We sat down with UK innovator, artist, and SneakHeads founder Wayne Lindsay. Keep reading for some of the conversation highlights and watch the full interview below and even see the SneakHeads prototypes up close and personal.
remx: Thank you so much for being here. We’re really, really excited to go on a deep dive of more about SneakHeads and you as an artist and everything that you have been building.
SneakHeads: Thanks for having me Taylor, it’s good to be with you.
remx: Most definitely. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background and if SneakHeads is your full-time gig or is this just a passion project? What was your journey getting here? What’s your artist journey? I’d love to hear more about that.
SneakHeads: To start off I studied civil engineering. First of all, I liked the idea of being an architect or an engineer. I knew that I wanted to fuse my love of drawing and creating and making things. So I was working for a firm of structural engineers, urban designers, architects, and then decided to kind of change track and did a part-time course at art college and started to manage the art gallery there. Started to really enjoy a freer, less risky way of creating where buildings didn’t need to stand up necessarily. And so went from there and then kind of finished art college and was a graphic designer basically at the other side of that. And I suppose for the last 20 odd years I’ve been brand design designer consultant and then the last couple of years moving into more product design. I’m working with loads of organizations and people across industries. The bit that I really love is working with people, humans and telling those stories and discovering those stories and weaved into those projects has always been this kind of involvement of young people, children and following their fascinations. And I’ve certainly included our two boys who are now 15 and 13. Since they were tiny, they’ve been working with me creatively on proper grown up projects.
remx: That’s really cool. Cause I feel like it’s not often that you kind of get that, so that’s really cool that you’re doing that with them.
SneakHeads: Sneakerheads was really a celebration of the things that the boys really liked. They love sneakers and sneaker culture and collecting, spending lots of money on that. So most people will know it’s an expensive habit and as a parent you are funding an expensive habit. But it’s good. It’s got a creative side to it. They love collaborating, they love creating, they love customizing. And they love art; they’re really talented. One is a really good graphic designer already. The other one is a good illustrator and good at fine arts. So we kind of put all of those different interests into a kind of bowl if you like. And we created these characters that we call “SneakHeads.” And my intention is not just to bring these characters into the world and make this amazing creative, collaborative, connected environment, but I want the boys to run this business. I want them to own it because it is formed from their DNA. And I will just fan enough oxygen into the flames as I can, but at some point I’ll step to the side and they will completely lead it and do all of the things that I wasn’t good enough to do.
remx: Well, I think you have to be pretty good at it because you’ve been building it from the ground up. It’s absolutely incredible. So I would love to hear a little bit more about SneakHeads. Obviously you gave us a little bit of background on the inspiration behind it when it comes down to the sneaker side of the sneaker culture that you have. But I would love for you to give us a little bit more background on where that came from and what made you want to utilize NFTs as well.
SneakHeads: Yeah, I definitely knew that I wanted to get into more games and toy design and the idea of collectibles was a natural kind of development based on that desire and intention. And it’s probably worth saying because I know that I’ve got the luxury of time and energy to do this because my wife and I decided years before, before we had children that we would opt out of working full time. And so we decided let’s do three or four days a week and have three or four days a week for us and do the things that we love and sometimes have guilt-free days of just relaxing and recharging and reminding ourselves of the other things that we forgot that we liked to do and maybe the things that we forgot that we were even good at.
So that’s the kind of backdrop to me having had the time over the years to experiment on the side, to do contemporary planning training, to work with organizations on developing people and discovering the how chemistry works within organizations aside from the design and aesthetic of what looks good and why it looks good. SneakHeads basically came out of that creative ecosystem. The soil was quite fertile to pretty much have lots of ideas. And so SneakHeads was really this little character that the boys and I made out of initially two polystyrene balls and with mini sneakers as sneakers. And we cut out two silver eyelets from some old Nike boots I bought in New York back in 1997. And that became the first prototype to the SneakHeads. And this was 2019 to 2020 way before I’d I think heard of NFTs.
So it was already a product that we wanted to bring into the world with this solid idea around customization, collecting creativity, sharing, swapping, and trying to create something that would cut across generations so young people could love it, older people could love it and people could customize it. And so this idea of having an entry level model but also a luxury range. So I suppose we ended up with this 3D canvas more than anything. And a character that we were calling SneakHeads.
SneakHeads: So, and of course with in exploring that we realized, okay, second edition shape SneakHeads, we already have an idea of what that 3D shape looks like. But this version we’re using the head almost like the way that we use the box. When you get your treasury pair of sneakers, you keep that beautiful tissue paper, you keep it in the box, you keep it in good condition, you put it on a shelf. But what if you could carry around your favorite pair or that week’s favorite pair? What if you could customize and have this phenomenal pair of sneakers that meant a lot to you for lots of different reasons and you carried them around with you. And so this is what these little guys are able to do.
remx: That’s so cool.
SneakHeads: So that’s my very, very long winded way of explaining why SneakHeads.
remx: I think that that’s beautiful because anybody could have just named it SneakHeads and not really have much story or is why that is something that we hear all the time and it elaborates so much more than it just being, well, we’re sneakerhead so we decided to make SneakHeads just the whole everything about it. Absolutely love to hear the background story. You’ve kind of mentioned a few times more about customization and I think that that parallels really well with what we do here at remx. So we’ve recently released a sneaker on a sneaker blank.
SneakHeads: I saw!
remx: Have you had a chance to play with any SneakHead textures or anything? Have you had any ideas around possibly releasing any collections on remx anytime soon?
SneakHeads: Yes, yes. And a big yes with capitals.
So I’ve certainly played with the remx platform. I’ve got little t-shirt design going on. I just got my really cool [Casey Rickey] deck and yeah, I was enjoying spinning that around on the screen earlier. Yeah. So I’m absolutely loving what remx has already brought to the world and their creative invitation to play and to customize and to add your take and to decorate and pattern and design onto the 3D models. Yeah, we absolutely want to, I think we’ve already found a way to connect the SneakHeads world to remx ecosystem and just use that, as I said before, basically it’s the 3D canvas for people to just experiment and explore and customize. And the provocation of a 3D shape as a canvas for many, many people is more compelling than a blank piece of paper. I was thinking about this earlier, that one of the most exciting things for creative people and one of the most daunting things for creative people is a blank sheet of paper.
And I think this is where remx are doing such a great job at saying to the audience, these are the kind of things that you can do, but you [give it a try]. So it’s not this unapproachable, edifice, amazing high-end creativity. It’s able to cut across the audience and basically it’s an invitation to play and create. That’s what we’re trying to do with our little SneakHeads characters to say, here are some skins and textures and designs and patterns and stories that visually you could tell. Mm-hmm. But that’s just a start point. That’s just a kind of provocation. Here’s your blank sheet and now you tell your story. Now you build your own collection. And I see that the synergy between remx and SneakHeads is a beautiful creative collaboration.
remx: Well super excited to see what you guys do in alignment with us cuz it’s definitely that it’s an alignment for sure. So you guys are running an NFT project, but it’s not just a typical NFT project. I feel like it’s pretty different from the majority. And I think that you’re using blockchain tech in a really unique way that other people aren’t really necessarily taking advantage of. Not to say no one is, but how are you using it for more on the side of engaging with communities in person and also to raise awareness for funds of nonprofits and things like that. Because I think that that was something that I found to be really, really cool that SneakHeads is doing, that’s setting the bar high for the NFT and Web3 communities.
SneakHeads: Yeah, I mean we’re not going to use the phrase NFTs within the website apart from a few nominal bracketed references so that there’s a little bit of education going on. But we are expecting people that aren’t conversant, crypto conversant, people that aren’t already within this Web3 space. We’re not expecting them to clamber over hurdles just to understand what’s available and what the opportunities are. So we are talking about our NFTs as community tokens. We are inviting as many people as possible, young and old from every community around the world to have a community token which gives them access to our circular economy that we call a Sneakonomy, our creative ecosystem, which we call a Sneakosystem. TM beside it. And I can give you a couple of examples of how we are already having a kind of a real life impact.
And these are beautiful but flukey chance opportunities that we kind of stumbled across. So because by their styling, these guys are, they’re without gender and they are not really human, but they can tell our stories, they can be a vehicle to tell our stories, they can be a canvas, but they don’t have hair. And it’s all about what will we skin them with. So I thought to myself as an experiment, what if I call two well known charities and just say, look, we’ve got these characters, we’re gonna launch them, we’re gonna use NFTs. And I’ll explain what that is, is a way of building a community and then we will find a really smart way cuz the technology allows this now to build in royalties and donations and a mechanism that is all locked and can be queried and has absolute transparency and is immutably captured on the blockchain. So no one has to worry once we agree this is what you’ll get, this is what you’ll get.
So I called the Vitiligo Society who are a UK based charity who raise awareness and funds for research. Vitiligo is a skin condition where you lose the pigmentation in your skin and it creates patches and actually can be quite beautiful kind of patterns. And everyone is unique and they usually vitiligo starts on the extremities. So my dad, who is originally from Jamaica, was darker skinned than I am. And I remember as a little boy on holiday, he showed us this one tiny little white spot on his ring finger. And over the years he completely lost the pigmentation in his skin and it went in patches. And I contacted Vitiligo Society and said, I’d love to experiment with different skin tones on our range of characters. Imagine every different skin tone is available.
And of course within that collection, vitiligo has to be within there because that is a skin tone. It’s not just one tone. And in fact, most of us don’t have one skin tone. We might have a generic, this is my, so the picture I painted in the director of the charity’s mind was, and they had quite an emotional reaction as a team was imagine if a child could use our 3D model, could select their skin tone, could draw their unique vitiligo pattern, could then save that and submit that. And then days later, a beautifully high end color, 3D printed collectible art toy with their unique pattern arrives in a box on their doorstep. And then imagine if they make that available and other people love that character too and somebody else wants to make that wants to a t-shirt with that character on? Then that young person gets a royalty every time somebody orders that garment or they make the character available so that other people can have that art toy.
And so it’s one story in potentially millions of stories where everyone could create something that somebody else could fall in love with and everyone could have that generous experience that artists have, which is to create something and bring it into the world and give it over for other people to enjoy. And in doing that, we create a circular economy where we are inviting people to come to play, to collaborate. Why shouldn’t young children work with international artists? That’s some of the work that I’ve been doing over the years with Forest of Imagination. It’s in its ninth or 10th year now. So that’s a little glimpse of what we’re we are doing. So at the moment we’ve run a coloring competition with Alopecia UK and Vitiligo Society and we’re gonna take those designs and drawings and we’re gonna use those as our start point to build those characters. And that becomes the provocation so that other people, young people and older people can see, oh that works, that looks good. I could do my own one and then they can play.
remx: Yeah, I love that. And honestly, I mean it’s something that no one else is really tapping into the longevity of being able to donate back to those kids and the research back to the organizations that you’re connecting with. So it’s a really, really amazing way to actually utilize blockchain tech and everything. It aligns perfectly with what you were already envisioning, but now we have the digital certificate that goes along with that and can forever give money back to those families.
SneakHeads: So these are just two charities that we’ve started with. We can do endless partnerships across collections in different communities around the world relevant to those areas. And those people can lead those projects and they can come into the community with their own concept of how we can help these individuals, these groups of people. And all you need is an idea and we’ve got the ecosystem the same as remx.
You’re creating an ecosystem. There will never be a lack of good ideas of how we can do good. And so I think that’s the nice thing that the start point for SneakHeads, for us, it wasn’t business everything. So we a hundred percent own it. We can completely dictate the direction and we absolutely can protect the motivation behind it, aside from the spreadsheet that I mentioned. So we’ve said to the charities that we’ve spoken to, this is what we are going to donate to you. And they’ve both said, that’s brilliant. But even if it wasn’t the money, just the awareness, just the story by the way, they both said to us, you’ve stumbled across something that we’ve struggled with, which is something that is really gonna appeal to particularly young boys going into their teenage years. There is nothing on the market for them at the moment. These two particular charities that talks to them that they can connect with, that they can have held up as something that they’re not only will relate to, but be proud of celebrate and champion. And so we’re really excited that, like I said, we kind of stumbled across an opportunity and we’re absolutely running with it because we can’t not do it now.
remx: Yeah. Well we are super excited to see it all come to life. I’m just following along on your socials and hoping to see more alpha drop and when you’re gonna be releasing and all that good stuff. But thank you so much for joining us and sharing all of the information that you have with our community and we’re really excited to see where it goes.
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