Web3 offers new ways for companies to reward and engage their employees and potential customers

Icon Technology Studio, the creative force behind major NFT projects like The Matrix’s recent drops, has developed its own line of NFTs, made by and for employees. It’s a first example of how companies can use web3 tools and formats to forge a new space for company culture, customer engagement, and employee expression.

Icon is a creative studio, as well as a tech powerhouse, so these NFTs had to push the tech boundaries and fire up the imagination. To do this, Icon’s NFTs use generative AI to create unexpected visual elements. They play with and reimagine the company’s logo, turning it into a series of mysterious, fantastic landscapes. Available on OpenSea, these NFTs can play multiple, surprising roles, acting as business cards, swag, membership badges, and even samples/demos.

“We see Icon’s company NFTs as a creative way of getting everyone on our team a wallet, from designers to developers. We want them to explore this promising space,” explains Global Executive Creative Director Brian Schmitt. “We decided to use our logo, which is three hands coming together, to reflect our global collaborative spirit. We're giving these NFTs to employees and partners, looking at it as the start of a conversation for the extended team—what do we want to make in this new space?”

Icon adds NFTs to the mugs, t-shirts, and other swag that companies often give away to potential clients or employees. Instead of static branded cards or other products, Icon employees can use NFTs to create and express their professional selves—while keeping the company’s ethos intact. And they don’t just sit in wallets: These NFTs can be turned into screensavers, profile pictures, phone or video call backgrounds, and physical printed art employees can display in their home office.

“What's special about NFTs is that people are making them their own. They are creating their own story around Icon and it’s engaging for the community,” Schmitt says. “We’re planting a seed for our company’s brand and culture to explore what can only exist in the metaverse.”

The beautifully designed NFTs are available to view on OpenSea.

Most developers contend with the how. Icon Technology Studio wants to do far more, grappling with the why to integrate the traditionally siloed stages of creating a tech product. That may sound abstract, but a clear vision of foundational “whys” resonates throughout the design, engineering, community, and content of an app, platform, or experience, making sure the right incentives are in place from the very first MVP.

Concretely, a client’s why can lead Icon to craft a thousand virtual outfits for the biggest ever drop of unique NFTs (as it did for a recent collaboration with Niftys and The Matrix universe). Or develop logos and custom merch perfectly matched to extend the product or company’s reach to the right people, once the coding is done. 

By going deep while working wide, Icon has created groundbreaking products for major corporations like Sirius XM, Harmon, Xperi, and Spotify, and for newly hatched startups with cool ideas. Spanning the globe from Brisbane to LA, they have launched high-concept, cutting-edge projects and essential, behind-the-scenes tools for the entertainment, music, design/fashion, sports, and automotive industries.

“We can be a true creative partner, in a very considered way,” explains Brian Schmitt, Icon’s Global Executive Creative Director, whose tech and design background at companies like Apple and Nike spans the creative industries. “A creative agency can tap into popular culture and help your message resonate with your audience but won’t know how to build the experience. A software development team may know how to build the experience but may lack a deep understanding of what it means culturally. We are one of the few studios that span all those considerations from creative strategy and design, to engineering to biz strategy. Whether we’re helping giant companies with global programs or brand-new startups, we’re thinking about it in the same way. We go deep into the partners and consumers’ space and find the shared why.” 

What starts with a quest for a deeper why, however, swiftly turns to code. “We like to say we do it in code, making demos from the first meeting, and working with ideas in a digitally native way,” says Garrick Brown, Icon’s President. That means building an MVP instead of a proposal, or showing a prospective client exactly what Icon envisions for the project in Unreal Engine, right from the start.

“Founders and experts at the very top of their game and professions come to us and trust us to do the work. That speaks to our capabilities,” CEO Rob Cleveland says. “Many developers can do the basic block and tackle. That’s not who we are; we’re here to do something left of center.”

Whatever the company undertakes, it does it in complete collaboration with clients. Instead of coding guns for hire shooting out rapid-fire projects, Icon strives to act as an embedded startup within the team that hires them—to the point that they have frequently been taken for actual employees of the client company. Icon works closely with clients from start to finish, to tackle everything from the perfect user interface to deployment and promotion. 
This holistic approach supercharges efficiency, yet also ensures consistently creative collaboration. For example, Schmitt noted that sometimes Icon’s moodboards, created at an early stage in the process, have suggested cool features that clients hadn’t considered before. 

“In the old agency model, incentives were misaligned. Icon starts by asking what it means to act as one team,” explains Brown. “In our line of work, the majority of client relationships are governed by performative behavior. We find opportunities where we can strip down those performances and actually understand with some degree of insight and intimacy what is really driving the goal of the client.” 

Cleveland has a profound sense of the accelerating pace of change and what it demands of tech talent: curiosity, flexibility, and speed. “Entrepreneurs and companies used to--and still want to--break up the work into smaller chunks and hand it out to a whole slew of different people. They don’t talk to each other, and they get the project done in weeks or months, not years,” he says. “Even compared to a few years ago, we need to be more agile. We run down the rabbit hole and extricate ourselves quickly. We can move away from what’s not working to another solution set without inertia. That’s the future.”