Hibiscus DAO Whitepaper
Table of Contents
What is Hibiscus DAO?
Current Landscape of Apparel = Exploitation
Brands Obscure Exploitative Practices
Solution = A New Trustless System
Behind Hibiscus
Immediate Roadmap
Future Goals
What is Hibiscus DAO?
Mission: Build an open source end-to-end process for
fully-transparent + community-owned apparel
production.
Roadmap
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Build a Decentralized, Community-Curated Apparel Brand
Leverage in-house production supply chain + tech infrastructure to release Hibiscus’s
first community-curated collection - becoming a community-directed decentralized
apparel brand.
Create Fashion Legos = Fork-able Garment Library
Create open source, end-to-end apparel production supply chain + tech infrastructure
that allows creators to easily create new garments on existing bases - via on chain
portfolios that can forked, remixed, and recombined.
Enable the Fashion Creator Economy
Build cryptographic profit sharing into our fashion lego tooling - enabling the creator
economy for apparel production by retaining and redistributing the value created in
making and wearing apparel.
Enable Proof of Ethical Production
Eventually, we want to create a system of producing clothes that uses consensus-driven
blockchain technology to verify products are being made ethically.
Current Landscape of Apparel = Exploitation
The fashion industry is growing exponentially - without any signs of slowing down.
The apparel and luxury market reached $1.9 trillion globally in 2019 - and is expected to
surpass $3 trillion in the next decade.
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However, the distribution of returns in the fashion industry is heavily skewed. This is
because a traditional brand's business model is based around maximizing profit - by
minimizing value returned to stakeholders.
Old System
vs.
New System
The traditional fashion industry is rooted in the exploitation of:
Manufacturers
Designers
The Environment
Traditional Fashion = Humanitarian Exploitation
Slave, child, and sweatshop labor are all common in the supply chain of traditional
brands. These human rights violations are well-documented but suppressed via
marketing and PR.
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The biggest offenders (like Nike and H&M) have been put under pressure to improve
their behavior but there is no way (yet) to verify if garments are being produced ethically.
Traditional Fashion = Creative Exploitation
Talented young designers generate massive value for brands - often without
compensation. And even when they are compensated, they are not paid relative to the
value they create.
A successful, popular design will earn a brand millions, yet the designer behind it will
see none of these earnings. Instead, their designs become the IP of the brand.
Traditional Fashion = Environmental Exploitation
Fashion brands intentionally leverage planned obsolescence and instill an increasingly
consumerist mindset based on overconsumption to feed their continued need for profit.
When overconsumption is encouraged, true sustainability is impossible to achieve.
Brands Obscure Exploitative Practices
“So really it comes down to this, there’s an anonymity in the supply
chain.
We don’t really know who, what, where and why —
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we know why we’re consuming it, we wanna consume it - but for
the consumer it is virtually impossible to know whether a
product was manufactured in safe conditions.”
— Rebecca Burgess, Rebecca Burgess: Regenerative Textiles and
Fibershed (8:24)
Today, the world’s biggest, most visible brands go to great lengths
to obscure their fundamentally exploitative business practices via
marketing.
They pour hundreds of millions into assuaging consumer guilt via manipulative
messaging - without addressing the negative dynamics that make this type of marketing
necessary in the first place.
Beloved brands such as Nike, The North Face, and Patagonia churn out
marketing campaigns convincing consumers that buying their products is
equated with supporting anti-racism, ethical production, and sustainability.
At the same time:
Executive leadership teams of these brands remain largely white.
Only ~1% of garments produced worldwide are done so by workers being
paid living wages in their home countries.
Most growth is created by a rate of consumption that no amount of recycling
will offset.
And because we still aren't able to truly verify whether garments
are being produced ethically - everyone in the industry is put in a
compromising position:
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A designer based in Los Angeles may be complicit in the exploitation and brutalization
of a child laborer in Bangladesh... though they may never know it.
Solution = A New Trustless System
We want to create a participant-owned system of
producing clothes that uses consensus-driven
blockchain technology to verify that products are being
made ethically.
Reinvention of Apparel Production via "Proof of NonSlave Labor"
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Building this new system will lift up creators and crafters - which can force traditional
apparel brands into an "arms race" towards ethical production by driving adoption of a
new industry standard of cryptographic verification in the supply chain.
The traditional system of apparel production is fundamentally exploitative and requires
reinvention. We view crypto technologies and philosophies, from fractional ownership,
to tokenized licenses, to smart contracts, as the best tools for this job.
Traditional brands benefiting from this status quo of exploitation will never willingly give
up their profits for a more ethical alternative. We have to disrupt them and build a new
system from the ground up.
With blockchain technology - cloud-based crowdsourced human-rights oracles and
"Proof of Location" protocols can validate safe and healthy work places.
Normalizing use of these human-rights oracles and verification protocols in apparel
production would expose corporations for lack of "Proof of Non-Slave Labor".
As “Proof of Non-Slave Labor” becomes an industry standard:
Corporations who currently have a stranglehold on fashion would
be forced to adopt ethical supply chain operations or admit - by
omission - to using slave labor.
To make this a reality we need to research and apply protocols to power fully
transparent on-chain apparel production. This enables a community owned,
transparent, and innovative production process.
ON CHAIN SUPPLY NFTS + TRANSACTIONS
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Hibiscus DAO = Empowerment
We seek to normalize and facilitate:
Not using slave labor.
Paying community/staff proportionally to their contributions
On-boarding current industry players onto the blockchain (designers & makers)
With hope of creating:
Strong design teams driven by community and monetary value.
More diversity, better ideas, better concepts, better curation, and more robust
thinking.
Momentum towards living on-chain.
Hibiscus DAO = Ownership
Crypto technologies help share ownership with stakeholders:
Web3 communities can bring more value back to their creators when producing
wearables
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Forkable concepts and tools can be validated and iterated on by community
creators.
Computer-aided designs can be registered on-chain as vectors and then used to
produce anything from printed goods to cut & sew - enabling proper credit and
compensation.
Future royalties of products can be distributed back to creators and the community
by the DAOs
With an improved model we can build better to do
more, produce less, and return value to creators and
users.
Blockchains can redesign incentives to enable freedom, effectiveness, and teamwork:
Shareholders, makers and creators shouldn’t be in opposition.
Effective products and social human rights shouldn’t be in opposition.
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Behind Hibiscus
For the past decade, I’ve (Jeremy Karl) been creating and overseeing the production of
some of the most sought-after products in fashion and sportswear.
By having my finger on the pulse of the fashion landscape, I'm able to collaboratively
imagine and draw up a better future where we can have web3 communities plug into
fashion3.
I have experience designing at brands like:
Kanye West's Yeezy
Drake + Nike's NOCTA
Arc'teryx
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Although I won't see any returns from these extremely successful products - these past
years are “proof of concept” and validation that I (and other culturally relevant
designers) have been able to create the future of successful fashion - years in advance.
We've done it before - and we can do it again.
Under the Hard Shell with Designer Jeremy Karl
"I don't sign a lot of NDAs," Jeremy Karl explains. I'm relieved, given
his frequent involvement in many of the most anticipated, often
celebrity-backed, fashion projects of the last few years. You may be
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ka.arweave.net/C2F00iV9sXzFx8fyH9w-Hz2znNn17_FvN53KnWY2
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Immediate Roadmap
First Wins for Hibiscus DAO
“Merch as a gateway drug to design for diversity”
As creating a humane on-chain system is a huge endeavor, we’re to use "merch"
production as a testing ground for returning ownership to the community + producers.
Key ideas to work on immediately bringing to life:
1. Build “Fashion Legos”: a garment library that serves an open-source, Githublike platform for apparel production.
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Create open source, end-to-end apparel production supply chain + tech
infrastructure that allows creators to easily create new garments on existing
bases.
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2. Cultivate a repository of designers, producers, and suppliers who have
successful used our core garment library protocol.
This gives our protocol network effects - making it even easier for new projects
to create apparel by forking and building on top of existing on-chain portfolios which include garments, materials, and designs.
2. Split system for community contributors.
Figure out how to retain and redistribute the value created in making and
wearing apparel via cryptographic profit sharing.
4. Produce the first community-curated collection.
Leverage in-house production supply chain + tech infrastructure to release
Hibiscus’s first community-curated collection - becoming a decentralized
apparel brand in the process.
Future Goals
Decentralizing Supply Chain + Returning Ownership to
Participants
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We can decentralize the supply chain by:
Setting up participation through product testing bounties, community management,
cross-world infrastructure and blockchain development.
Eventually - creating the ultimate “god” protocol brands with full on chain supply.
On returning ownership:
Building on-chain tools for designers to register their work to ensure proper
attribution.
Enable structures such as product purchases that would give back a percentage in
ownership of the organization - enabling access to dividends.
Creating a community governed treasury to give back to inner city groups inspiring
mainstream trends or help build better support structures for communities supplying
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raw materials.
First steps = Inviting consumer participation via Product Review + Social Marketing
Bounties:
Sourcing content and reviews from users who are rewarded for it.
Building Incentives for Environmentally-Sound
Consumption
We can reduce environmental impact by embracing that a single piece can live
multiple lives with different owners.
We can incentivize this behavior by helping pieces hold their value with a robust
secondary market ecosystem:
Building integrated secondary markets where the community can list pre-owned
pieces and enjoy continuous returns from future sales.
Integrating secondary markets and product liquidity such that you can “return” an
item for the secondary market value immediately or purchase a “used” item for the
current floor price.
And by allowing you to retain value from your item even after it leaves your
closet:
Generating NFTs as “proof of journey” or “store of value” with the encrypted data
gathered by your product: a unique “souvenir” of your time with the product before it
leaves your wardrobe for a new home.
Focusing on chain storage, a dynamic NFT can “store” the customer’s collection as
"shares" without having to immediately claim the items. Staking your shares, can
possible let you “mine” limited products or give you access to new “utility” NFTs.
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Augmenting User Experience
Geocaching = Gamifying IRL Exploration
Decentralized geocaching would bring another dimension to the experience of buying
and wearing sport clothes.
Whether it’s a simple hike outside of LA or ascending Kilimanjaro - rewarding explorers
with real value from their data gathered or their miles traveled helps create a
regenerative and healthy relationship between users and performance products.
We can even incentivize outdoor exploration in our gear by having of our athletes create
geocached bounties for each collection.
Tweaking with a community approach: a prize cannot be fully redeemed until
multiple fragments around the glove are found.
Adding a DeFi element: participants could have the privilege to stake their rewards
into a location-specific protocol such that when subsequent participants claim
rewards - the staked users earn as well.
Metaverse + Apparel = Innovating Human Expression
Sportswear and technology still has a lot of limits IRL, the Metaverse enables us to
explore possibilities + preview developments.
There are currently no culturally relevant Metaverse fashion platforms, whether it’s for
designers, curators or users.
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Whether for function or fashion - there are many use cases for Metaverse apparel:
Equipping your avatar for Metaverse exploration or flexing at the recent opening of
the Fingerprints DAO museum.
Enabling accessibility to give humans with disabilities more options to represent
themselves and interact with their environment however they would like.
Ideating innovative designs that wouldn't be possible IRL - like light refracting
“invisibility” jackets or continuously changing “prints” on pieces.
Using generative art to create new prints owned by creators - which can be
sold/licensed.
Operationalizing physical onramps into the Metaverse by getting your body scanned
and measured to your avatar.
Trying on clothes in the Metaverse, paying with your wallet, and getting the product
sent to you IRL.
God Tier Protocol
Overview of a community-owned transparent brand
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Co-authored by Jeremy Karl (@techspec_) & Vishnu G. Kumar
(@VishnuGKumar)
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