Bugatti × Asprey

Ali Walker, a designer and creative leader at Asprey Studio, contacted me directly on LinkedIn. The project was Bugatti × Asprey: two heritage houses preparing a collection that joined a physical sculpture to an NFT.

The brief asked for a lot at once. Help the team understand NFTs and Web3. Imagine what the Bugatti × Asprey opportunity could be in that world. Build the Web3 and NFT strategy. Find and win collectors and a community. Launch and market the drop. And do all of it without cheapening the heritage of either house.

The last requirement was the real one. Bugatti and Asprey arrive in Web3 with names that carry enormous weight in their own world. Native digital collectors do not defer to that weight. They have their own codes and their own status markers, and they recognise very quickly a brand that arrives as a tourist: a drop announced from outside, priced for prestige, with nobody inside the community who already believes in it.

A heritage collector needs the object to carry the house’s standards. A digital collector needs to understand the ownership and the people around it. The launch had to speak to both through the object itself, rather than borrow the vocabulary of another NFT drop.

I built the narrative and storytelling for a Web3 audience: how the drop should speak to collectors who know the Bugatti and Asprey names but look first at the object, its scarcity and the people around it. The story had to explain why these two houses belonged in that culture, in the language of that culture, without apologising for being luxury houses.

I built the collector and community strategy and chose the target communities. I brought in partners and providers through introductions. I set the launch calendar and the activation sequence. In January 2022, with Juliana Cossa, I laid out for Ali the social content, the conversations to open and the order of the launch communication, so that the right people heard about the drop in the right order.

The work ran through people. I introduced collectors, including major NFT collectors, to the project. I activated the Bored Ape Yacht Club and other communities I belonged to, and introduced the Web3 voices those communities listened to.

Buyers I introduced bought into the collection, and the communities I activated brought further sales. The pace of sales picked up, and important collectors entered the project’s circle.

The sculpture and its linked digital object were the collaboration’s own. Asprey Studio, with Ali Walker leading the creative direction, designed the concept, and the rarity, pricing and supply were set by the project. My work sat around the object: the story, the collectors and the order of the launch.

In July 2022, Bugatti announced that the collection’s 261 smaller silver sculptures, each linked to an NFT, had sold out.

The sell-out belongs to the houses and their team. My part was making sure the people who decide in Web3 heard about the collection from inside their own communities, from people they already trusted, in the right order.