're bringing you customers or they're bringing you sales, that's when you compensate. Because agents need— they need money, they need income, because you have to pay for your LLM calls and for hosting. And they, you know, it's going down and down and down, it's becoming less and less and less. Um, but they are paid on performance. Now, okay, that— where does that leave, you know, humans? What can they do? You can own that agent. You can set up an agent which you've got your particular taste levels, you've got the brands that you might want to work with, you've got the things you want to talk about, then you can connect with— you can actually own that agent and steer it in the right direction. That agent can go, Michael, um, are you still living in Amsterdam or are you back in the UK, or where are you now?

I mean, I'm Amsterdam.

You're still in that sense. Okay, I'll mention my friend Jason, right? Jason Denham, based in there. So, you know, if you like Jason and, and Denham, then you can, you know, and, and he ends up doing a, a promotion. Oh, I would like to be a marketeer for that. I would like to be a co-creator with that product. Your agent can go off and do that for you. You know, you steer it in the right direction and then you go to bed because it's working behind the scenes. It's doing the analysis, it's doing the research, it's talking to the person in Japan that wants to know about it in Japanese and just steering them in the right direction. And that's the beauty of it, where you could— and you could own a multiple of those. You could have one that's relevant to your fashion career, one that's into food and restaurants and all of these things, and they could actually be generating revenue for you.

It's unbelievable, isn't it? I can't wait to see where all of this goes. I know that there's a lot of brands that are already looking into agentic AI, but it's really going to shift the gear on a lot of things. I think it's exciting to see where it goes. Obviously, throughout this interview, you've mentioned co-creation a lot of times, and I think that is one of the biggest opportunities of this digital ecosystem space. What does meaningful co-creation look like to you, and how do you make it scalable?

Um, through tokenization, number one, through the platform that we've created, which has, you know, been 3 years in work, which allows that to happen, um, and changing that relationship between the brand and the consumer. So I've always used the couple of examples, Nike ID, for example, which was what, wow, almost 10 years ago, I guess now that that first came out. And you could go into the Nike flagship stores, choose, you know, it was a standard sort of Dunk or Air Force 1 type model. And yeah, you can choose the swoosh color, you can choose the lining color, you can choose the laces, and then come back in a week or two, and then hopefully it's there. You know, here in Singapore, which is where I'm based now, you know, at Christmas, there's a pop-up outside the Ralph Lauren store where you can go in and buy a t-shirt shirt or a polo and then take it outside and they'll stitch a badge on it wherever you choose. And but so limited options within a finely defined parameters is basically what co-creation is at the moment on, on that retail level. I haven't seen anything where as a consumer you can connect with a brand and give input about what you would like to see. I mean, people do that, you know, hey, wouldn't it be great if you did this in orange? And then it gets sucked into the that brand thing, and eventually something might come out of it like that. But it's never accredited, it's never validated, and it's never rewarded. You know, it might be if someone does something amazing or whatever. Um, so here's, here's an example. I'll use Ralph again, and that's because I love Ralph, by the way. It's not being dismissive. But if I walk into the Ralph Lauren boutique, pick up a plaid shirt, pay $100 for it, As soon as I cross the threshold of that, I can do whatever I want to that, you know. I can cut the sleeves off, I can get a tin of paint and paint an anarchy symbol on it, and then, you know, I've customized it, you know. I've done what I can, and Ralph has no influence or control over it. And then I can sell it. I can go on my Etsy store, I can go to Camden or Portobello Road Market or, you know, whatever, and I could maybe sell it for £200. I maybe spent $30 on customizing it and whatever. So at the end of it, with all that hard work and effort, I might make $70. Ralph just got his initial $100. Certainly doesn't— he might not be very happy with the outcome if it's, you know, offensive or rude. If that was a digital product, and so it's a digital plaid shirt and it came from us, and the way we've built our smart contract structure is we can set the parameters of what can be customized. What could you do within that? Fabrics, colors, graphics, things that could be added on, things that could be taken off, etc., etc. And some brands might say, well, you can only work within these parameters because we are very protective of our DNA and very protective of our look. Others could go crazy, go batshit, whatever you want, we don't care. You know, we want you to be, have fun and, you know, be part of our brand. And as long as the label still says that, were built. So I pay 100 for the digital version, whatever that number might be, and I pay 30 for the right to customize it, and then I have access to tools to enable that customization. A year ago we would have said, okay, you need CLO or, or Substance Painter and, uh, um, yeah, whatever creative ones. Now anybody can do that with AI. You can actually say, hey, here's this thing, can you revise it? Now there's IP-related issues and protection things that have to be talking about, but you know, those are being dealt with. And you know, one of our partners, which we'll be able to announce quite soon, is about IP protection on that type of thing, how we can protect it for both the creator, the co-creator, and the brand. Okay, so I do something that's cool and within the parameters, and I've got a couple of thousand followers, and I put it out to my followers, hey, I've just created this in collaboration with Ralph Lauren I'm going to sell 20 of them for 20. Um, who's up for it? Yeah, yeah, boom, boom, boom, done. You've got 400. So instead of making 70, you've made a total of 400, but a chunk of that goes back to Ralph. Yeah, right. So Ralph is going, I will let you do that, and I've got the return from that one. So I'm saying 20, it could be 1,000, it could be 10,000, and you don't have to sell them for $20, it could be $1, it could be $1,000. There's all these parameters. Now again, Ralph will probably say, I do not want to have anything sold for less than half of what it originally cost, or something along those lines. And certainly I don't want to sell it for more than it could have been done. So you can have— again, all of these things can be structured digitally and tracked because they're all on-chain. So once something's made, it's recorded, it's immutable, it it's traceable, everybody should be happy with that reporting structure. So that's how I see the co-creation element working. And just as an aside, agents can do that as well. Okay, yeah, okay.

And I also wanted to speak to you because I think this whole co-creation space and everything that you are building, it lends itself so well to building community. And I think that what a lot of brands fail at the moment is that there's some kind of transaction, but the post-sale isn't there. And that kind of— they, they lack this kind of building or feeling of a community that consumers can be a part, part of. And I'd love to ask, what lessons have you learned from designing this ecosystem yourself about community, and what could other brands learn from that?

That's a really difficult question to answer. Without being dismissive or offensive to certain groups, let's say. But in Web3, everybody talks about community. You know, it's, it's— I mean, you would have heard this at the Fabricant, I'm sure. You know, community is everything, and you have to have that. Most people in Web3 that talk about community are actually people that want free stuff. That's why they're there. They're not there to actually properly contribute and be a part of it. They just want free stuff because somebody's talked about something. So actually building a community is really hard. Um, the way I'm looking at it now, um, is actually having a stake in a brand. So this is when I'm talking about Brand Coins. I, I'm, I'm sure many people understand the concept of memes, you know, that something gets picked up and run with because it was of the moment, of the zeitgeist, it was humorous, it tapped into certain something, and that goes viral. And there are such things as meme coins worth billions of dollars now, which you've got in there. They have no substance, they have no inherent value, they're just there because somebody did something that was cool at one particular time, and now a lot of people have bought into that. For me, brands are memes. Brands are actually better than memes. You know, if you are a real brand follower and a brand aficionado, you're there because of something about them that resonates with you, you know. And if you go back, you know, that's why you get into music, or you get into certain bands or artists, or or, you know, movements, whether it's, you know, punk or heavy metal or disco, whatever, you know, that, that's me. I want to be a part of that. And you get sucked into that thing and you follow it, whatever. And I— if you go back, uh, I mean, most of my career, that's what would happen with brands. A brand would start, whether it started in LA or New York or London or Milan, and there would be a little thing that would fester and mutate around it. And then it was like that, where did that come from? And then that's when the community said, I want to be a part of that one. And you, you, and the community migrates and moves and it expands. And that's been stripped apart by social media, you know, that, that festering and growing and nurturing, it's in and out in an instant now. And I think also the way that brands tend to sort of market themselves You know, you just have to look at the chopping and changing of creative directors and, you know, brands. It's like, you haven't doubled our sales in 12 months, you're out. You know, oh, I've given you 3 years and, you know, you're not as bigger than, than so-and-so, so let's shuffle someone around it. And I'm not saying that's, that's, that's necessarily a bad thing, but you need to have that sort of the, the message that the DNA there's something that's going to appeal to people. That's when you get a community. If people are resonating with you, they want to be a part of that one. But that's the key. You can only get that community if people can sense something. And it can be very viral, you know. Everybody's saying, oh, you've got to promote it, you've got to do this, you've got to get paid ads on Facebook and Instagram and blah blah blah. And we all know that the return rates on those are less than 1%, you know, because they never end up where they're supposed to, you know. So You know, having that— having a vision that people can believe in and something that they can resonate and associate with, but then give them a stake in that. Give them the opportunity to be a part of that one. Say, hey, you know what? Yeah, and this is where Nova comes in and Brandcoins come in. Um, take Kickstarter as an example, right? Okay, look, I've developed this brilliant new mouse. Um, if you Donate $20, in 6 months' time you might get a mouse and you might get your name on our website and whatever. And that, that works, you know, people, it happens, you know, all sorts of things have been successfully funded through that Kickstarter model. If you take that concept of saying, right, I love this brand, whether it's an old one or a new one or a revitalized one or whatever, or a subdivision of a brand, I want to be involved in that one. Here's $5, here's £2, here's £100, and I'm buying into the brand coin for that particular thing. That will then give me the opportunity to contribute to the development of that brand. I can suggest products, I can vote on things, I can bring collaborations in. And for a brand, it's a great way of funding their, their growth through, first of all, digital products, but eventually, if they want to, into the physical realm as well. Because you will have a community. Because if you, you might only start with a couple of hundred, and most things will, you know, most brands will. That's how you start. You don't go to, you know, you don't suddenly get 20,000 followers for that. A lot of them are just jumping in and going, you need those sort of few hundred really passionate ones that believe in you, that actually engage and be a community rather than just somebody who's looking for some free stuff. And then they talk about you and they bring other people in of the right mindset. And I do believe that is the way that the future will go. It's not about boom, broadcast this to however many millions of people you can, and that's only going to cost you $200,000 US, you know, that mindset of spending money, but actually focusing doing it on crypto rails. So rewarding people in that, saying, hey, do something like this, help us co-create, you can be incentivized for doing that. And actually, you can actually earn through that process. So like I said, I think community is an overused word, particularly in Web3. It's flippantly thrown around, um, and it's— I think it has sort of filtered into the normie world, the Web2 world, about, oh, we need a community because that's You've already got a community, you just need to engage with them in a new way.

Absolutely. Yeah. Nice. Well, look, we are running short on time. So you, you mentioned then about how you see the future panning out. So there's a couple of things that I want to ask about that. So with the kind of ecosystem that you are building, what kinds of brands do you think are going to embrace it first? Will it be emerging or heritage? Will it be are brands more in the East than the West, or kind of what kind of brands do you see embracing it first and most successfully, I guess?

Right, we have a bunch of conversations going on with brands anyway, but like I said, I'm not pushing them hard, I'm just keeping them up to date. And there's a mix. One is a license from a very prominent IP which has a fashion world connection. It's not directly related to fashion, but it it works really well. One, I can't go into detail. Another one is a resting brand that was very hot in the early 2010s, which comes from a music artist DJ background. The founder of that moved on to do something else, but still has the brand and wants to do something interesting digitally with it, especially around that co-creation, because it was a very graphic-driven brand. So here's a way that people can actually come up with good concepts and put that there. Um, another one which I won't give it the kiss of death by being too disclosure because I had a couple of meetings last week with them, um, is a really well-established brand, Fashion, which has done certain things in the digital space before, so is familiar in that world, and they are I would say that the principal is extremely keen, but they have a board of directors, so that's the process that we're in at the moment. Um, the other one that I'm doing is sort of, if you like, it's our own, which I'm calling the Collab Coin. And the Collab Coin is basically where one-offs can be done through designers and brands. So before you go and do your own full coin, just come and do a product or an outfit with us as part of the Collab Coin. So the Collab Coin holders will be there, and they'll be the network though. So The ones I've lined up, my background, and I'm sure you know, Michael, um, I was sort of involved in the, well, what was called urban fashion, which later mutated through a clash with, first of all, um, action sports into streetwear and blubber. And then obviously that's been driving an impact on luxury for, for a good period. So I was on the back end of a lot of those brands back in the late '90s and early 2000s. So I have some good strong relationships and friends there, so there'll be a little package of designers with really strong backgrounds around that. So, and, and I have to say, most of these are friends, so they just said, yeah, whatever, Richard, we'll, we'll support you. So that's a good thing. There's another group that I'm working on which is, I would say, more avant-garde, uh, designers, people doing things in very gender-fluid and creative spaces. So we'll be putting a little package of those together. There's another one which is a Paris-based group which crosses between both physical and digital already.

Nice.

So we're putting things together through there. So, um, yeah, those are just some of the conversations that we've got going. So I would say quite wide, um, yeah, but I would also say, um, the people behind them are willing to experiment, you know, they're ready to give it a shot. They're not— that's the case, they're not coming straight in and saying, yep, 'But I need to know how much money I'm going to make.' Actually, that's not true. The board of directors of that other brand, they want to know. Yeah, because that's, you know, that's their job. Um, but the other ones are like, 'This will be— this is going to be fun, you know. How far can we push it?' Where, you know, they want to be creative because that's, you know, if it was just taking an existing high street brand or a retailer and just dropping it in, I'm almost like where's the fun? You know, that's why people are in fashion, because it's fun, because it's great, because of the people and the cool stuff. And then sometimes you get wrapped up in the politics and the bullshit, and it becomes less enjoyable. And then it— and especially when you're in big corporations and there's all sorts of things that have to be navigated and understood, you know, let's get— but it's, it's the fun moments, it's doing that catwalk show, it's the big after party. It's like, you know, getting the celebrity who suddenly bought your product. You didn't seed it to them, they just bought it and are wearing it, and it was on the front page of, you know, something. You know, those are the things to go, yes! You know, that's— and again, I want to try and take that concept into what we're doing and actually go, let's do things that people go, ah, that's cool! Excuse my French, you know what I mean? Excuse me, you know what I mean?

I love it, I love it, I love the, uh, energy. And you're right, there is so much opportunity to do exciting, exciting exciting things in this space. So I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. Let's end with this. On our prep call the other day, you said that you think that some of today's most exciting brands might be born in this realm. What advice would you give to someone who is trying to launch a fashion brand in 2025 and beyond, and how can they tap into this world?

First thing, don't. Don't do it. It's very, you know, financially, um, it's tough. It's tough to launch a brand in the traditional cycle of what you would normally go through of, you know, making some products, go to a trade show, buy, get some local friendly independent retailers to stock it, and, you know, get some friends or models to wear it. You know, all that type of thing just gets harder and harder these days. But there are these digital tools now which enable things to be done in different ways. So I would say, yes, start digitally. Think about, you know, what you— I mean, to give you some— so one of the things that we're working on is, um, yeah, I'll say text-to-apparel. So the, the current sort of processes for taking something into a 3D wearable digital asset, it's still not straightforward because there's all sorts of elements around textures and meshes which come down to polygons and all that stuff, and then fitting to the— and if you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said, oh wow, it's still 3 or 4 years before there's any algorithm that's going to be able to convert that to that. You know, it's— you start with a CLO 3D output with, you know, 6 million pixels on it, but to make it work on a phone, you need 6,000. So how do you take that and minimize it down to that level so that it still looks good or acceptable and but functions in a way that can work on a phone or in those things? We've just done a, uh, we've just announced a partnership with Google, um, where we're actually going to be able to tap into both their AI and their cloud services for rendering. And that, and, you know, it's, it's not anything unusual, but it's a really important thing for us to be able to then take that 6 million and maybe make it 600,000 and still do something really, really interesting and cool with that one. Um, so I've drifted off, off the, the topic of the, the question, but those digital tools are becoming more and more accessible and more and more cost-effective to do interesting and cool stuff. The trick is how do you monetize that? Because a lot of businesses that are doing really interesting things with digital fashion, and there's lots of them out there, and some of them are part of our B&B 100, um, that, you know, they've still got to find a way to, um, get paid for their services and get paid for the tools they're provided and whatever. And that needs to scale. And that's, that's the— and again, having the ecosystem, making open source, uh, from EID, and having the Fash currency is, I believe, where that can happen. So to answer your question, if you think about starting a brand, keep an eye on what we're doing. Join in when you can. Become a part of our community. and then you could have a solution. If you're going to try and do it in the old-fashioned way, go ahead if you want to, but you probably need an auntie to pass away and leave you a property so that you can, uh, a lot of money.

Yeah, uh, good, good advice. And I think, um, look, this has been really, really great. As someone who I, I would call my, myself a normie, I was always the one that at the Fabricant they would test out new, new things on to see how on earth is he going to react to this, and it normally wasn't that great. Because I'd be like, I'm so confused, I'm so confused, what is going on? So it's exciting to hear that you're putting all of these things in place to lower that barrier. So yeah, really excited to see where you go from here. As Richard said, he might not be actively reaching out to you if you're working for a brand, but he's more than willing to have you reach out to him.

So come and talk to me.

Absolutely. I'll drop your LinkedIn into the article as well. And it's put published and people can reach out to you there. But Richard, thank you so much for your time. Lovely to catch up with you and hope to see you IRL soon at one of our events.

Sometime soon. I haven't been to Amsterdam for a few years, so I'll definitely give you a shout when I get there.