In the world of startup founders, perhaps none are more scrappy than those in the streetwear industry. The literal rags-to-riches lore of The Hundreds’ Bobby and Ben Hundreds — going from having their friend’s mom sew their first shirts to a worldwide cultural empire two decades later — continues to fuel countless aspiring upstart labels that make up the now $185 Billion global streetwear industry. 

The streetwear scene owes much of its 20+ years of success to the internet. In the early 2000s, the linear, static, but quickly adaptable nature of web1 allowed smaller internet-native brands to compete with established brick and mortar fashion houses by leveraging speed to market — what basement-grown brands lacked in media spend, they made up for in word of mouth hype, virality, and an obsessive fanbase. 

Web2’s era of dynamic participative social media further kicked down the door of exclusivity as burgeoning streetwear communities began to share resources. Thanks to industry iconoclasts like the late Virgil Abloh publishing a literal how-to to starting a brand, subreddits like r/streetwearstartup that boast +700k members, or supplier streetwear TikToks that give you inside scoop on quality blanks, demystifying the fashion industry has never been easier. 

Demystifying is one thing, but truly disrupting and breaking through is another. Just as the two previous internet generations before it, web3 is poised to disrupt fashion and give up-and-coming labels a leg up. Now notable projects are using blockchain technology to address some of fashion’s legacy challenges.  While forward thinking networks like Crowdmuse are tackling supply chain transparency, sustainability and revenue splits between collaborators, and platforms like DressX and The Dematerialized are building marketplaces for virtual goods, one of the biggest challenges is distribution. 

Enter Harmony-NY, the global streetwear collective and design platform founded by Kenzo Nakamura and Tim Nolan, that looks to leverage the ownership, crowdfunding and community power of web3 to “build the world's first interactive streetwear brand” where holders of the membership NFTs will be able to vote on the Creative Director and aesthetic directions of the season. 

Netcetera caught up with Tim and Kenzo from their respective places in NYC. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Raf Katigbak: First off, how did you both come to web3?

Kenzo Nakamura: I got into crypto when I went to NYU for grad school and there was a “Blockchain For Good” class that I took with UNICEF and the UN. A friend of mine was working at Consensys and I went to work on one of the projects within their venture studio. I was there for two and a half years.

Tim Nolan: I come from an earlier version of the web and have seen different permutations of how people culturally connect with technology — whether that’s facilitating community and creating niche environments, but also how it fuels creativity. A lot of the work that I've done leading up to [Harmony-NY] was a lot of primarily browser-based art pieces — highly consumable and addictive “toys” I call them. One project was called Cache Monet. That gave me the bug of making my art practice distributed through the internet. It's like, ‘how can you be big in Japan and never go to Japan?’ ‘How can you stimulate someone in Moscow?’ 

Raf Katigbak: How did you then connect the dots to what you are building with Harmony?

Kenzo Nakamura: I studied industrial design and then I went to a tech program at NYU that mixed design and tech, then worked for a crypto company. I wanted to get back into the design studio and watched Project Runway with my girlfriend and it all kind of melded together into this one idea. I thought ‘streetwear is really from the streets and by the people’ and having a collective decide on the direction of where the label goes would be a perfect decentralized use case for the blockchain and these tokens. 

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Raf Katigbak: A lot of people see the marriage of web3 and fashion through the lens of ownership of digital goods. How do you see Harmony within the current digital fashion landscape?

Kenzo Nakamura: We've talked to other people in the web3 and streetwear space and they're much more focused on bringing NFC chips to clothes and we're not against that, but where we're focusing to innovate is on decision making and social coordination and using tokens for that, as opposed to having them come with garments. Although we do love the idea of having these NFTs with every drop.

Raf Katigbak: I'd love to hear more about the interplay and importance of physical vs digital goods.

Kenzo Nakamura: We were building Harmony in the NFT crypto winter of 2022 and 2023. I felt like the aesthetic of NFTs then was polished and artificial. I like where we've taken the hard stance where we want this to feel like a streetwear brand that’s analog, it's physical, nothing's made in 3D, and so we've not gone the digital route. We're not doing garments that are rendered in a 3D space and are finished in artificial 3D space. That's not to say that we might not do that in the future, but I think we want to have a really tactile aesthetic to what we're doing and blockchain is just a back end for what we're trying to do.

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Tim Nolan: I think that interplay is important. When we first started talking about Harmony, that was set in stone - we're going to create physical objects. We create artifacts. The contract and the key is just the way to get this idea global instead of having to do it locally and in a box.  The goal is never to have some imitation of life, but to actually have real-world presence, we just connect digitally.

Raf Katigbak: You’re really focused on the idea of creating not just apparel but a platform for creatives and supporters, I'd love to dig into how you see infrastructure and distribution as the major barrier to fledgling fashion labels.

Tim Nolan: If you looked at the early days of streetwear, it was a closed world where things just came out of a black box and had a red box logo on it — and it was a T-shirt and it was Supreme. Then you get to 2017 where you have people like Virgil giving out cheat code playbooks. Now my social feed is crushed with where to get the best blank hoodies and where to get full color screen prints. But that will only get a young designer so far, they'll never be more than a landing page. But we're building a vehicle, something that has inertia and momentum and platform distribution. As our audience grows, that just helps propel these young creative directors with the ability to actually over-deliver on what they actually want to make instead of just another hoodie with a screen print on it, really getting into the idea of a design studio and Project Runway concept of watching this thing happen in public. Our tokens are just keys. They just let you into the building. When we have a design studio people will be invited in, whether virtually or in the space for showings, reveals, drops, etc. That really takes this away from the NFT-only thing. It's not something you can save to a desktop, this is something that you can participate in.

Kenzo Nakamura: The truth is, I don't see that people want to start and operate their own streetwear label. I think they want to be loosely affiliated with one and to be able to curate vibes and images—to just vote and be a part of this experience. I think that's what we're providing to the 1000 keyholders. It's an hour to invest a month, you watch the content that we've provided, you communicate with the community on our dashboard around what you think the best decision is, and then they'll vote, all from the comfort of their couch on a Sunday. And then they get to have some pride and ownership on what's been produced. I think that's the commitment level that people want. I don't think people are to be the person directly behind it and I think we're providing this experience to our future community.

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Raf Katigbak: Right. It's this idea that actually running a label is hard and it's more that people would love to just have a say, participate and have that sense of ownership over it.

Kenzo Nakamura: Exactly. 

Tim Nolan: I think that’s the point. You can do it from your couch. It's powerful—like you're in on something but it's no skin off your back, you don't have to have to sweat about it.

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Find the latest limited apparel collaboration between Harmony. Crowdmuse, and Refraction here in anticipation of the Refraction x Towns event at Public Records tonight, April 4.