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Danielle Barich Of H3NSY — Hennessy’s Web3 Platform Where Creators And Communities Can Blend
Is it even possible to build a solid Web3 presence without launching a single NFT? That is exactly what H3NSY did. This is one of the first brands to launch a sub-brand of Web3 from its main brand without a big drop attached to it. The brand’s Web3 development director, Danielle Barich joins the show to tell us more. H3NSY is a Web3 platform where creators and communities can blend and connect over a shared pursuit of innovation, collaboration, and culture. It is an intriguing digital ecosystem spun off from the iconic brand Hennessy. With their latest project revolving around their exclusive membership community, Café 11, H3NSY is set to broaden its horizons previously reserved for celebrity partners. Hennessy now aims to leverage this community to further spur the creative process. Join in and dive into this fascinating digital world with Danielle!
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Danielle Barich Of H3NSY — Hennessy’s Web3 Platform Where Creators And Communities Can Blend
This is Danielle Barich of H3NSY, the Web3 platform where creators and communities can blend and connect over a shared pursuit of innovation, collaboration, and culture. I am here on the Edge of NFT, so cheers and enjoy another fine episode aged to perfection. Please drink responsibly and keep tuning in.
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Stay tuned for this episode to learn why H3NSY has done an incredible job of developing their Web3 presence without even launching an NFT, how our guest finds a way to keep her grandmother always close to her heart, and how Louis Vuitton is entering Web3 in a major way as its most authentic self packaged into a highly sought after and not an inexpensive NFT treasure trunk. All this and more on this episode.
Before we move on, don’t forget that our Outer Edge LA event returned to Los Angeles from March 20 through 23, 2023. You can now catch up on all the discussions, presentations and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live and registering with your email address. You’ll have access to over 60 captivating conversations and performances. Binge-watchers are welcome. Netflix, watch out. We’ll see you inside.
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This episode features Danielle Barich from H3NSY, an intriguing digital ecosystem spun off from the iconic brand Hennessy. She is Hennessy’s Web3 development director and has spent more than a decade in the luxury event industry owning her strategist skills to craft unique sensory experiences that resonate with each brand story. In 2021, she began experimenting with Web3 and took a contract role with Ledger. She was working in communications at Ledger and notably on their launch of The Sandbox Ledgerverse. Danielle saw an opportunity to connect her experience in brand strategy with luxury brands and this new Web3 technology, ultimately leading her to her current role with Hennessy.
H3NSY is Hennessy’s vibrant Web3 platform designed as a melting pot for creators and communities to come together in a shared pursuit of innovation, collaboration, and culture. With their latest project revolving around their exclusive membership community, Café 11, H3NSY is set to broaden its horizons previously reserved for celebrity partners. Hennessy now aims to leverage this community to further spur the creative process. Join us as we’re going to dive into this fascinating digital world with Danielle. Welcome to the Edge of NFT.
Thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here.
We’re thrilled to have you. I guess you just got back to Paris from NFT Lisbon.
I flew in on Saturday and before that, a few weeks ago, it was NFT NYC. I feel like I’m making all the rounds across the world to these different conferences and it’s been great.
We’ll have you over to LA sooner than later. We got a lot of fun events cooking, but it’s been for good reasons that you’ve been doing the tour. H3 for short, Hennessy’s Web3 hangout spot is where you’ve blended together creators and communities from all over the world to mix and mingle over shared interests like innovation culture. Certainly, Hennessy has been a very culturally significant brand. I’m curious about the backstory of this project, how it got started, and what else it’s all about.
Our Web3 journey began with our CEO, Laurent Boillot. He has always been a leader in innovation for the brand and progressing through many cultures of the world. Web3 has become a new subculture, culture, or however you want to define it. Before I was with the company in 2021, he reached out to Ian Rogers, CXO of Ledger and formerly Chief Digital Officer of LVMH at one point. He asked who was a great partner for Hennessy to enter this space. One of the names was Trevor McFedries of Friends with Benefits, and that might be a great fit.
Long story, lots of conversations there, and this idea of Café 11 came to fruition. It’s this idea of mixing 1920s cafe culture across New York and Paris, and then with the 11 being 11:00 AM when our master blender and the tasting committee tasted their eaux-de-vie every day. It’s a very significant time of the day in Cognac. That was born. We launched the project in November 2022. How this relates to H3 is it didn’t do as well as we thought. The biggest feedback we got in Discord was that the market had changed. We were surprised, as the 250-year-old Cognac brand, everyone trusts us in Web2. They know they are going to experience quality. They know that our Cognac is the best in the world.
In Web3, shockingly, we didn’t have that same trust and clout. With many brands with a lot of empty promises, there were a lot of those feelings in the community. There were a lot of questions about our comms plan. They didn’t see enough communication around it and asked about our commitment to the space. That was a great learning for us and we took that feedback back to our teams here in Paris and suggested if we are serious about entering Web3, we need to start a community first. Like we’ve done in many other aspects of our business in Web2, we need to create a space where we can have ongoing conversations with thought leaders and different communities in the space.
We need to have an area we can launch and talk about the projects we’re doing like BlockBar, which we launched in 2022 as well, and then have socials where we can meet and discuss with our community, grow new ideas, and co-create before we’re launching more projects. In February, we launched the first phase of H3 with our Twitter and Discord as a way to start meeting and communicating with our Café 11 holders and also new community members. We’re looking at what phase two is going to look like.
I love that you all went down the rabbit hole, did this customer discovery, and were humble enough to listen, learn, and recognize the importance of community first. I guess it would’ve surprised me too if I was in your shoes because you deliver on your promises. In a space like ours, the importance of that is even more now than ever before, given the mixed history and space where we’ve had some incredibly high-value and high-utility projects and some projects that have taken the air out of the room.
We have a way that our comms work. We’re a huge brand. We have many sub-brands within that. We have different types of cognac we call brands. As all these different projects are launching, we have one with Alicia Keys in Web2. We have had many projects over the years with different celebrities and artists. We often are moving through much of that quickly that our comms get 2 to 3 weeks to talk about that campaign, and then we move on.
When we approached Web3, because it was mixed in with all of this master brand and all of our other projects, it got that short window. What we realized was that was too quick. We needed to build more conversations, get in there, and understand the community more. We’re one of the first brands who’ve launched a sub-brand of Web3 from our main brand without a big drop attached to it.
H3NSY: Hennessey is one of the first brands to launch a sub-brand of Web3 from its main brand without a big drop attached to it.
When we announced H3NSY, many people flocked toward Discord asking when is the drop. We kept copying and pasting the same answer, “We’re not doing that right now. We’re here to learn and do fun things. Everything we’re doing in 2023 is a community first. Do not expect some big extensive drop from us right now. We just want to learn and have fun.” So far, that’s what we’ve been doing. It’s working well. It has been a lot of fun and has a lot less pressure. We’ve learned much to lead us to new and exciting projects that hopefully will come in 2024.
It’s one of those secrets lying in plain sight that’s been around for several years. You just need to talk to the clientele and have some conversations. Given all of your contexts here and what you’re seeing right now, we’re looking at luxury digital assets coming in the future of Web3. We’ve seen some already hit the stage. It’s going to evolve in its own way. There are going to be some borrowings from the past. There are going to be some innovations in the future.
How do you see the evolution of luxury branding into Web3? What kind of challenges and opportunities do you see in the metaverse for example? I don’t know how much significance there is, but for those that are tuning in, we’ve got a fun background over there. It looks almost metaverse-y. I also see a present on the floor, which is very tempting to be like, “Do we know what’s inside that box?” Let’s talk about the metaverse, Web3, and this luxury digital realm.
We’re not going to call it Web3 for that much longer. At the end of the day, everyone in this space is looking for more mass adoption. It helps us all when more and more people start adopting wallets, investing in cryptocurrency or NFTs, and other digital assets. That responsibility falls to big brands. You have the trust of millions of people across global markets. They can influence and use that trust to show the mass market new innovations and new technologies. That’s going to be the responsibility of a lot of the brands at LVMH, including Hennessy.
With that, there’s this fear in the word NFT because it’s linked to cryptocurrency. There’s a lot of negativity surrounding it in the media and the mass market. As soon as people see those three letters, if you’re not in the space, you’re a little nervous, “Is that for me?” I think more luxury brands will start adopting the technology but not using the three letters NFT or the word Web3. They’ll use the technology and hide it under more Web2 terminologies so that people get the benefits of it without knowing what they’re interacting with. It’s similar to maybe how you use your credit card and no one knows what goes on when you tap that.
For luxury brands, it’s giving a new meeting to authenticity and ownership. Luxury brands have always been about owning something that says a lot about you that adds to your identity, having something of value, and also proving authenticity. Right now, you buy a luxury handbag and you receive a little plastic card that has a serial number on it. That’s the proof that this is real and that you own it. You can lose or destroy it. It’s not permanent.
Using blockchain and tokens as proof of ownership or proof of authenticity is going to be a huge part of the luxury market going forward. When you buy a handbag, that’s what you’re going to get from now on. It’s like a digital passport or receipt in some ways that is going to be linked to the blockchain and prove that you own it, and then link it to the secondary markets, which I think is a whole new evolving industry for luxury right now.
I also think it’s a new way of decentralizing purchasing. To give you an example, in Hennessy, we launched our H8 bottles in January 2022. There were two bottles out of 250 to celebrate our 250th anniversary. The two bottles were released on BlockBar for about $250,000 each. This was the first time that a bottle of that caliber was released to the public. Typically, the bottles in our rare edition collection are only released in our private apartment to a very select VIP clientele. This was the first time that it was open to everyone, and in a way that a DAO could purchase it who purchased both bottles. That’s also going to be an interesting way of opening up luxury markets to more consumers.
I love all of that. I was in a discussion last week during LA Tech Week about what is going to move the needle in terms of mass adoption. My point was similar to yours. I think it has to be brands and a language that relates to the everyday consumer. To your point, verifiable digital ownership and the connection between the digital side and the physical side of your product is a fantastic use case and something that other brands can emulate as well. You talked about the community being the secret sauce for an approach to H3 and building that community online. What’s brewing in the Café 11 community? What are those conversations like and what are the plans for those conversations moving forward?
It’s been an exciting community. It’s smaller than we projected, but that ends up being the silver lining. We have our Hennessy OGs or our Hennessy Lab, as sometimes I call them unofficially because they’ve been this community that we can test and learn with, share new ideas, and offer new access to the brand that we’ve never done before. We threw our inaugural event in Art Basel in December 2022, where all holders were welcome for an amazing twelve-hour event with panels, food, discussions, and a great after-party as well. That was successful.
We launched a second one in Lisbon. Holders were welcome to attend. We also surprised all of our holders with a gifted NFT from a street artist who also does digital collectibles. That’s something we love to do. The big piece was we thought, “How do we give co-creation to our community?” For years, we’ve done collaborations with artists and celebrities. We did one with Kim Jones, and how we can give our community the power to design a bottle that they’re going to consume to be able to interact with the brand in a way that has never been done before by any luxury spirits brand.
We’re working on a Café 11 bottle. Our community was given a brief on what this project would be. The first step was voting on the artist that they wanted to choose. We pre-selected some artists. One is the original artist who did the NFT, should they want to continue that aesthetic and throughline. We also proposed to other artists more in the generative art and NFT space. The community voted to continue with the aesthetic of John who did the NFT design.
They’ll be working with him in Discord to share ideas and what they like to see. He’s going to figure out his creative process of what information he wants to take from each person, and how he can create that into a piece of art that’ll then go on the bottle and on the box. Once this art is validated by the community and also our legal teams to be sure that it’s within regulation, those bottles will be available on BlockBar to exclusive Café 11 holders. It is a gift with their membership from purchasing that in November, and something that they get to design. They’ll be the only people that have it. It’s an exciting project.
It’s a great example of bringing that digital community to the physical world. How many Café 11 holders are there?
It’s 484.
That’s going to be special for them.
We love that we get to partner with BlockBar. How that will work is it’ll be token dated. You have to connect your wallet and show a case that you have the NFT. If you have multiple, you can claim multiple bottles. Essentially you mint a free NFT that’s the 3D form of the bottle. You hold onto that while the bottle is being produced.
What’s also exciting about this project is typically a partnership. It’s about a two-year lead time on a bottle being redesigned. In this case, we’re able to push it to one year or even less by the time the design is done. What Web3 technology allows us to do is also we can pre-gift the bottle while the slower process of the bottle design is happening. Once the bottle is ready, you can redeem and burn the NFT we gave you to redeem and ship your bottle to your home. It is a cool process that before Web3, we did not have the option to do.
Nothing like a nice bottle of Hennessy to get in the mail. I’m sure it’s wrapped very nicely. There’s something about that packaging that makes you feel special. When you’re looking through Web3, back to this luxury lens, are you looking around at other projects in the market that you think are worth to double-take on that you should check out where you’re inspired by?
A project that I was inspired by is on hold, from what I know. I’m disappointed because I want to see what happens. It is the Byredo-RTFKT collaboration. That was something announced in June or July 2022. Byredo, the perfume brand teamed up with RTFKT. They were doing these auras where fragrance is connected with a personality. Your CloneX could choose a mixture of their personality. It created this aura around them, but then that signified a mixture of fragrances, and then you would get the actual perfume that was mixed with all the auras you chose. I thought that was interesting.
I come from a background of a lot more sensorial marketing and brands. That’s what also attracted me to Hennessy. It is a real-life product that you have. You taste it and it has notes. The fragrance has a lot of that too. That’s what interests me. How do you take a product that you essentially need to enjoy in real life? How do you add a digital storytelling element to it? How do you bring it into Web3 without ruining the essence of the product and the brand?
I thought that was an interesting approach. From what I know, it’s still on hold. I don’t have a CloneX, but I ask friends of mine who do. I think there are a lot of similar questions in the Discord and community asking when. That’s one I’m very curious about. We’ve all been watching what Starbucks, Nike, and Adidas are up to as a large brands as well. What they’re doing in more of a membership space is interesting.
In Starbucks, they didn’t use a lot of Web3 terminology. Being one of the first to not go down the hard NFT road to sell out their project was something that intrigued me. It’s something I paid close attention to. It’s no secret that Web3 loyalty is a huge topic right now along with AI. Cracking that in the luxury space is a tricky thing to do without it cheapening your brand. We’re not Air Miles here. No one buys an Hermès bag with Air Miles. Finding ways to connect those two worlds in luxury space will be interesting. I haven’t seen anyone doing it quite yet.
The perfume one reminded me of the hot sauce pepper party. This was a while ago. Our friend put it out there. He did something similar to what you’re talking about perfumes where you could have these different hot sauces with all these different combinations of things. You could buy the NFT and then get the hot sauce. Josh got one of the hot sauces to enjoy on a lobster roll.
We had another episode with a company that was selling lobster as an NFT membership. I had to create a new type of lobster roll. I used the hot sauce. I induced the accidental collaboration there. To your point, Danielle, I was having another recent conversation with someone about the entertainment space. We realized that there are a lot of analogies for what you’re dealing with in the senses and the core space with all types of band engagement.
Distilling.
How long does it take to make a typical Cognac?
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Yes.
Is that still in your collection?
What is the most recent thing you purchased?
Can you say what you minted? Is that allowed?
What is the most recent thing you sold?
Selling your passion. That’s great.
What did you do before joining us on the show?
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Let’s see what we got going on there.
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