VINTAGE DAO launches January 1st, 2022, as the breath of fresh air the vintage community has been looking for. In this post, you'll read about how vintage has gotten to the state that it is currently in, and how VINTAGE DAO can be a home for everyone looking for direction.
Welcome. What a two years it has been for not only the world, but for the vintage community as a whole. Congratulations on making it through, regardless of your circumstances, we all went through a lot personally. We've also seen a lot of growth from the first Virtual Flea weekend in March 2020 (which I'm proud to have been a vendor for) to where we are today. Auctions weren't even a thing for the first weekend or two back then! The year of 2020 was unprecedented for vintage due to everyone being stuck at home during the pandemic, and also getting stimulus checks. Not being able to spend money or time outside, we were all searching for that dopamine hit, and nostalgia was the answer. We saw shirts selling for upwards of $6,000, hundred of people tuning into the few Instagram Lives that were running auctions, and everything was actually going pretty well for vintage.
Fast forward to mid 2021 and whenever you log in, you're bound to see 15-20+ people you follow who are live running auctions. The vintage game has become extremely saturated, and without a stimulus check this year for most people, there wasn't extra money to be spent on clothing. On top of that, covid restrictions began being lifted, and more people were comfortable going back outside and living life. With the combination of less money in peoples pockets, more opportunity to spend their time doing things outside of social media, and people who bought the top on a lot of expensive shirts, we began to see prices start falling.
We've also seen a rise in 'bootleg' shirts being made, some that closely mimic vintage tees and others that were more unique designs. This rise in 'bootleg' shirts being made has played a role in further reducing the prices of the more expensive shirts, as would-be buyers now had a much cheaper alternative to that cool shirt they've been really wanting. It also reduced the price of 'mid' because the modern boots are priced in the same range as most 'mids'. For the people who aren't as interested in the vintage aspect of the shirt and what that represents (quality, environmentally friendly, history), modern 'bootleg' shirts offer what they are looking for: a cool design at an affordable price.
All of these forces combined have put vintage in a weird spot, everyone is talking about the state of vintage privately but nobody has any ideas of how to fix it. There have been a few in-person events thrown during 2021 with varying degrees of success, but the lack of community input into some of the events caused a major gap in the expectations and reality of what happened.
“When you lead from the back no one gets left behind. A community organization that takes the input of every individual inside of it flips the traditional hierarchy of businesses upside, and will have the most benefit for everyone involved as opposed to just those at the top.”
Enter VINTAGE DAO
What if the vintage community had a dollar value attached to it, and every member in the community owned a piece? Would this force it to be held to a higher standard and spur innovation?
Picture this, a system to organize people who don't know each other from around the world, where members make all the rules, while each member can remain anonymous should they choose to. Well, that system has been created mainly in the last 6 months via the crypto community in the form of a DAO. DAO stands for:
Decentralized
Autonomous
Organization
With VINTAGE DAO, community members in the vintage space can have actual fiscal ownership over the progress they are helping the industry achieve. By owning the VINTAGE DAO's native token, $VTG, you will actively participate in everything the VINTAGE DAO does. Your tokens represent your voting rights, as well as claims to future revenue streams generated by the VINTAGE DAO. Members of the DAO use the internet (Discord group) to organize all their efforts.
$VTG Coming March 2022
In order to join the Vintage DAO, you will need to purchase 25,000 $VTG tokens. $VTG is the currency of the DAO. Unlike traditional 'membership dues'. this purchase of the 25,000 $VTG tokens only needs to be made once, and it will last you your entire lifetime. On top of that, as a token holder you will appreciate in the increase in value of the token, which is based on the amount of value the DAO is providing you as a member.
Think about a gym membership for example, you pay a certain amount monthly for that. But then your gym builds a new building and offers new services, so they increase the cost of the membership on you. Plus, you're not making any money by the financial increase in value the gym is now worth by adding those new improvements. So now you just need to pay more money monthly to be a member at the same place you were a month ago at a different price.
Within a DAO, that paradigm is flipped upside down. DAO's make membership an asset. The price of a 'gym membership' is replaced by a token cost. You actually own your membership in the DAO, and can theoretically buy/sell that ownership at any time. But because you own it, you participate in the increase in value of the DAO as it grows in value. When that 'new building' gets built by the DAO (in Vintage DAO's case, an example would be hosting lives event down the road), the dollar value of the $VTG token goes up in value. And because you truly own that membership, the value of your membership goes up in value too.
Closing Notes
2022 is going to be the year of change. Covid has made people very independent, but mentally it has taken its toll on everyone. People are beginning to look for new ways to interact with each other and grow together. It's been a long road that many of us have fought alone, but VINTAGE DAO is a community lead effort where you can achieve your goals via a collective of like-minded individuals. It is also meant to help people safely start to interact with the world of crypto. There will be lots of questions, please don't hesitate to ask, and we look forward to growing together in 2022.