The idea
Made with Black Culture (stylized after ‘Made in USA’) was born from the nonprofit Originals Nation’s community organizing work in Los Angeles. Years of dialogues amplifying the need to monetize and protect the commercial use of Black cultural influence produced the concept of the ‘Black Stamp’. The Stamp would function like Orthodox Union’s suite of kosher symbols, or Fair Trade and Organic certifications on consumer goods. These decals pay perpetual licensing fees for their placement on product packaging, creating a viable financial model for profit-sharing and reinvestment.
The founding team came together in 2020 to develop the certification rubric, or the standards by which content, products, or brands would be deemed ‘made with Black culture’: using Black creators’ image (e.g. modeling), labor (e.g. executive marketers), likeness (e.g. slang, music, dance or athletic movements), and/or endorsement (e.g. influencer promotions). Through this definition, it’s easy to see how fashion, video games, sports teams, music, and a wide range of industries are profiting from using unlicensed, unprotected cultural IP.
Key Learnings
- The question then became: how do we verify culture at scale? Since culture is ever-changing and social, the means of verification needed to be both too. Enter web3.
- On-chain attestations were the perfect mechanism to document transparent, immutable evidence of a cultural supply chain directly from the humans participating in the collaborative act of creation…at scale. Issuing the Black Stamp as an NFT meant the license, up until now only existing as visual icons on physical goods, could evolve into the digital world. Cryptocurrencies could enable micro-payments and other economic innovations to rectify previously imbalanced rights to rewards. In the future, all of these features could combine as a hyper-interactive marketplace, where an NFT-embedded real-world artifact like a sneaker could be scanned with a phone to launch a digital demonstration of its cultural supply chain.
- MADE was incorporated and launched in 2021, and built an on-chain minting MVP by 2022, onboarding >100 Black creators as early adopters and testers.
- As part of the Techstars Crypto 2023 cohort, we presented a distinct pathway to building on-chain, starting with a social need and application, rather than looking for a real-world way to apply the computer science. I continue to believe the web3 ecosystem is at a tipping point where more innovators with diverse backgrounds need to see what the technology can do to spark ideas about what the world needs it for.
Pitch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3qzftHyfC0&t=1577s