[Dive #5] BAYC's Quadruple Gated Merch Drop
It feels like an obstacle course out here
PSA: This is the first “Dive” edition of my newsletter!
The primary difference between Shorts and Dives is that Shorts are commentary based on recent news in the NFT world. Dives will be focused on recency and they’ll be a longer too. Eventually Dives might consist of interviews, how-to’s or other topics.
Who knows, I’m literally a week in lol. If you do have any feedback, give me a holler!
Anyway, on to the good stuff.
Today I’ll be breaking down BAYC’s merch drop on 3/28
and how they’ve set a new bar for what exclusive access looks like through their multiple gates.
Before that, I’m going to call out a couple things before diving in.
1. The merch is, to put it lightly…not universally loved.
And here it is in all it’s glory.
A lot of jokes were made with comparisons to Ed Hardy and Affliction. It also seems that BAYC’s brand color wheel is 80% black. I hope and believe that will change over time.
2. The merch drop was a buggy experience for many consumers. This seems to be due to the Coinbase Commerce integration which allowed for payment in cryptocurrency. I imagine this experience will be smoother over time but it was a bumpy ride for many.
And these public opinions are coming from BAYC holders, diehard proponents of the brand and company. They aren’t afraid to speak their mind, even if it’s negative.
Fortunately, I didn’t experience any of this and had a smooth checkout experience! Maybe because I’m a lowly Mutant holder?
With that out of the way, let’s get into the juicy ‘quadruple gate’ that BAYC has employed with their merch drop and and will likely continue to employ.
Gate #1: Availability gate
Yup, that’s it. It doesn’t care whether you have an Ape or if you have a PhD.
It’s closed and it DGAF.
The merch drop lasted about 3.5 days (was supposed to be 2.5 but extended another 24 hours due to the technical issues). Assuming there is one merch drop every quarter for 3 days per drop, the merch store is open 3% out of the year.
That’s. Amazing. Name another e-comm site that does this. I don’t know any off the top of my head.
Gate #2: Token gate
This is more common gate in the space and is the Web3 version of a login. By connecting your wallet to the website, you are ‘logged in’. Based on what you have in your wallet, the website/app can determine what access you have and what you’re able to do.
In the case of the BAYC merch drop, you had to have a BAYC or MAYC in order to access the store.
Gate #3: Currency gate
You couldn’t purchase the BAYC merch with fiat. You could only buy the merch with ApeCoin (APE), the token for the BAYC ecosystem.
APE wasn’t an option to purchase this merch, it was the ONLY option.
(Note that the merch was priced in USD due to potential volatility in APE price.)
Gate #4: Visual gate
This one was particularly interesting when combined with the Token gate. As a MAYC holder, this is what I saw when scanning through the merch.
As a MAYC holder, but a non-BAYC holder, I…couldn’t see the BAYC merch.
WOAH.
This isn’t a ‘Sold out’ type of UI element. Hell, I couldn’t even tell if it was sold out.
I straight up couldn’t see the merch. Only the description.
I personally haven’t seen this before in e-comm and I love it.
I don’t know this for a fact, but I imagine if I had a BAYC but no MAYC, I would see the inverse of the above screenshot. This isn’t a BAYC > MAYC type of situation, but rather a if you have X you have access to Y. Simple as that.
(BONUS) Gate #5: Quantity gate
A tale as old as time, scarcity was another gate, which encouraged speed to checkout and another layer of exclusivity.
Some items had limited quantities, like the MAYC soccer jersey, which I was fortunate enough to purchase.
BAYC’s exclusive item was a rug (for those of you in the NFT world, there’s a double entendre here lol).
So WTF does this have to do with me and my business?
These Web3 gates have already become commonplace through the space. However, I believe there are a lot of strategies and tactics that can be applied regardless of tokens and this is a great inspiration and case study for everyone. Whether it’s for merch, early access to a product or feature, or something else, we can get creative here.
I hope the ideas below provide inspiration. They’re not mindblowing, but they could provide a little more oomph to whatever you’re working on.
[Availability] Incorporate live countdowns
[Availability] Require certain milestones to be reached in order to unlock the availability gate. A certain number of views, a certain number of engagements, etc. If the achievement is unlocked, celebrate it with your user base! You reached the goal together.
[Availability] Add on a layer of platform cross-pollination. Want to know when the hot thing from your company is going to happen? Announce it only on Twitter or wherever makes the most sense. Your most diehard users/fans will follow you if the carrot is juicy enough.
[Token] Substitute tokens with a ‘create an account‘ gate if you haven’t already. You need to sign up with an e-mail in order to access free content. B2B does this a lot.
[Token] Want to reward your ‘holders’? Create certain metrics that are equivalent to a holder. Users that have spent $X or more in the past year. Users that have been the most engaged in the past month. Show your Day 1 users some love. Loyalty should be rewarded and it’s happening hand over fist in Web3.
[Currency] Is there a soft currency in your product (looking at you gaming and rewards industries)? How can you translate soft currency into physical rewards? Gift cards are nice, but what if you could do something else with it? Likely hard to implement, but could yield engagement and retention metrics you’ve never seen before.
[Visual] How can you employ a version of what BAYC did with their merch drop? If you have merch, copy it and combine with a variant of the token gate. Content-focused companies like Techcrunch, NYT, and Crunchbase do a good job of this as well.
[Note] These gates are great tactics to consider employing. However, depending on your user base and how they operate, creative more or less exclusivity is something they might be sensitive to. Exclusivity is understood pretty well in the NFT space. You either have access to something or you don’t based on what you have. Not necessarily the case for other industries or brands, especially if it’s focused on access.
Does that Thanos pic make more sense now? ;)
Other odds and ends
There’s so many other facets of this merch drop I found interesting, but I wanted to focus on the gates. Here’s some other notes I had from the experience.
Most people didn’t like the merch, but help may be on the way. There is no shortage of artists and creators in the NFT space, and I believe BAYC will be exploring this avenue sooner than later. Collabs are the name of the game these days.
People bought a lot of merch, and they shared it. Whether it’s out of excitement, to engagement farm, or flaunt how much magic internet money they have, the BAYC merch drop chatter dominated NFT Twitter for the day.
These folks didn’t spend a couple hundred, they spent a couple thousand. I myself spent $724 and I’m not even sure I want to wear any of it!!
Crazy, but if you know anything about hype and the world of resell, this is what it currently looks like for BAYC merch…(note that these are the lowest listing price not necessarily the sale price, but it’s still multiples above retail)
And it doesn’t stop there. There are more collab drops coming and they aren’t stopping. Today Superplastic dropped a figurine collaboration with BAYC. Each of these figurines were $222 a pop.
The drop incorporated most of the gates I mentioned above and I myself got suckered into buying 4 of them.
At least those figurines look better than the Ed Hardy t-shirts I bought :)