01/04/2024 The Survival of an NFT Company During Crypto Winter: The Impact of $30 Plushy Penguins

Move over Bored Apes. Thanks to a contract with Walmart to sell stuffed toy versions of its cute aquatic birds, The Igloo Co is home to the world’s hottest NFT collection. Aisle 17 of the Walmart Supercenter in North Bergen, New Jersey is devoted to children’s toys and games, and the adorable plushies, known as Pudgy Penguins, are selling fast at more than 3,000 Walmarts as well as on Amazon.com and Ebay. The plushy penguins are actually physical versions of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), digital collectibles that are now selling on crypto marketplaces for as much as $500,000 each.

Launched in July 2021, Pudgy Penguins are the creation of four college friends who decided to get in on NFT mania. The collection sold out in 20 minutes for about $90 a piece, netting them more than $800,000. The success of Pudgy Penguins led to a downturn in NFT prices and disillusionment within the community in late 2021. This is when serial entrepreneur Luca Netz came into the picture, buying the copyright ownership and the initial creator addresses of Pudgy Penguins for $2.5 million in April 2022. With a seed round of $9 million, Netz took over the brand with the goal of building trust with Penguin holders, following through on promised projects, and expanding revenue streams.

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Netz was able to build up the Pudgy Penguin brand outside of NFT enclaves, amassing a large following on Instagram and TikTok. His most unexpected innovation was Pudgy Penguin’s presence on Giphy, which has amassed 16.6 billion views, surpassing Disney. Netz also secured retail partnerships and was able to launch physical merchandise through Amazon and other retailers. Walmart gave Pudgy Penguins a 2,000-plus store launch, and the company has sold over one million toys via its retail partners, generating $10 million in sales.

With merchandise flying off retail shelves, NFT prices have been soaring. The floor price of Pudgy Penguin NFTs has risen from 4.2 eth to a recent high of 20 eth, or roughly $58,000. The Igloo Company has also introduced a real-world royalty scheme for NFT owners, sharing royalties from physical toys and plushies with current digital collectible owners. Nearly 130 NFTs have been licensed for physical products so far, with owners receiving a 5% royalty on net revenues.

Netz’s approach to integrating physical merchandise with digital collectibles has been a game changer in the metaverse. The ability for NFT owners to earn royalties from the sales of associated physical versions of their non-fungible tokens is a unique concept that has proven to be profitable. As Pudgy Penguins continue to soar in popularity, they have established themselves as a masterclass in brand building within the NFT space. With their innovative approach and successful retail partnerships, Pudgy Penguins are setting a new standard for the future of NFT collections.

Arts

https://westobserver.com/the-survival-of-an-nft-company-during-crypto-winter-the-impact-of-30-plushy-penguins/

Interesting NFTs
taNNa
conceptual art. drawing and digitally processed.
The Scion
A young figure caught in a moment of distraction, aware only ephemerally of his unconscious being, as it engages in psychological and psychedelic layer spaces. His right arm casually cradles a moray eel; the figure is comfortable but not truly aware of the potentials for danger in such negligence. His shirt reads “Bello” in Pokemon style font, harkening back to a childhood straddling the millennial threshold. To his right side, out of the unconscious deep, shrouded alien heads propagate as a fractal totem, each new iteration a more sophisticated rendering of emotional masking over the cold mystery of the greys. As the scion of the Budgie-Sattva, the young man, in his distraction, is also simultaneously aware of higher levels of self discovery. To his left a psychological topology sets beneath the oracle side of an 8 ball ,hovering; its message a purest concept of acceptance. The “Scion” lettering is in 80’s HeMan style bold declaration. The lower right side of the painting is like a hybrid of melon, feathers, and seeds. The crystals in the background bring light; conducted, refracted, reflected, and dispersed, to balance the dark shadow of the figure’s physical body. The aura of the scion succeeds in layers to point, with a finger, and the crown chakra, toward a center of a mandala existing as nigh pure application of strokes, in essence painterly abstraction, but also revealing hints of the Aura of migraine, and the bi-hemispherical nature of the brain–noting concerns of the possibility of inherited mental disease. Yet the flourish of chakra as it sets against that center is robust, active, coherent, and reveling against all fear. Fundamentally, the piece speaks to the activation of one’s potential to begin to “Know Thyself”, and find greater awareness out of the enigmas of the mind–as an inculcated seed given to the rich soil of one’s own birthright.
CryptoKitties
Sup playa! I'm Kitty #453964. I enjoy fighting for the people, fighting the patriarchy, and watching Stranger Things. I'm often described as ridiculous, and I own it. I think you'll love me beclaws I have cattitude.
#50930
By OthersideDeployer
Alex in Wonderland
A figure, Alex, stands mostly naked in the midst of a physical and psychological maelstrom. He is clad only in nostalgic 80’s era socks, on a tenuous island between active waters and a variety of shark denizens. Sharks on the right side of the image are all beached, including a shark with a quartz crystal snout, an orange shark wrapped in a life buoy, and a shark further in the distance wearing an 80’s style shirt with the number “88”. On the left side is the largest shark, wearing bright glossy red lipstick and brandishing prominent teeth with braces. She is cordoned off from the figure by a roped float divider, and within her thought bubble is a warning symbol. Behind the figure, hovering in the air, are Grey aliens emerging from the distance, out of a series of elliptical UFO shaped interdimensional membranes. The Greys take on the visual form of spermazoa ostensibly impregnating the interdimensional thresholds. As is typical, these Greys inhabit a zone just behind the unconscious topology of Alex’s dissociative mind. Though Alex’s bottom half is representative, his top half mutates into a psychological cornucopia. In a manner akin to “Auto-Erotic Sphinx”, a predecessor work, the figure has self suctioned—an act of sensual infatuation, enjoyment, and exploration. Upward exists the figure’s primary conscious eye, adorned with a revolutionary beret emblazoned with a Bitcoin badge. The figure’s summit features the nose of a fighter jet facing off against video game Bullet Bills, one of whom is marked by a communist North Korean star. A cropped section of a UFO observes the contest. Alex’s mind branches both left and right. To the left is more singular embodied consciousness, manifesting two eyes and a Ganesh trunk grasping crayons. The right branch dissociates upward diagonally, emerging into an array of eyes, faces, teeth, tail, a unicorn horn, and much more—all of which participate in expressing his unconscious being; a democracy of psychic factions representing thought impressions and associations. All illumination and darkness– fernal, infernal, high consciousness and corporeal underbelly–reside in this realm. In the distance are relatively languid, light clouds, and against the firmament hovers a colossal distant eye peering over the scene and far beyond. This painting possesses underlying genetic traits with previous works such as “Auto-Erotic Sphinx with Toys”, “Dionysus”, and “Fuku-Shiva”. The work serves also as a nod to an earlier period of art inspiration during late teens and early twenties— born out of the nakedness, vulnerability, curiosity, and wonder inherent to coming of age and all subsequent psychedelic revelation.