R66 Toys NFT Interview with Co-Founder Dimension

Natalee

3 years ago

Hi, I am Giovani aka Dimension. I am the co-founder of R66 Toys, a Russian based creative art studio that makes collectible NFTs founded by Nikita “R66” Replyanski and Konstatin Makarov. Started as an NFT collector in February 2021, I helped to build the collectors group C^3 together with @404artproject and @aurepa that is now a collective of 60+ collector friends in the NFT space. C^3 stands for: Cool Calm Collected. In July 2021 I minted my first Freestyle Dance NFT on FND as one of the first dancers ever on the blockchain to sell dance NFTs as an artform.

What made you pursue NFT art?

I was in Tokyo Japan october – december 2019 producing my documentary about the Japanese HipHop dance community where I stumbled upon Ninocence her IG account displaying her art. I started to follow her journey as an artist when one day in the beginning of 2021 she shared one of Nikita Replyanksi’s first NFT drops “Hello World” from R66 Toys. I got inspired by the character and quality and I felt connected to the artpiece. After doing months of research I believed it was time for me to join the NFT space and collect my first NFT in May 2021. It must be the R66 Toys that got my first attention. R66 #003 “Witch Doctor” was my first NFT! This piece made me obsessed with the art and made me one of the top collectors of the R66 Toys. I started collecting every piece they brought out. Because I was so hyped I tweeted everything about their new drops and became an active community member. I had many ideas regarding the future of R66 and asked if they were open to talk about the future of the R66 Brand. I offered them to work for free as one of their team members to bring their brand more awareness in the NFT Space. After many meetings I became the community manager of R66 and months later they decided I should be one of the co-founders and ever since we have consistently built the brand together. From purchasing my first NFT to becoming one of the co-founders is one of the milestones I will always carry with me in this short but mostly exciting journey.

Could you tell us something more about R66?

R66 aka Nikita Replyanski ( link: https://twitter.com/n_replyanski ) is a phygital artist based in Moscow. Nikita started his career in 2008 as a digital artist for video games and made a long path in art that brought him to phygital pieces and NFTs inspired by technology, futuristic fashion and cyberpunk.

R66 made art collaborations with Adidas, Asics, Novaya Tretyakovskaya Gallery, Adobe, world famous rock band Bring Me The Horizon, etc.

So what is R66 Toys?

R66 Toys ( link: https://rarible.com/r66toys ) is a futuristic NFT toy store created by Nikita “R66” Replyanski and his team. At the moment the team has already created 20 high quality collectible toys including such collaborations as adidas originals (very first adidas NFT on the blockchain) and Success Rockets – rocket company from Russia. R66 Toys was one of the first collectibles on the Rarible NFT platform and is currently sold out with over 150 holders.

One of our unique trademarks is to embrace the term “phygital”. Phygital (physical plus digital) is a marketing term that describes blending digital experiences with physical ones which means we work in both realities.

Our community (link:https://discord.gg/R66) is very happy with our work and we see more and more collectors using our work as PFPs. So, we came up with the idea to create a PFP collection based on the silhouette of our R66 Toys. We will represent unique 1/1 PFP art pieces manually made by our team and collaborative artists.

How Big is the team and what are their roles?

Our team consists of the founders Nikita Replyanski who is responsible for the creative side of the project and Konstatin Makarov who takes care of management and strategy. In late 2021 our team joined Giovani Dimension who is now responsible for community building and influence marketing around the brand. Also there are two artists in our team: Elena is a lead character artist and Petr is 3d and animation artist.

(Thats me CloneX #1042)

How did you come up with the ideas?

Usually we sit with a whole team to brainstorm, everybody sharing his ideas, we put everything on the Figma desk and after that we are just picking the concepts one by one.

What Makes this project unique?

Each PFP has truly been through a creative process, where much attention has been paid to each individual piece of art. In this project we work with 8 very esteemed artists, in which the signature silhouette of our toys is filled with their creativity and unique style.

We want to show this to our collectors but also to the world that we are expanding our universe, that we continue to grow and that there is a special toy for everyone in which you can recognize yourself or have a special connection with. We believe in the infinite options of character development that inspired us to create the collection named VOIDZ (creation from nothingness).