I know what you’re thinking – every tech company has t-shirts and hoodies to spare, boxes of branded merch in storage waiting for a conference, or any opportunity to distribute it hand and foot. So why is this any different?
Infobip’s handed out our fair share of those, but this time, our Chief Developer Experience Officer Ivan Burazin decided to flip the script and create a limited-edition street fashion line. Why? Because everything else just wasn’t good enough:
Creating brand awareness through traditional methods, such as billboards, and banners, is not a good enough return on investment, at least for us. It is necessary to surprise the market.
The surprise element certainly seemed to be there when Vetements partnered with none other than DHL, Lego did a collab with Levis, and when Ikea launched its fashion line. Why should Infobip, a pioneering tech company, be any less brave than a delivery service or a furniture store?
Since that’s just not in our blood or our brand book, we went ahead to create a fashion line catering to devs and tech aficionados. Starting with a tech-enabled hoodie that won’t end up in a pile of gym clothes:
Advertising clothes usually end up in the gym or similar. They are purely functional. Because of that, we set out to make a hoodie that people will wear with pride.
The hoodies you see are a result of over a year of creative talks and experimentation between up-and-coming artist, Joshua Cirjak, and Infobip’s CDXO Ivan.
They sport an NFC tag that turns the hoodie into an NFT, and can be accessorized with 59 custom pins, one for each country where Infobip has an office. Collecting them all will take you around the globe so there is a gamification element as well – not to mention the flex that comes with casually showcasing all the places you’ve traveled to.
A dash on NFT, a pinch of Disneyland, a splash of rock
Joshua Cirjak, founder of IUTD Studios and a gifted designer, proved to be a perfect fit for this collaboration. Young, playful, lover of all things tech, he played around with different design processes, from turning Infobips logo into binary code to distorting the logo in a scanner. The result of the former method ended up featured across the chest of Infobip’s designer hoodie:
I’m all about creating things with a backstory in my design process. I think a cool graphic thrown on a hoodie isn’t good enough nowadays.
It didn’t hurt that Joshua had Croatian roots and was making a name for himself globally – much the same as Infobip has done over the years.
Joshua and Ivan worked together closely to get the right message across. The final hoodie was inspired by band tour t-shirts, Disneyland, and Infobip’s tagline: Worlds Connected. Why Disneyland? Well, when Joshua was a kid, he liked collecting pins from Disneyland and trading them with the workers. What if you could do the same for Infobip, collecting a pin at every office around the globe?
The back of the hoodie features all of our offices worldwide and reads like a regular band tour site list. Or, if you’re an avid pin collector, as a cheat sheet for the pin treasure hunt.
The heart of the hoodie, though, is on its side, where you can find the NFC tag. When a tag is scanned, it opens the website, automatically connects to your wallet, and you can claim an NFT for each hoodie.
To merge block chain and hoodies, another Croatian company came onboard. Blank was in charge of setting up smart contracts for NFTs, a webshop for the sale of hoodies, and a web application for confirming NFTs. If nothing else, the hoodie lives up to Infobip’s slogan worlds connected, since it brought several companies from different industries together over one (spectacular!) piece of merch.
Ok, so where can I get one?
You can get the hoodie via hoodie.infobip.com, where there is a countdown to November 22, when the hoodie will be released. If you want to know the exact minute when you can buy it, leave your email address so that you will be notified when the sale starts. Remember, we made only 300… so be quick about it!
