Sneaker Heads

mohsne2

May 11, 2022

WGMI Rating:

 3/5

Mint Details

Mint Date

June 18, 6:00 pm UTC

Public Raffle:
https://www.premint.xyz/Sneakerheads-Public-raffle/

Public Raffle closes on June 16th, 11:00 am PST

Supply

5,000

Mint Price

0.25 ETH

What is Sneaker Heads?

Sneaker Heads is a 3D art style NFT project which combines sneakers (shoes) and heads into an illustration. Browsing through Sneaker Heads art, we can see many modern and popular trainers projected throughout their designs. Some examples are the classic Nike Air Force 1 trainer. Also the Nike TN Air Max shoe. In addition, some of the Sneaker Heads resemble famous celebrities such as Kanye West. Sneaker Heads is aiming to create “the largest Web3 sneaker community” and to bring sneaker culture to the NFT space. They are a very hyped up project and almost everybody in the NFT space knows what Sneaker Heads is. The collection is going to consist of the original Sneaker Heads drop, then many other drops and collaborations are anticipated in the future.

Story / Background

Artist Ali Dawood spent years working “in the shadows” before announcing his own collection. Being a huge hip hop, streetwear, fashion and sneaker enthusiast, he implements these things into everything that he does. Combining his artistic skills and passions, it seems only natural that Sneaker Heads was born.

Ali claims that he is new to the digital scene. For a long time, he worked for other NFT projects whilst he gained experience and raised funds to start his own. After months of being contracted externally, Ali began to refuse all new requests so that he could focus on Sneaker Heads.

Utility

Sneaker Heads does not claim to have one main utility. Looking at the information available, it appears that they are going to offer their holders exclusive benefits such as access to limited edition merchandise drops, sneakers and clothing.

Roadmap

The Sneaker Heads roadmap consists of 4 pillars:

01 – Community:

The heart of Sneaker Heads is in the community. They are striving to build an environment where they merge sneaker culture, street culture, and NFT culture together.

Full time moderation team with 24/7 engagement and activities in Discord.
Hosting community events in Discord, on Twitter, and in real-life for holders to build lifelong relationships and unforgettable experiences.
The community will benefit through partnerships with sneaker brands and retailers. They will give their holders the opportunity to have an advantage in the physical world. With early access to sneaker drops and other exclusive benefits.

02 – Brand

By creating Sneaker Heads, they are creating the foundation of their global brand. This project is the beginning of a whole Sneaker Heads ecosystem in the real world and digital world.

International brand identity.
Sneaker Heads streetwear brand, limited edition drops for holders.
Sneaker Heads holders will have access to exclusive drops on a regular basis. The clothing brand will be a key part of the Sneaker Heads ecosystem.
Hiring top-tier industry experts (Designers, fashion experts, C level executives).

03 – Sneaker Heads x Collaborations

At the heart of sneaker culture is collecting. Sneaker Heads will deliver this through limited-edition drops for holders in collaboration with world-renowned artists and brands. These limited-edition drops will range in rarities, some will be for every holder and some will be very limited paying homage to sneaker collecting culture and making collecting more special.

04 – Metaverse

Sneaker Heads is a brand that strives to be at the cutting edge of merging the digital and physical worlds. The metaverse is not just one place but it is an entire ecosystem that they will develop. They want to increase the experience of Sneaker Heads members through numerous metaverse utilities.

Virtual reality / augmented reality experiences
Metaverse wearable airdrop

Team

There is only available information on the two core team members of Sneaker Heads. There is likely to be more people working on the project, but limited information is available.

Artists

Ali Dawood is a 3D artist living in LA. He has been doing art for 22 years in a variety of forms, some of these being drawing, sculpting, dancing/breaking and 3D visualization. He studied architecture which has certainly contributed to his ability in 3D illustrations. With a passion for street culture and hip hop, Ali decided to create his first Sneaker Head piece which helped him make a name for himself in the industry. On Ali’s own website where he is described as a 3D generalist artist, we can see some of his previous work. It looks very clean, professional and well received. Ali does have LinkedIn, but does not appear to be very active there. Instead, he has gained a large audience of 78.3k followers on Twitter on his blue tick verified account. He also has 33.9k on Instagram. On both social media platforms, Ali receives good engagement on his posts.

Head Of Marketing and Core Team Member

The other team member for Sneaker Heads is called Fares Benouhiba. Looking at his LinkedIn, it appears that his resume and previous experience is stacked. He is also very active on LinkedIn which is a good sign. Fares is the CEO and founder at EMF Media, the first Snapchat ambassador in Europe as well as some other notable business ventures in the past. On Fares’s Twitter, he claims to be the proud owner of CloneX and Moonbirds NFTs, as well being involved with the 333 Club.

Collaborations

Browsing through Sneaker Heads Twitter feed, there are very few, if any, collaborations with other projects. The only like and retweet giveaways that they have conducted tend to be for themselves. This doesn’t mean that they do not collaborate with other projects, it may simply mean that they don’t like to retweet from the Sneaker Heads official Twitter page. Browsing Ali Dawood’s Twitter, we are able to see a few collaborations. The most notable collaboration is with mega hyped project Hape Beasts which launched earlier this year. Sneaker Heads has also collaborated with Rarity Sniper for a giveaway. Both reputable and big names in the space, Sneaker Heads have done a great job of selecting their collaborations carefully.

Marketing / Community

As mentioned above, Sneaker Heads has not participated in many obvious giveaways. Many projects currently spam excessive giveaways to inflate followers and engagement figures to project a false sense of popularity. The fact that Sneaker Heads has not done this, yet still has gained so much hype, means that the marketing is done very well. Fares is an expert marketer so this comes as no surprise. The main marketing methods that Sneaker Heads have appeared to use is showcasing their sneak peaks on Twitter. Engagement is incredibly high with many posts gaining thousands of likes and retweets.

There are many sneaker collectors and enthusiasts around the world, therefore Sneaker Heads have an existing wide target audience. Sneaker Heads has created a few pieces to look like famous celebrities in the hip hop industry. The most obvious ones are Kanye West and Travis Scott. By combining sneakers and hip hop together into a piece of art, there are a lot of people that it will appeal to. This is one reason why Sneaker Heads have managed to gain such a large following.

The Discord is very active, it appears that people are engaging in genuine conversation. Activity flows fluidly despite there being a 30 second cooldown timer. It is hard to tell whether some of these people are grinding for Whitelist as the project has yet to mint, or whether they are genuinely excited about the project. There is a large moderation team who ensure the Discord server is a pleasant space 24/7.

Analysis

Bullish case

Sneaker Heads is a mega hyped project in the NFT space presently. Almost everybody knows about the project, many anticipate that it will launch successfully. They boast 262.2k followers on Twitter, 35.4k followers on Instagram and have 69.7k members in their Discord. The art appears to be very professional, clean and well received. The combination of sneakers and hip hop is very appealing to a very broad target audience. Both core team members appear to have a lot of experience in their respective fields. In addition, development and progress so far has been very impressive and successful until now.

Given the amount of hype surrounding Sneaker Heads, it is likely that they will launch and become a highly successful project.

Reservations

There are a few potential concerns surrounding Sneaker Heads. As mentioned, a few of their sneak peaks resemble famous celebrities. In addition, a lot of the art looks to resemble famous trainers from brands such as Nike, Adidas and New Balance. It is unclear whether these are official partnerships where permission has been granted. Given the lack of information, it is very unlikely.

Creating art which looks like popular icons or well known trainers which might not actually be included in the collection is a marketing stunt – you could argue that Sneaker Heads has used FOMO and hype building tactics.

For those that have been in the NFT space for some time now, Sneaker Heads 3D art resembles many of those 3D artstyle projects which ended up as rug pulls a few months ago. For this reason, there may be a negative association for some people. However, the fact that the team is doxxed and everything looks to be going well so far, the WGMI team do not anticipate that Sneaker Heads will encounter many issues.