#279: Doodles is Giving Fandom a Firmware Update! by Doodlifts
🛣️ A journey through the 2.5 year history of Doodles and beyond
TPan here! I’m en route to a friend’s bachelor party so I won’t be writing my usual piece today. However, I do have some great content for you from someone else in the space.
Today we have Doodlifts sharing the story of Doodles and what they’re up to. Doodlifts subscribed to this newsletter a year and a half ago and we’ve become friends (both online and IRL!) and are fellow Doodles community members. When it comes to community, Doodlifts is a great example of what a diehard community member looks like, and you’ll be able to tell by the piece he wrote for us today. When I asked him if he would be interested in a guest piece to share the POV from a superfan, he quickly responded with a resounding yes.
Doodlifts is the Co-founder of TGIDoodles, a community-led media brand for all things Doodles. If you’d like to learn more about what he’s up to, you can follow him here.
Hi, I’m Doodlifts!
I’m what some may call a bit of a Doodles Maxi, but I do try to keep a level head. I joined the Doodles community in June of 2022 by purchasing my very green headband Doodle. I picked this one in particular because of my background in Strength and Conditioning and I felt the headband represented my passion for fitness. “I am my Doodle and my Doodle is me” kind of vibes.
After joining the community, I quickly jumped into the thick of things. I wanted to be involved in everything Doodles. I got my feet wet with the Inkubator, a community treasury that holders could activate to pursue their dreams. After working on my own and many other proposals I met a fellow Doodle holder, ChefTonyP. Tony seemed to have a similar passion and we agreed that we needed to work together on something.
Around the same time, the Doodles brand itself had begun to grow increasingly quiet. So Tony and I took it upon ourselves to fill that void and started hosting weekly Twitter Spaces to highlight community efforts and provide Doodles with a place to gather. Since then it’s been off to the races. TGID, our media company, has since run countless spaces and hosted notable guests from all over web3. I have had the pleasure of growing my skills as a content creator as the Doodles brand has come into its own. The people I have met and the opportunities I have had as a result of joining this colorful community are something I will be forever grateful for. One of those people is TPan and he asked me to write about what Doodles has been up to recently and where I feel they are heading. So as the threadooors say, let’s dive in!
Many web3 and NFT brands have struggled to find their identity, purpose, and product market fit. I believe that one brand is poised to be not only the breakout star amongst its peers, but may end up disrupting the entertainment industry entirely. That brand is Doodles.
As of 3/14/2024, Doodles is three weeks away from their activation at NFT NYC. The brand plans to give its core community an exclusive look at the process behind creating its new animated special. The special is touted as its biggest production yet, featuring visuals by the Emmy-nominated animation studio Goldenwolf (now owned by Doodles), a script from the writers of Adventure Time, and a soundtrack produced by Pharrell Williams. If that feels like a lot to absorb, that's not surprising. Let's look into some of the recent history to provide context on what any of that means and why it matters for Doodles and the opportunity ahead for web3 IP.
The Beginning
Doodles minted as an NFT collection in October 2021 as the brainchild of three co-founders, Scott Martin a.k.a. Burnt Toast, Jordan Castro a.k.a. Poopie, and Evan Keast a.k.a. Tulip. The project got its start in the same way as many other NFT projects at the time did: the marriage of art and the blockchain.
Scott was a world-renowned artist and muralist who had worked with major brands like Google and WhatsApp to add his flavor to their design and iconography. Jordan and Evan worked at Dapper Labs, the company that brought the famous Cryptokitties to the world back in 2017. Despite it sounding ridiculous, being involved with the Cryptokitties actually brings a lot of street cred, something akin to the PayPal mafia. These two were early builders in the web3 space, at least in regards to NFTs.
The three launched their project to much fanfare and FOMO, and it was off to the races. Doodles quickly became the darlings of the NFT space, sharing the spotlight with other notable projects like the Bored Apes and VeeFriends. The team remained lean and scrappy for a long time while other teams rushed to expand their cadre and deploy their war chests. While Doodles remained a small team they quickly built up a reputation for punching above their weight, especially at IRL activations.
The event that really put Doodles on the map was the activation at SXSW 2022 where they partnered with BEHR Paint and Shopify to create an award-winning immersive retail experience that attracted not only NFT folks but created lines of “normie” conferencegoers. To round out the event, Diplo even played a DJ set! The NFT market was hot and it was hard to not let the good times roll.
But then the crypto winter started to roll in…
The Bear
2022 and 2023 were not quiet years for the Doodles. Despite the depressed floor prices, history will look back at this time for Doodles as “building in the bear” and the team made some major progress.
Some of the more notable events during this crypto winter:
Raised $54 million led by Alexis Ohanian’s VC fund 776
Poached Julian Holguin (former President of Billboard) to become the CEO
Brought on Pharrell as the Chief Brand Officer
Acquired Goldenwolf, one of the most renowned animation studios in the world
Launched a second collection called Doodles 2 on the Flow blockchain
While any single one of these moves should have sent shockwaves through the NFT industry, the energy seemed to dissipate behind these announcements because of the lack of context. By their own admission, the team did not communicate the context for these moves very well. They all seemed like headline decisions, but it was tough for the community and those outside the community to understand the direction. Observers could look on and imagine if you threw all of these ingredients in a pot then surely something wonderful would emerge. But what was that thing going to be, seemingly no one knew.
The Partnerships
People had started to ask questions like “Is Pharrell even involved?” “Is he just a paid figurehead?” You know how restless degens can get! Then along came the Pharrell Pack. The Pharrell Pack was the beginning of the vision coming into focus, maybe more slowly than some would have hoped, but the lens was turning nonetheless. The Pharrell Pack was a big brand moment when Pharrell himself entered into the Doodles world as his own animated character.
This campaign also came with a pack of wearables. Wearables are clothing that you can adorn to your Doodles 2 character inside the creator app called the Stoodio. While this may seem insignificant, what it represented was a vehicle for web2 brands to enter into the web3 space that was safe and fun, as opposed to some of the outright flops that other brands had experienced trying to break into NFTs. Doodles was creating a white-label pathway for non-blockchain brands to create their first NFTs, making this a repeatable and scalable process.
Doodles went on to iterate on this strategy by selling out physical + digital drops with Crocs and Casio G-Shock. The team created a repeatable process that could be taken to other web2 brands and tout its growing reputation as the place for brands to break into NFTs.
While all of this was transpiring, Doodles did not leave its IRL activation DNA behind. Instead, the team was working on elevating it to the next level. Doodles partnered with CAMP, an up-and-coming experiential retail brand that already has stores with Nike and Disney, to create the first semi-permanent experience.
As someone who has visited other CAMP locations, the Doodles experience in Chicago is far ahead of its peers. Kids are equipped with NFC wristbands and enter an immersive A/V experience that introduces the Doodles world, running around the set and participating in a scavenger hunt and interactive video game. Kids can collect digital wearables by tapping their wristbands on various items in the experience and equip them onto their newly formed character. They can edit their character on tablet stations throughout the experience using the Doodles Stoodio as well.
CAMP has said that the Doodles store is one of their best performing ones and the reviews consistently rave about the experience. Doodles and CAMP record all the wearables collected and send an email as part of the exit experience, allowing the newly created Doodles and digital wearables to be a part of the kid’s journey beyond the physical experience.
The Big Picture
Earlier we discussed how all these things thrown in a pot would surely create a fantastic dish. Here are the raw ingredients…
Doodles has a verifiable super group of connected and talented entertainment industry personas: Julian Holguin, Pharrell, Ingi Erlingson and the crew at Goldenwolf, and Brandon Rosenblatt
Doodles has a character builder app that brands can leverage to enter into the NFT ecosystem and Doodles can use to engage its fans
Doodles has a wearables economy that can grow through URL and IRL experiences
But what is the dish? Is it mashed potatoes, potatoes Au Gratin, or poutine? Austin Hurwitz, head of Strategy at Doodles, helped reveal the recipe: Entertain, Engage, Exchange.
In preparation for their animated special, Doodles has already started to gather fans across social media platforms
As Doodles gathers more fans, they will attract the fans to the Stoodio via short-form content and more
Once the fans are engaged in the Stoodio they will want to exchange wearables
Once fans exchange wearables they will be given opportunities to be rewarded for sharing those digital wearables through plug-and-play content engines and other co-creative devices
As the community of doodles grows and more people share their character the brand will attract more fans and we are now back at the entertainment stage
This is the fandom flywheel Doodles is trying to spin. It is all contingent on people falling in love with these characters and their stories. I mean, cmon, just look at ‘em!
Finally, the relationship that the brand intends to create with its fans shouldn't be overlooked and is vitally important to the success of the brand. You may have noticed that I didn't speak a lot in this article as to why everything is an NFT, but the reasons are as follows. The level of insights that Doodles will learn about its fans because all their meaningful actions are onchain is incredible. Doodles will be able to recognize and reward fans in ways that were simply impossible without a completely vertically integrated and onchain brand.
Recently, KITH was praised for its retroactive rewards program for its loyal customers. While it was impressive, it will be table stakes for web3 brands, especially for character IP brands like Doodles. Disney doesn’t recognize its fans the same way that Doodles loves theirs. The age of uni-directional fandom is over and Doodles is poised to lead the way for the next generation of creators and fans.
Call me crazy but I believe this approach to IP proliferation and fan relationships will fundamentally disrupt the entertainment industry as we know it. People don’t want to be passive consumers of the next Marvel sequel anymore. We don’t want to be force-fed the next live-action remake. We want original stories and we want to participate in that story. No vehicle out there solves for this, but Doodles and their approach does.
This was an eye-opening piece for me, not just because of the Doodles story (which is a great one), but rather that many of the top web3 communities have superfans like Doodlifts that go the extra mile to show their dedication, fandom, and loyalty to the brand, team, and efforts. They’re out there and I hope everyone building a community finds them.
Follow the Doodles journey at TGIDoodles, or follow Doodlifts here.
See you next week!
TPan cool,
Doodles update web3 space, and this is good
but what about BAYC, It looked horrible.