Hey .SWOOSH fam,
It’s a new year and a new path forward for .SWOOSH so we’re kicking off 2024 with a quick recap of what we’ve learned and where we’re going with .SWOOSH this year and beyond.
In 2023, we’ve learned so much about virtual products, co-creation, and self-expression. We hosted community learning workshops in over 10 cities, launched a signature collection, debuted “Airphoria”, our first game world in Fortnite, and invited fans to unlock physical sneakers tied to virtual products.
We also confirmed that a virtual product’s value should be based on the enjoyment it gives you when using it to express yourself or unlocking access to physical product. It’s more about the joy of collecting — of being a true fan — not just a transaction. In the next year, you’ll see this come to life as we launch more variations of virtual products that expand your love of self-expression. We’ll go way deeper into video gaming with the launch of a new line of virtual products — Nike In-Game Wearables. In-Game Wearables are different than our digital collectibles (like OF1) because you can purchase and wear these collections directly in your favorite video games. You’ll also be able to unlock exclusive physical apparel and footwear in the real world based on the in-game wearables you purchased. You won’t need a wallet to store any of these new products — you’ll just link your game accounts to Nike. More on that later.
By far, our favorite memories of this last year were around surprising our members with exclusive physical product — like the TINAJ AF1s. These and other products were targeted based on traits in the virtual products you collected. We’re going to double-down this next year on more exclusive physical product — both in footwear and apparel — for those in our .SWOOSH community who buy our in-game wearables or digital collectibles.
All that said, we recognize how important it is for you to have control of your digital collectibles and so in the second half of this year, we’ll be allowing you to off-ramp your collectibles to your own wallet. That way, you’ll be able to trade them with others on marketplaces that guarantee royalties to creators. Having collaborated to co-create products this last year, it’s especially important to us that all creators benefit financially for the contribution of their art. To be clear, we will only be allowing for off-ramping to other marketplaces — we won’t be building our own. Simply put, building our own marketplace could distract from our product creation and storytelling, which we feel is most important to us — and to our members. We’ll be sharing more details about this later in the year as well.
To those of you who have purchased .SWOOSH virtual products, we thank you so much for rolling with us. You are our founding members and those collectibles you own can be your ticket to unlocking more exclusive offers from .SWOOSH this next year. Your honest feedback has been so critical to our historic first year and we look forward to learning more from you as we dive deeper into the next chapter of our journey. We’ll share more on our next phase in video games soon enough. Until that time, thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
-THE .SWOOSH TEAM
