Weeks 1–8: New Identity

Why are we doing these articles again?

At Tongue and Sole Lab (TASL) we value transparency and allowing others to learn from our experiences, which is why we’re writing weekly logs about the process of making our shoe NFT project. #BuildingNFTsInPublic

Note: Our first two entries will be high-level summaries of weeks 1–8 and 9–16 of our project as we decided to write these articles very recently. Moving forward we will release these articles more regularly.

Weeks 1–8 (Nov 2021 — Dec 2021)

Successes

• Team additions. Ari, Diego, and Oliver were the first members of the team but we’re extremely fortunate to have our two friends, Chandler and Grant, join us. Chandler is a shoe guy through and through. He began collecting and reselling sneakers eight years ago and has built up a successful business, even selling to NBA players. Check out some of his pairs on eBay and Instagram! Grant is a talented and experienced blockchain developer who also provides consulting services for a wide range of blockchain projects. Some of his notable work includes partnerships with brands such as Rolling Loud and Ibanera. Fun fact: he’s a rocking guitarist.
• Shoe customizer partnerships. Every artist we’ve talked to has been very enthusiastic about our project and eager to contribute to our mission of bridging the NFT and sneaker communities. On some initial calls they offered great ideas to bring to our project, showing their value as excellent partners even beyond their art. We have more meetings set up after the holidays as it is the craziest time of year for their businesses.
• Project name. We brainstormed trying to find the perfect name for our project. We temporarily operated under the name “Rarity Runners” but disliked the cheesiness of using “rarity” and knew we could find something which conveyed the unique nature of our collection. Eventually we had two final options: Tongue and Sole Lab and Tongue and Sole Collective. To us, “Lab” signified a collaborative and process-oriented group of makers, while “Collective” seemed more like a higher end, elite group of collectors. We ultimately chose Lab because it appeals to our desire to promote creation/experimentation, and we believe it will draw a crowd of people genuinely excited about sneakers and NFTs, rather than straight flippers.

Failures/Learnings/Process

• Art. It has been a difficult but fun process thinking about and creating the generative portion of our collection. We started by placing approximately 50 iconic shoes in a document. From there, we identified and separated their best features. We also had to decide upon the different layers within each NFT to randomly generate. In an attempt to control some aspect of color cohesiveness, we broke each shoe up into an outsole, midsole, and upper. And to make the shoes more creative, we added accessories and displays. From here we’ve combined parts of shoes into more formalized silhouettes.
• Trademarks. This was our biggest challenge and learning. Our initial plan was to use exact models of shoes but quickly realized this was a recipe for being sued. You can see an early example below. We knew not to include logos as those are trademarked, but then found that certain shoe silhouettes were trademarked, especially the most iconic like below. So we made sure to look up if any shoes we were considering were trademarked and made sure to remove them. We went back to the drawing board and thought it would be cool to draw inspiration from a bunch of shoes’ features and mash them up into our own unique silhouettes, as a celebration of sneaker culture. Things like this are very unclear in the NFT space but we hired an IP lawyer to double check our choices, triple checked every trademark on the Internet, and will continue to do research before our art is set in stone.

• College students. We knew from the beginning we would dox our team, but we were debating for a while whether to say and promote that we’re college students. The pros are that it hopefully will make people trust us more and want to buy into our story more. The cons are that people may think we’re inexperienced. The whole point of these articles is to be as open as possible, so we decided to make this information public and at the forefront of our collection.
• Fundraising. Launching a project is expensive so we put Ari in charge of applying to grants from our university and other recommendations from professors. The biggest expense is deploying an ethereum smart contract, but there’s also server costs, domain names, our Medium subscription, etc.

Gratitudes

• John. Thank you for your endless pieces of advice on our social media strategy (building it “brick by brick” & being genuine), and how to gain trust from our followers.
• Our lawyer. We appreciate your legal advice and guidance on our art, you’ve saved us a lawsuit :)
• Gio. You must be sick of us by now. But you always answer our complicated questions on blockchain and communities. We wish the best for your own NFT collection.
• Carter. Your support for our project goes a long way! This made my day: