Rimowa: How the luxury luggage manufacturer further travels down the Web3 sphere

🚀 1.5 years after their first ever NFT “Blue Prints from the Metaverse”, Rimowa continued its venture into the web3 space with a larger NFT drop: The Meta-Artisan Collection.

🤝 For the continuation of their web3 go-to-market, they partnered with the Web3 native digital fashion studio RTFKT. Having already done a suitcase collaboration in 2018 with Supreme, this fits well giving the brand a streetwear touch and addressing a younger target group beyond business travel.

🛫 The pre-launch was accompanied by a strong storytelling component with frequent video snippets and interactive quests to be solved by the community to piece-by-piece uncover more details on the drop. This created a creative and authentic experience and kept the community engaged while creating a lot of conversations on Twitter.

🌟 As a brand in the premium segment, their cabin luggage NFT was high-priced at $3k (~2E) and very exclusive (888 supply). This NFT will have the utility to later claim the physical luggage, similar to prior forging events that RTFKT did with Nike.

☝️ Interestingly they also sold a second-tier NFT at a lower price (100$) and higher supply (2222), a sidekick called WorkerBot. This enabled a larger audience to participate in the story and made it more accessible while keeping the core exclusive.

📈 The drop itself sold out in 3.5 hours and generated ~$2.6m (~1.7k E) primary sales volume and the secondary market also made as much revenue on the mint day (~S2.4m/1.6k E).

Couple of learnings we can draw from their launch:

✅ Immersive mint innovation: Unlike a classical minting website, the mint took place in a virtual 3D experience. This brought the experience to a new level and was well received by the community.
✅ Timely raffle-based distribution: To ensure fair distribution, the NFTs were raffled live on a rolling basis. If won, participants had a 5 min window to mint the NFT. This created a sense of urgency to not opportunistically wait for a quick flip until end of the mint window.
❌ Bound user attention: At the same time, the urgency to mint right after winning the raffle required users to be “glued” to their screen and was perceived by many as a “waste of time”.
❌ Technical exploit: While mints were limited at 1 per wallet, a “loopable” exploit enabled some users to bypass that limitation by sending the item to another wallet and just reentering the raffle.

🙋🏻‍♀️ So who did Rimowa and RTFKT reach with this initiative? With a 70% unique holder ratio, they onboarded ~2.1k holders into the ecosystem, of which 1/3 were already CloneX holders. They attracted a web3-versed holdership, where the average wallet has been active for 433 days, 6E ($9k) balance, a median NFT portfolio size of 95 NFTs and on avg. 143 outgoing transactions (Disclaimer: Of course, there could be multiple wallets and outliers).