Top Podcasts
Wahid P. Chammas Of Faith Connexion - The Brand That Is Democratizing Fashion For Creators
Traditional brands have been far too exclusive. But Faith Connexion is democratizing fashion for creators backed by NFT technology. Today’s guest is Wahid Chammas, Chairman at Faith Tribe. The aim is to build the first fully decentralized collaborative creation and design of fashion pieces that the community owns. Faith allows independent designers and artists to add their own personalized touch. They can even create their own sub-brand under Faith! Do you want to take part in the democratization of fashion for creators? Dive in!
—
Listen to the podcast here
Wahid P. Chammas Of Faith Connexion – The Brand That Is Democratizing Fashion For Creators
Our sponsored spotlight episode features Wahid P Chammas, Chairman of Faith Tribe and Owner and Steward of the Faith Connexion brand. Wahid has worked in finance for 27 years, including meaningful contributions at Goldman Sachs and Janus Henderson. He owns a private equity firm. Here we are talking about Faith Connexion, which launched to critical acclaim and gain prominence under the artistic direction of Faith Tribe in 2015. It quickly became one of the leading and trendiest luxury streetwear brands. It has been regularly worn by influential celebrities like Kanye West, Beyoncé, and Rihanna.
Faith Connexion is working with a top-tier software development firm based in the US with experience in crypto and blockchain to design and develop the digital creative platform, Faith Tribe. The Faith Tribe platform embodies Faith Connexion’s culture of collaboration and community, an online marketplace and open-source platform that gives buyers easy access to production scale customization. It establishes a direct channel of communication with FC-approved creators, including designers and artists. Wahid, it’s a pleasure to have you here. We are excited.
So am I. Thank you for having me.
Amazing to have you in the boat here with us. Crazy background coming from a world of banking and finance, and then landing in the fashion world and now the world of NFTs. We are so curious, tell us about that journey and how Faith Connexion came to be.
As you noted, I did spend much of my whole life in finance. Several years ago, I started my own private equity firm and we own 37 different companies but 1/3 of them are in fashion and fashion tech. Faith Connexion is a brand. I have been a part of it for a while. It’s interesting because the question is not how I’ve got into fashion, but, “How I’ve got on the blockchain?”
It’s funny because I have done so much research and all the projects that you learn about, are great innovative ideas that came out of entrepreneurs, etc. This is different. This is a 21-year-old company that is now adopting the blockchain, which is a solution for its growth. It all happened when we were speaking about many different options of fundraising, etc. There were a bunch of blockchain luminaries that says, “You have something unique that ought to be tokenized.” That’s what led us now. I can’t wait to talk about it.
You are discussing a little bit about logistics, the business side of things, and getting into things. Can you tell us a little bit more about Faith Tribe and Faith Connexion, the ethos, and what’s going on there?
Since its inception, we have had a big bout of success. Our star designers built Balmain, Paco Rabanne, and this unreal brand that brought communities and art together, and celebrated independence and avant-gardism. Those are just words. What exactly is Faith? Many years ago, we innovated something called open-source fashion. How do I explain that? Think of Chanel, Prada, and Louis Vuitton, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? You think of luxury and exclusivity.
What we wanted to do is create luxury, high-end but create inclusivity. We are the only high-end brand that allows independent designers and artists to contribute to our fashion and be able to customize and individualize. Think that that was happening for 21 years but it wasn’t to last May and April 2021, finally, we were at the right place at the right time. Why? It’s because you had that huge boom in NFTs. It feels like years ago but it’s a year ago.
That’s when people were doing digital art, individualization, etc. That’s when our brand blew up. People said, “This is crazy. You’ve got a luxury brand with celebrities and people. You have dozens of independent designers and artists all over the world. How about we scale this to thousands?” We are not going to be able to scale this to thousands without the blockchain. It’s the right place at the right time, the right business model, history, and moment in time.
Frankly, the blockchain was a saving grace because it brought us capital in a time where I’m bitter because I own a lot of companies and Corona separated the haves and have nots. People say, “The Fed’s bailed out a lot of companies.” They helped a lot of big companies. Apple was able to borrow on a minus-50 basis. It’s ridiculous. A lot of these small successful global companies, brands, etc. didn’t get the help necessary, and yet the blockchain was there for us. We were different. We are not a new idea. We are an established company coming to you folks to grow.
What’s so interesting about that is I can relate a lot of it to Jeff, and my background in food tech and having worked with this decentralized network of chefs and how unique of a concept that was at the time, and then going into fashion ourselves and trying to co-brand with independent artists. There isn’t a formula for it. You guys broke new ground in a major way and created many opportunities for independent fashion designers that are normally hidden behind the curtain in the dressing room, so to speak.
Let me not give myself too much credit. It helps to have been doing it for many years and I can’t emphasize this enough because I see so many great projects out there, especially in the NFT space, saying, “We want to do this. We want to democratize this one. We want to democratize that.” Democratizing fashion has been in our blood for decades. The blockchain and having this presence now is allowing the scaling but it does help to have that background and that credibility.
People, especially in a bear market like today, I’m excited because the bear market is going to separate the folks that have the staying power from the folks that just get an idea, “Let me get a token out there. Let me boost this thing. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. It was fun along the way.” This is different. We are beholden to our investors. We are beholden to our company that is decades old. We are beholden to all our independent artists and designers that we worked with for years. We are going to onboard new ones but this community is something we have spent a long time building. It’s not going to be sacrificed.
Let’s get into some details here. You’ve got this FTRB token. What role does that play in the Faith Connexion ecosystem?
What is Faith Tribe? Faith Connexion always had a tribe. We always used to call the people the cool ones because what is Faith Connexion? It’s streetwear. It’s art. It’s the clothes that you would wear in hot couture all the way to Burning Man. It’s not pretentious. It’s art on clothes. What symbolizes the kind of person that wears it? It’s the person that wants to be part of a tribe. It’s not a person who wants to be part of a clique or a certain pretentious cutter of fashion. It’s someone who wants to be elegant, cheap but part of a tribe. It’s something that means something. That has always been part of our essence.
Fashion NFT: We’re the only high-end brand that allows independent designers and artists to contribute to our fashion.
We said, “How are we going to create this community for the community, for independent designers?” We called it Faith Tribe. A lot of people ask me, “Everything you are doing, can you just do it cash?” The answer is yes but number one, it’s not cool. Number two, having a token that unifies everyone creates an unbelievable community.
More importantly, if I’m getting someone in a rural place in Latin America or Vietnam, etc. having someone to be able to buy the token or use the token and get access to, day one, a design studio where they can create their own design. They go to the next step, Mint their own physical and digital NFT, and then go to the next step, say, “I would like to manufacture this physically, source tweed, leather, and manufacture in Italy and Portugal.”
Finally, use our marketing prowess and our influencers, and then settle on a global eCommerce marketplace, someplace like FARFETCH, for instance. All that is something that we are now bringing to the table. It’s so exciting for us because you couldn’t do that in the past. The model was you would send a resume, you may get a job somewhere, and then maybe 5 to 10 years later, someone will give you an opportunity to design something of your own.
Here, there are no more excuses. We are allowing entrepreneurs a chance to get fully scaled up as if they were part of a big company with resources and be able to create either a sub-brand under Faith Connexion or their own brand. That’s what Faith Tribe is. That’s what we are building. We are democratizing fashion.
A lot of people say, “That’s a dumb way. Do you realize that you are going to cannibalize your own brand?” We don’t care. That’s what Faith is. We know that maybe Prada, Chanel or whatever would never do that. We want to do that. If we can find mushrooming new brands, artists, and hidden gems, that’s part of the coolness of it. That’s what we are trying to do. It’s real-life stuff. The metaverse is huge. Everyone can participate in the metaverse to us but we believe in the combo. I can’t wait to talk more about it.
You mentioned the design side of the house and independent creators coming in and creating this collaboration. Could you tell us a little more about the designer studio side of things and how that plays into the NFT marketplace and other features of this project?
I’m going to answer in two parts. One, I’m going to talk about the evolution of technology, and then second, I’m going to talk about FTRB, the currency, and the fact that no one can use all these tools unless you are part of the Faith Tribe. The currency, the Faith Tribe, is our token and it has full utility. Let me go to the first thing. Jeff, have you built a house or know someone who built a house? You have an architect, correct?
Yes.
Years ago, you would make changes and your architect would come with a design and change things on a piece of paper, and then you give feedback and they would come back after one week. That’s changed. Now, you can build a house not just on the metaverse but building a house now is virtual. You use all the software to make all the changes, you architect, and in an instant, it can show you what the room will look like, and then ergo. It goes to the quantity surveyor and you build a house. It’s fast.
The same thing happened in fashion. It’s amazing. Now, we have a fully integrated system that we use where you create your own fashion design. Funny enough, people are talking about avatars. In the terrestrial fashion world, we use avatars because we used to use mannequins. We used to use what we call and pitch, virtual. We used to do all that. We do that but it’s far more efficient to create it virtually, and see what it looks like and size it, and then that model goes straight to the factory and we can create from that.
Solving big problems creates economic value for all stakeholders. Click To Tweet
Not only did we have the right idea but technology came at the right place at the right time, where you could go do your design studio, create the avatar, and that data goes straight to the manufacturer. We can create it for you because we have the factories and everything. That’s the great thing about Faith Connexion, the history, the presence. You could then pop that straight into the metaverse. I can’t wait to talk more about that. That’s a different discussion.
The real brands that have been succeeding in the metaverse are the ones that can do the digital prints. It exists in the metaverse and physically. I don’t know if I answered your question about the design studio but technology has picked up and we have access to all this. I have put together the greatest partnerships. My private equity firm has ownership. Remember I mentioned we have a lot of fashion companies and fashion tech companies. This vertically integrated ecosystem is cool.
A lot of people say, “Do you have competitors?” Funny enough, I have two types of competitors. I have the real-world competitors, the terrestrial world, the fashion brands that you know. They are doing their own NFTs but they are definitely not doing open-source design. Somebody says, “Do you have any open-source fashion competitors?” I said, “Yes, but they are all digital. No one is doing open-source fashion both digital and physical and that’s what’s cool.” I have tons of competitors where you go and you design your own clothes digitally but not one of them is fully integrated with factories, resource procurement, etc. For me, we want to empower the artists from soup to nuts.
You are doing this as a DAO, which is incredible. This token is the way that people transact on this clothing, either digital or physical. It’s a fully integrated solution from what I can tell.
I gave you 5 utilities but there are 3 others that I didn’t mention that make it truly unique. The five utilities I mentioned are, you use a design studio, make physical and digital NFTs and NFCs, which by the way, we use in the fashion industry now to fight counterfeit. We are all doing it. We have the tag, it’s digital, you scan it. A great company called Legitimate is a leader in that, partners of ours. We mark it and then we on-demand manufacture when we sell.
There are three other things that make the DAO unique. Number one, you could use our token to buy clothing from Faith Tribe and Faith Connexion. That token gets burned so the circulation supply goes down. I want to make this a big deal because I don’t want the token to just spread in a circular fashion as a payment token. Ultimately, it has to reach a dead end, which is we are creating value and designers creating clothes, and it ends up in your closet or on the metaverse. That token ultimately gets burned.
The second thing is if I’m about empowering artists and fashion designers, and I mentioned that in any country you can imagine, many of them don’t have the money to buy the token to use the tools to then make money. Investors who buy FTRB can stake it and that staking is used to lend to the artist. The artist doesn’t even need money to get started.
I look at some of these projects and it’s weird. You do staking and it’s the project giving you coins later. It’s like a Ponzi scheme. They see all these yields with us. The staking is going to be in order to lend to an artist. I have a dirty secret, which is that the fashion industry has 60% to 70% gross margins. It’s a highly profitable business. The startup capital to back a designer and an artist can create a lot of value for everyone.
Fashion NFT: We have a full-integrated system where you create your own fashion design.
Finally, that community is going to be useful, clearances and all this. Every savvy fashion lover loves clearances but the name of the game in clearances is you want to be the first because clearances suck when you get into the old inventory. You always want to be the first one right after the season to get the best. We are creating this community to be able to have fun with it, with that product and the utility of the whole thing. Investors are going to be able to make a ton of money because they are going to be able to lend people to make it in the business of fashion.
To get in a little bit of the specifics there, if somebody is staking their token, do they develop a direct connection with a creator in some way? Is that something that you plan to happen or could happen? Is it anonymous?
I’m getting that question a lot. That’s crazy. I’m going to tell you the truth. We haven’t done that yet. The idea is there’s a staking pool and then we manage the pool. I have gotten a lot of questions, “Can we do peer-to-peer matching?” It’s exciting. The whole notion of doing peer-to-peer matching like crowdsource funding, where the governance of the whole ecosystem picks a designer and the investor can bet on the designer, we can go there one day.
Let me answer the question a little bit differently, Eathan. I have noticed a lot of projects. I’m new to this. I’m new to your world. I have been doing fashion and investing for a long time but I’m new to the blockchain. They go after specific, unique problems and they solve them. Let me tell you why I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of spending too many resources doing what you said, although people have been telling me about it and maybe we do it. Maybe you can recommend someone to hire to do that peer-to-peer matching.
The fashion industry is $3 trillion. That doesn’t even include the metaverse, which people estimate could be $100 billion all the way to $1 trillion. Independent designers and fashion artists, that’s $400 billion to $450 billion. Those people are under-resourced, don’t have scale, don’t have access. If we took a 1% share of that, that’s $4 billion to $4.5 billion. Why am I saying this? It’s because peer-to-peer matching, staking, and all this are exciting but FTRB is going after the big behemoth when no one is going after them.
I want to solve the big problem because the big problem will create economic value for all our stakeholders. The whole idea of peer-to-peer matching is so revolutionary. Creating an OpenSea-like system for fashion where investors can pick and choose who to back and that whole NFT marketplace evolves. Ultimately, we are going to go there but we have so much low-hanging fruit to pick. I owe it to all our stakeholders to pick that fruit quickly.
A lot of readers are excited about working on ideas and projects, things that you are putting forth as possibilities. Can you give us any about how you handle some of this nitty-gritty of setting this stuff up, tackling tokenomics, deciding on a blockchain, and forming a partnership that would make this work?
Eathan, I’m going to answer that question with a lot of humility. I have been slapped in the face so hard because we boast about having a 21-year track record, a huge balance sheet, a presence in the marketplace, and relationships with the finest fashion tech companies. Many of them are going to be unicorns. Some are multibillion-dollar companies like the marketplaces. You come into this world and it’s different.
I’m lucky that we have 3 PR firms, 2 of them in the blockchain, Luna PR and IBC, and we have backers by NFT Tech. They taught me a lot about tokenomics. Let me give you the good news. The tokenomics have become extremely typical. It’s a tight float. It’s closely guarded. People like the limited supply of five billion tokens but we are floating a small amount.
Come in with humility and be honored to be part of your community. Click To Tweet
I belong to a different part of the world where I talk to you about $3 trillion and going after $400 billion and trying to get any share of that. You create a multibillion-dollar enterprise and you create real economic value. I find that the people are so focused on tokenomics and all this in the near term, and then they say, “You’ve got to get X VC firm on your roster.”
I have amazing private equity backers, guys with 10, 15, 20 years of track record, a huge AUMs, and yet people say, “That doesn’t count. You need the crypto guy. You need the person that knows that name.” You ask, “How long has that name been in business?” “A year or two years.” “What’s the track record?” “If they invest, how long will they last?” “One year.”
Go ahead. Let’s go.
Honestly, a chocolate bar. I like chocolate.
Back then, it was real milk.
Did you give her a good interest rate?
I heard we are all invited.
It was great. Thank you, guys. It was awesome.