Re-mekko

Our client

Marimekko is a Finnish lifestyle design company renowned for its original prints and colors. The company’s product portfolio includes high-quality clothing, bags and accessories as well as home décor items ranging from textiles to tableware. Marimekko products are sold in about 40 countries. In 2020, brand sales of the products worldwide amounted to EUR 286 million and the company’s net sales were EUR 124 million. Roughly 150 Marimekko stores serve customers around the globe.

Marimekko made important contributions to fashion in the 1960s. It is particularly noted for its brightly colored printed fabrics and simple styles, used both in women's garments and in home furnishings.

Used skills

Our challenge

Thanks to the unprecedented pivot from daily life to online life during COVID-19 as well as the ever increasing importance of sustainability, exciting new possibilities for fashion have opened-up, allowing Marimekko to be more sustainable and reach a new audience.

But this change isn’t all that strange! During the last few years more and more 2nd hand C2C marketplaces have been popping up and they have gained the attention and praise of the consumers. But! So far only a few fashion brands have done something in reaction to this opportunity and are yet to reach the full potential in creating a community. This is what Marimekko wants to achieve.

Marimekko wants to be in the forefront of this new movement and show the other industry players the power of having a vibrant community. The 2nd hand market is expected to outgrow fast fashion by 2028 but we still have a long road ahead of us in bringing this from niche to mainstream. Thus it is important for fashion brands to be active facilitators in this process to support the development of a circular value chain and ensure their community will still be engaged and active. How can Marimekko facilitate and enable community members to interact and exchange pre-loved Marimekko items in a way that the process is smooth and the experience is superb? We want this platform to serve as an active Marimekko community booster so it’s also important to us that the people always come back for new content!

Our solution

Our solution was to create the first mobile application for buying and selling physical NFTs as marimekko branded items with a story.

Our idea: to create a re-mekko marketplace where people can sell their marimekko branded items with their personal story. And inside the store, implement the concept of an NFT item in the physical world.

Work process

Here we have: IFPS (the decentralized file storage) with a simple NFT blockchain written in Solana An NFT token is generated for every unique SKU, and the list of items purchased goes into the customer's closet.

Anybody, can find our NFT in the IPFS vault and verify the authenticity of the purchased product. Each item has its own unique history. The owner can add a note about that item. The entire history of the item is linked to a specific NFT token.

Okay. There is a store in the Remekko app where people sell products to each other. We can buy these products, view their stories, and inspect the NFT token.

Now it' s time to sell your product. We press the sell button and put a price. Now our product can be bought by any remekko user. After the item is bought, we get money into our bonus account and can spend it at marimekko on the next purchase. To integrate this application with marimekko stores and official dealers you need to send SKU-s plus a client's scanned code from the ERP system to the remimekko server.

Our results

The developed solution involves the use of IFPS (decentralized file storage) in combination with a simple NFT Blockchain on the Solana platform. For each unique SKU, an NFT token is generated and information about the purchased products is stored in the customer's closet. This provides the ability for any user to verify the authenticity of a product by finding the corresponding NFT in the IPFS storage. Each product has its own unique story, and owners can add notes to these items. The history of the product is closely related to the specific NFT token. The Remekko app includes a store where users can buy and sell products to each other. They can view product histories and verify corresponding NFT tokens. All this provides users with a unique opportunity to participate in the ecosystem with transparency and authenticity of products, as well as track their history and provenance through NFT technology.