Selling his art through NFTs | Local Business

The future for artists and Caribbean creatives lies in their ability to create and market non-fungible tokens (NFTs). That’s the view of creative director of Back Yard Design Company, Nicholas Huggins.

What is an NFT?

An NFT is a digital certificate of authenticity and ownership that can apply to art, music, or a virtual product or an experience in the digital world, the metaverse.

What makes an NFT unique?

It can only be acquired by cryptocurrency from a digital wallet. That purchase will now be part of the blockchain.

The Port of Spain based Huggins, 31, is now selling his third collection of digital art as NFTs.

After dabbling in one-off NFT pieces, he launched his first collection, “Carnival Metavendors”, in November 2021. It was quickly followed by “Head of House”, a 25-piece Caribbean-inspired collection. Only five pieces are unsold.

Last Friday, he launched his third 36 piece-collection “Portraits of Paradise” on the platform Open Sea.

In an interview with Express Business, Huggins explained that running his agency and creating NFTs were two separate jobs.

But being first to market had gains.

He observed that his friend, Sekani Solomon, who works at Cash App and who he graduated alongside at the Georgia-based, Savannah College of Art and Design, was the first person he personally knew who sold NFTs in 2021.

But it was his other friends, Stephen Hadeed Jr and Stephanie Telemaque, who engaged him about getting into the NFT space given the body of illustrated work he had built out over the last eight years, which he primarily sold on Instagram.

At the time, he was working on a series called the “Caribbean Architectural Alphabet”, which were letters A to Z and then the numbers 0-9.

“I took those 36 pieces, and put them together as one piece, which I sold as a print and I sold like 50 prints in a week. It was a limited edition. And I said cool, this could be my first NFT. So in May 2021, that’s when I minted my first NFT on a platform called Foundation,” he recalled.

To mint, is to create the artwork on the blockchain.

He basically forgot about it until five months later, he received an email that someone had placed a bid on the art.

“How it works is you set a price, which is the minimum that someone can bid. And when that person bids, then a 24-hour auction starts and more people can bid,” he said.

He said he received about six bids but it was the person who initiated the bid who ended up acquiring the art, which worked out at US$800 value in the cryptocurrency, Ethereum.

It was after this first sale that Huggins said he took a deep dive and spent up to 70 hours in the month of October 2021 researching NFTs.

In his second collection, he wanted to keep it Caribbean-centric.

“In all my art I like to showcase where I’m from and showcase the Caribbean in general and T&T in particular,” he said.

His “Portraits of Paradise” collection is valued at US$200 each in Ethereum equivalent.

“And basically what I’m doing is, I’m also going to sell prints of each piece. So if you own one of the pieces, for each print that sells your piece, you get 50 per cent of the profits. So if you put out US$200, I think once 15 prints sell off your piece, you would have basically earned your money back,” he said.

He said he copied this idea from Jamaican artist, Bonito, who gives 50 per cent of the profits of his prints to his collections.

This, said Huggins, builds community.

“If you buy a painting from an artist, that artist could go and sell prints. If they sell prints of that painting, you don’t get any monetary reward. What you do get is the notoriety of owning the original painting of which a lot of people own those prints, which then raises the value of your piece,” he explained.

What is the value of an NFT as opposed to an actual piece of art?

“In the NFT space, there’s a lot of talk about utility. That could be early access to different launches. For me, when I sell my one-on-one pieces, someone also gets a physical print of the piece. So there’s a lot of different aspects of utility involved in the NFT space that’s kind of different from traditional art. That’s also something else for the artists to consider. And that’s where I think people who are already in the space kind of can help advise you on how you could position yourself in terms of utility,” he explained.

Apart from selling NFTs, Huggins also acquires them. He invested in a Woman Rise project which has now doubled in value.

The best NFT advice he received?

“If you’re buying NFT’s, buy three- one to resell to cover the cost of the three, one to resell a bit later on and when the price goes way higher and and you want to kind of just hold for yourself, right? So if you kind of follow that, it’s really interesting,” he said.

In his view, the future is NFTs.

All it requires is a smartphone and Wi-Fi.

“I see this as the end of the days for like the struggling artist. This is like breathing fresh air into allowing different artists or whoever anywhere in the world to sell digital products to anyone else in the world without having to worry about how they are going to receive this money. This basically solves all these problems,” he said.

The NFT community

Internationally, designers and food companies are getting into NFTs.

Now, Huggins is a part of a community which is trying to onboard more Caribbean artists to have a Caribbean space in the NFT world.

He observed that there are several people doing work in the NFT space in T&T, among them Mark Pereira of Zed Labs and fashion designer Anya Ayong-Chee.

“It is definitely the best time to get into the space because there’s not that many people in it. So you could position yourself as a leader in the space if you start now. Right now, similar to what Steven and Stephanie did for me, I’m trying to onboard more artists into the space. For instance, Walt Lovelace who I do a lot of work with, he just released a photography collection on Open Sea, which is one of the platforms. So it’s just about doing that.

“And then I’m also part of a small group of people and we’re trying to set up this thing that can basically house all the Caribbean collections in one place. Obviously stronger together. So all the Caribbean collections are together, we could then market these collections to people who maybe don’t have a big social media following or whatever,” he explained.

He expects that locally, advertising agencies will soon begin marketing NFTs for companies.

“I’ve spoken to a few advertising agencies to plant the seed. And I mean, whoever does it first will have that bragging rights of “Oh, we did this. We did this first regionally or we did this first in T&T. I think it’s only a matter of time. I would say though, like my recommendation to any corporation or company that is trying to get into it, if you need to understand the culture and it can’t come off as money grab. It can’t be like,” Oh, we’re just doing this to make a ton of money.” It has to be community driven. That’s the whole ethos of the NFT space,” he said.