We offer a service to turn your apparel into digital assets. We do this by imbuing them with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and providing a web-interface to let end-users interact with the digital clone that comes with the clothes that they purchase. View our demo at YQue.net
- Identity as a service for apparel
- We generate bulk QR codes for clothing that link to unique web pages
- Customizable web pages for customers that is embedded in their clothing
- The QR code directs to a unique web page
- The key to customize the webpage is inside the apparel
- The web page is a gateway for
- Links to social media: access to all your social media in one place
- Payments: Currently supports the feeless cryptocurrency IOTA
- A free Non Fungible Token (NFT) that represents their identity
- Social network: These identities can be connected through the web interface
- The identity NFT can act as:
- Proof of receipt: the authenticity of the product can be easily verified by using a distributed ledger
- Membership to club: instead of plastic cards your shirt can be a form of identification
- Hyper-personalized apparel for concerts: specific NFTs can be gifted when purchasing clothing at concerts
- Enables companies to continue to engage with their customer after the point of sale
- The distributed ledger we use does not use proof of stake and is feeless to use
- By extending the utility of clothing we also extend its life
My father owns a small business in Los Feliz selling screen printed t-shirts. We worked together on this concept in an attempt to reduce the unnecessary waste and to help my father with his brick and mortar store which has become an increasing novelty in this age of the internet.
What we sell to apparel companies is identity as a service. A streamlined process to generate unique identities on their clothing, and a web application that allows end users to own the digital clone associated with the clothing they buy.
There are three ingredients to make a Deep Link Micro Page:
- Pick a physical object to imbue:
- T-shirt
- Trucker hat
- Sweater
- Generate a self-sovereign identity that is readable by phones:
- QR code
- RFID tag
- Embed the identity into the apparel
- Heat-transfer
- Direct To Garment (DTG) printing
We currently offer services for generating bulk self-sovereign identities and printing their respective QR-codes onto heat transfer for easy application to common clothing. We partnered with a clothing boutique at Y-Que trading post in Los Feliz, to prototype and distribute our first implementation.
Deep Link Micro Pages (DLMP) expands the experience and utility associated with clothing by adding a separate dimension of interaction. When an end user scans the QR code they will be directed to a unique web page, associated with their specific product. Along with the clothing, the user owns this mobile friendly webpage and can customize it with links, text, payment gateways and more. Their webpage is an anonymous home that can only be viewed from physical interaction with the person and their clothing. Critically, the customer buys a digital identity along with their clothing; the associated web page is simply a gateway to interact with this identity.
To showcase the identity associated with the product, when you first login to the webpage you are able to mint a badge. Each self-sovereign identity is used as the seed to deterministically create the metadata and graphic for the badge.
When the badge is minted, a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is created from the self-sovereign identity on the Shimmer decentralized ledger and can be registered in Chrome, FireFox or Edge by using the MetaMask plugin. By leveraging the established MetaMask plugin, you can use your NFT as a proof of purchase for entities to easily verify the authenticity of your ownership without requiring any paperwork, driver licenses, receipts or personal information . The t-shirt, qr code, webpage, badge, and NFT are all embodiments of the same identity and can be used in person or online to both personalize the clothing experience and provide membership opportunities.
Other similar services include LinkTree, FlowCode, Carrd, Milkshake and Beacons. Many of these listed companies are varieties of “Link-in-bio” companies providing vertical mobile friendly web pages for content creators to reference on their social media accounts. LinkTree recently received $45 Million in series B funding with 16 million members. Carrd tries to be unique by offering more features while FlowCode differentiates itself by using QR-codes to link to mobile-first landing pages. FlowCode is owned by The DTX Company valued at $10.45 million by Dun and Bradstreet. What highly differentiates our product is in three parts. First is the anonymity brought by having your identity and access the webpage be physically embedded into the clothing. Second, is the features of the webpage allowing a social media like experience and real-world functionality like payment gateways. Lastly, the self-sovereign identity provides a unique function to personalize clothing as a form of membership and to easily verify the authentication of clothing.
The apparel market was valued at $368 billion dollars in the U.S. for 2019 by Statista. Normalizing the revenue by the 328 million people in the United States or 3.97 million in Los Angeles leads to $1,120 per year per person spent on clothing. Los Angeles alone has 75.8% of its population above the age of 21 giving us a market in this county of 3.01 million people. These people give us a potential market value in LA county of $3.371 billion dollars.
The marginal cost of this business is low. This business sells urls endpoints and would provide a service level agreement to its customers. When an apparel company buys 100 QR codes, they are purchasing 100 identities and websites that will be supported under the service level agreement. The web-services currently cost $15 per month and should be able to support thousands of QR-Codes being distributed. The web-services are efficient and have low overhead. In this model. This would have constant or positive returns to scale. Another part of the business would be printing and shipping heat-transfer ready identities in the form of QR-codes. One sheet of heat-transfer paper is $2 for 16 QR codes. Using an upper bound for high-quality ink costs we estimate $2 per sheet. This makes the QR code have an upper bound cost $0.25 each. This would reduce greatly as we buy materials in bulk. The high-quality ink printer would cost about $300 each. If we sold 128 QR codes with priority shipping at $8, and it took someone 1 hours at $20 an hour to print, pack and ship the product. This would cost $60 in total or $0.46 per QR code. At a conservative estimate, if the QR codes were sold at $1 per identity that would be a 54% profit per QR code before server and rental fees.
We have several pathways to monetize in this business. The first is from selling identities in the form of webpages. We can sell them to apparel companies on a per identity basis and offer a service level agreement for 10 years. A server that can support at least 5,000 identities costs $180 a year or $2,300 for 10 years. This translates to a cost of $0.36 per identity for 10 years of support. Selling each identity for $1 would leave us with $0.64 profit per identity. If we sold the QR code too our net revenue would be $2, our costs would be $0.82 leaving us with $1.18 profit per QR code identity. Additionally we can offer unique services to the apparel companies. For things like concerts we can offer unique NFT drops to give a personalized clothing experience for the fans of their favorite artists. When you buy clothing from a game company the Deep Links Micro Page can offer unique in-game items like skins. For a premium service we could allow vendors to attach the logistical history of the product to the webpage, proving that the clothing was ethically sourced, its environmental impact or proof that the company is making ethical donations. These identities could be used as membership authorizations or two factor authentication with companies or games. For example, your starbucks mug could represent your starbucks membership and could be used to transact your payments with your account. School clothing could use these webpages to mediate fun educational games that act as an inter-social game. Lastly, we can monetize the consumers themselves. We could offer a premium monthly service giving them access to additional features. These features could include image support allowing them to essentially make a custom webpage for their internet presence. We could also support credit card payment through the payment gateway. Any type of integration with spotify, shopify, etsy or youtube could have a premium interaction to allow for personalized mobile friendly websites.