The advent of Web3 has brought about a transformative shift in the way creators and organizations engage with the digital landscape. Ewen Cameron, founder of Berlin Cameron shares the story behind the GORJS beauty creator DAO.

Working with creators

This article is part of a series of articles from the WARC Guide to working with creators.

Throughout history, the concept of beauty has captivated the imagination of artists and writers; what we consider ‘beauty’ has often been a defining element shaping culture itself. In ancient Greece, beauty was defined in the balance and symmetry of an object, particularly the human face. In Renaissance Italy, beauty transcended mere physical appearance, capturing the essence of intellectual and spiritual refinement. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beauty was often expressed in abstract or symbolic forms, designed to challenge traditional ideas and inspire or provoke us to probe for deeper emotional and psychological significance. Which brings us to today, the era of social media when beauty seems to be defined by ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ on platforms such as Instagram, and every selfie is a testament to the might of the ‘filter gods’. One could argue, and the NYX Professional Makeup brand certainly felt this way, that beauty has become too predictable and subject to conformist norms.

The NYX brand is committed to celebrating the diversity of what humans think of as beauty and empowering marginalized voices to inspire an inclusive vision of beauty, so we turned to the place where anything is possible: the metaverse. In the metaverse, the limits of inherited good looks – or of any of the physical characteristics we normally consider part of beauty such as height and body type – simply don’t apply. Instead, the only limits are those of creativity and imagination. In the metaverse, users are free to create and customize avatars and environments that reflect their ideas, their aesthetic sensibilities, even their fantasies. Traditional barriers or prejudices such as race, gender, age and wealth don’t matter. This fosters an environment where beauty can be redefined in radically more inclusive and diverse terms. Beyond that, the immersive nature of the metaverse means that new ideas aren’t just viewed or appreciated, they are experienced and deeply felt, creating the potential for new expressions of beauty to break through and capture our collective imagination.

With the growth of the metaverse, a vibrant community of artists started to emerge, harnessing the expressive power of 3D design to create avatars free of physical properties – bending, shaping and fabricating creatures that stretched the very definition of human likeness. For a company like NYX, this was an opportunity to once again lead the conversation about beauty. But to do so in a meaningful way, the brand had to be a credible part of the emerging culture. This is when the GORJS DAO was born.

The advent of Web3, of which the metaverse is the most prominent expression, has brought about a transformative shift in the way creators and organizations engage with the digital landscape. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have emerged as a key component of this transition, offering a fresh and innovative approach to collaborative decision-making and resource management as creators explore new avenues for building and monetizing their work. In the Web3 world, creators demand a voice in directing their projects and equitable participation in financial structures and, most importantly, they seek out communities that share their vision and can further their projects’ reach and effectiveness.

GORJS is the first creator DAO designed to build a vibrant community dedicated to answering the question, “What is beauty when there are no physical or genetic limits?”. GORJS DAO essentially puts creative and financial control in the hands of the artists and investors who support the vision through nonfungible tokens, enabling them to vote and fund projects and participate in financial success.


Launched in February 2023 in the midst of a crypto winter when NFT sales of iconic brands such as Porsche had failed, GORJS sold out in under four minutes, demonstrating the excitement of the Web3 community for our vision.

But our launch was just the start. GORJS’s vision is to give voice to the vastly diverse and inclusive ideas that blur and bend the lines between imagination and reality, empowering previously marginalized creators via the power of grants from the DAO. Therefore, the first act of the DAO was to commission a group of nine artists we collectively call Team Alpha to create our first collection celebrating this unique vision. At the end of April, our first collection dropped, offering consumers the opportunity to mint from the collection of 5,000 original avatars that stretch the concept of beauty. From there the avatars will come with additional utilities such as interoperable in-game usage, as well as a partnership with Hologram to enable holders to use their new avatars in social media and conference platforms like Zoom and Teams.

NFTs

NFTs

We look forward to an avatar drop as successful as the original launch of the DAO, but, more importantly, we look forward to a metaverse where ideas about identity and beauty are freely explored, where the human capacity for creativity is unleashed to imagine a world beyond human and express ideas about beauty that will enlarge the concept. We anticipate that GORJS DAO will continue to fund artists from a profoundly inclusive and diverse perspective and, in its own way, help create a metaverse that is inclusive, inspiring, and, above all, GORJS.

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