The Team
0. Who are the faces behind the brand, yiume and how are they best prepared to shape the future of a sustainable industry with the use of digital fashion?
Yiume consists of three members, me (Jakub Kliský), Lukas Babic and Jib. I am a computer science student at University College London, Head of Labs at London Blockchain Labs, smart contract engineer at Cred Protocol and founder of yiume. Lukas is taking care of Marketing and Partnerships at yiume while studying business engineering at Maastricht University and Jib is our technical advisor already working in the Web3 industry on his project Rysk Finance – creating structured products using options such as Dynamic Hedging Vault. Before getting into Web3, we had two drops and both of them had sold out in 24 hours. We have the required traditional fashion experience to bring an idea to life and execute on the vision of revolutionising the fashion world as a whole – putting the yiume ecosystem on-chain.
The Brand
1. What peaked your interest in Fashion, NFTs and the Metaverse?
The potential for innovation is what excites me most about the new technology. In my opinion, fashion has been a tool which allows expression of an individual or a community since the beginning of times. It is a tool that illustrates the human creativity at its best and blockchain technology opens up many doors to human imagination while fashion is no exception.
There is still no general consensus to what Metaverse really is. However, we have seen big (not only fashion) companies push for it. Without the clear definition of the term we can question the legitimacy of these actions. We at yiume are not hopping on hype trains to gain momentum from buzzwords. That is why yiume is actively avoiding the term ‘Metaverse’ and other buzzwords in our branding as we rather direct our attention and energy to building out something revolutionary.
2. Why yiume? What is the inspiration behind the name. What does your company do and how does it fit in the Web3 space?
The world of dreams and what our minds can come up with when dreaming is truly astonishing. The name yiume comes from the Japanese word ‘yume’ which means ‘dreams’ in English. We are trying to give people a better tool to capture the limitless creativity through the yiume ecosytem we are building. The letter ‘i’ is added to underscore the emphasis on an individual in the world of dreams and distinguish our brand from the Japanese word.
Yiume is going to be a fashion marketplace leveraging decentralised tech, seeking to revolutionize the way we approach fashion. Instead of buying physical clothing, you can acquire the clothing design itself, in form of an NFT. This design NFT contains all the metadata of a physical garment, so in its possession you can have it manufactured for the real-life clothing.
Such a way of producing clothing combats every negative aspect of fast fashion. Firstly, production becomes on-demand instead of pre-demand, eliminating the millions of tons of waste. Secondly, the consumers obtain the power to choose their manufacturer, so they can decide where and how their clothing is produced. This is unlike the current trend, where most of our wardrobes are filled with garments that have been assembled from low quality materials, by exploited workers, in 3rd world countries. Finally, yiume marketplace will give a voice to every creator, levelling the ground of the fashion landscape. For creators, this approach eliminates the problems tied to upfront capital, logistics, running a website, unsold stock, etc. – the quality of the designs is the only thing that will determine the winners.
This is far from all the opportunities that the ecosystem unlocks while some of them are not even imaginable to us at this point in time. Having said this, now how the fashion scene will look like with this amount of freedom: experimentation and risk-taking will be incentivized, so I think we can get ready for fashion trends way beyond our dreams. This comes a full circle back to the name of the project and its connection to dreams – giving you an insight of what we want to achieve with this project.
3. What decentralised tech will you use to achieve your vision?
The designs available on yiume marketplace are NFTs, running on smart contracts on Arbitrum, transactions will occur in cryptocurrencies, and the possibility of expansion to other chains as well as a DAO is not excluded in the future.
4. How will this tech achieve your vision?
The NFT technology enables the absolute ownership of your clothing design, so they’re at the basis of this entire system. Furthermore, exchanging the tokens on blockchain breaks all geographical barriers between creators and consumers in a transparent and traceable manner ensuring the safety of the customer. This aspect is also aligned with our vision of a free fashion industry, eliminating the possibility of shady deals made behind closed doors.
About the Vision
5. Why did you choose the Arbitrum chain? How does this fit with your sustainability statement?
We chose Arbitrum because of multiple reasons:
- Low fees & security
◦ If we want to make sustainable fashion approachable to many people we need to ensure cheap and secure UX. Given that Arbitrum is a Layer 2 chain on Ethereum it is as secure as mainnet (which is much higher than Polygon or Solana).
- Ecosystem
◦ We believe that the Arbitrum ecosystem is the one growing at the fastest pace and the most unique projects are being deployed here. yiume is amongst these projects and we want to solidify the Arbitrum ecosystem the best one out there.
- Team
◦ The Arbitrum team has been supportive and helpful since we established contact. The development on the chain such as Arbitrum Nitro is another testament to the fact that this team is shipping ground-breaking technology.
6. As a sustainability driven brand, manufacturing partners are very important, who will they be? And What will the garment redemption process look like?
Yiume partner manufacturers list will consist of a handpicked selection of factories and producers whose values and production methods are aligned with our values of sustainability, fair trade, and high materials’ quality.
Let’s create an example to illustrate the garment redemption process in more detail. Say that you noticed a pants design on yiume marketplace that you are mesmerized by.
Step 1: design acquisition
You buy/mint the design directly from the creator on the yiume marketplace, exchanging ETH (or any other cryptocurrency the designer will choose to accept) for the NFT.
Step 2: choosing a manufacturer
You want to wear these pants in real life, so you decide to have them manufactured. You now have two options: proceed with yiume partner manufacturers, or contact any other manufacturer in the world, for example the ones in your city.
As mentioned before yiume partner manufacturers will hold the values of sustainability, fair trade, and high materials’ quality. We are working on getting at least one manufacturer into every big city (starting with London and New York).
If you decide to proceed with them, the option will be available directly on yiume marketplace, and after entering your shipping details and redemption details (such as the size of the pants) and paying the production costs you will only need to wait until the package arrives at your doorstep. We are definitely not going to limit you to yiume pre-selected choices and that is why you can go with any other manufacturer who can produce the piece of garment. In that case, you will have to contact them individually, and choose the NFT design you want to redeem – of course you also need to supply redemption and shipping details. The only difference between the two options when choosing a manufacturer is the opportunity cost between ensuring the standards of a modern civilised world and convenience.
After finishing these steps you own both the design and the real-life garment!
7. What will success look like for your NFT holders?
To clarify, there’s two types of NFTs available on yiume.
First type: clothing designs. You now have the full ownership of that design, and you decide on the production of the physical garment. There is no middle-man choosing the path for you. If you ask me, that is a huge success right there. But that is not even close to all of what yiume brings to the table. You can also financially leverage it, so success can be having an eye for talent and acquiring a design from an upcoming creator whose collections grow in popularity and value over time. The collection of art/fashion pieces will be on-chain thanks to yiume.
The second type of yiume NFTs are collectibles. Holders of these get discounts on every subsequent redemption of yiume designs, an increased cap on number of redemptions, and early access to limited collections. Besides these benefits, you can earn financial incentives from these tokens as well. We are partnering up with NFT lending and borrowing marketplaces to make sure that our community can lend their NFTs to others. The borrowers can enjoy the benefits of discounts and increased caps while the lenders earn interest from the borrowers.
While achieving these kinds of environmental (on-demand production) and economical (full ownership, discounts, lending interest) benefits, there is still one that should not go without saying – the social benefit. People can see that you are an innovator when they see some of the oldest collectibles or designs by yiume in your wallet. You can show off that you were at the forefront of the new wave of fashion.
That is why we want to thank you, our early community and supporters. We are going to have a free mint of (yiume.first) collectibles, the first ever yiume NFTs holding the biggest benefits out of all yiume collectibles to ever come out. You should make sure you do not miss out on this opportunity.
About the Industry and Community
8. What are the differences between Yiume and other players in your sector?
As I already touched upon a little bit we have seen big fashion companies push for the Metaverse, digital fashion and NFTs. At this point in time, there are so many opportunities that can be pursued that we can see that most of them either go the mainstream road – mint NFTs for their users just as a sign of status instead of real utility while using buzzwords like that to gain more traction.
There are many projects that do not follow the mainstream path and most of them are building magnificient stuff. They all focus on their area and we do not seem to overlap with many. I honestly believe that collaboration is better than competition when it comes to creative work like fashion. That is why we are building a marketplace that will allow anyone to publish their designs, exchange value and open new doors for human creativity all around the world. I am very excited to see what we can come up with other projects pushing the boundaries of the blockchain technology with us
9. What is the most valuable aspects of utility you will be able to offer your community?
It is difficult to point out only one aspect of all the benefits, however, I had to choose I would probably say the absolute ownership of clothing designs is the one. There are several implications coming out of this aspect such as the elimination of the middle man between the artist and the consumer, decisive power over manufacturing method, access to a broader creator base, possibility to launch your own clothing line with close to zero investment capital, possibility to financially leverage your wardrobe, possibility to contribute to a zero-waste future, full transparency and traceability.
10. When can your followers expect to access your NFTs?
The free mint of the (yiume.first) collectibles collection will come out in Autumn 2022. We have several partnerships lined up which will follow with the deployment of the design NFTs. There is not an ETA on that as of now.
12. Describe the future of sustainable digital fashion.
I truly believe that the approach that yiume brings is the future of sustainable digital fashion. So many brilliant minds have tried to solve the problems of nowadays’ fashion and none of them has shifted the paradigm. The sustainable growth of fashion giants is flawed in the long term as in the end there will be less and less people to sell the garments to. The revolution has to come on both the demand and supply side and I know that the blockchain technology and yiume will play a vital role in it.
Edited by GLITCH Team