Hibiscus DAO Whitepaper [1-Page]

What is Hibiscus DAO?

Hibiscus DAO is building the first transparent, open-source, community-owned toolkit for the fashion creator economy.

We're rethinking clothing production with 3 goals in mind:

  1. Build a decentralized apparel brand via community-curated collections.

  2. Create “Fashion Legos” = a "Github for Garments" to open-source apparel production.

  3. Enable the “fashion creator economy” = help creators and makers own the means of production + retain the value they create via cryptographic profit distribution systems.

Immediate Roadmap

“Merch as a gateway drug to design for diversity”

Creating a humane on-chain, full-service garment production system is a huge endeavor - so we’re using "merch" production as a testing ground for our protocol + returning ownership to makers.

Key ideas to work on immediately bringing to life:

  1. Build “Fashion Legos”: a garment library that serves an open-source, Github-like platform for apparel production.
    • Create open source, end-to-end apparel production supply chain + tech infrastructure that allows creators to easily create new garments on existing bases.

Garment Ecosystem Diagram

  1. Cultivate a repository of designers, producers, and suppliers who have successfully used our core garment library protocol.

    • This gives our protocol network effects - making it even easier for new projects to create apparel by forking and building on top of existing on-chain portfolios - which include garments, materials, and designs.

  2. Split system for community contributors.

    • Figure out how to retain and redistribute the value created in making and wearing apparel via cryptographic profit sharing.

  3. Produce the first community-curated collection.

    • Leverage in-house production supply chain + tech infrastructure to release Hibiscus’s first community-curated collection - becoming a decentralized apparel brand in the process.

Smart Contract Inegration

Why?

Current Landscape of Apparel = Exploitation

The apparel and luxury market is growing exponentially: reaching $1.9 trillion globally in 2019 - and expected to surpass $3 trillion in the next decade.

But the industry's success is rooted in exploitation. Its business model is based around maximizing profit - by minimizing value returned to stakeholders.

Traditional Fashion = Humanitarian Exploitation

Slave, child, and sweatshop labor are all common in the supply chain of traditional brands.

These human rights violations are well-documented but suppressed via marketing and PR.

Traditional Fashion = Creative Exploitation

Talented young designers generate massive value for brands - often with little to no compensation.

A successful, popular design will earn a brand millions, yet the designer behind it will see none of these earnings. Instead, their designs become the IP of the brand.

Traditional Fashion = Environmental Exploitation

Fashion brands intentionally leverage planned obsolescence and instill an increasingly consumerist mindset based on overconsumption to feed their continued need for profit.

When overconsumption is encouraged, true sustainability is impossible to achieve.

Old System vs. New System

Fashion Profit Margins

We want to return power + ownership to creators and producers.

Crypto technologies help share ownership with stakeholders:

  • Community owned ateliers vs. factories and manufacturers
  • Fork-able concepts and tools can be validated and iterated on by community creators.
  • Designs registered as on-chain vectors - enabling proper credit and compensation.
  • Future royalties of products can be distributed back to creators and the community.
  • Locally accessible physical design and fashion resources.

Which enables:

  • Strong design teams driven by community and monetary value.
  • More diversity, better ideas, better concepts, better curation, and more robust thinking.
  • Momentum towards living on-chain.