The Queens Of Crypto: Mavion’s Michelle Reeves

*This is part of a monthly series featuring women leading innovation and inclusivity in crypto, Web3, NFTs and the metaverse*

NFT skeptics continue to wonder, what’s the point? Why would I invest so much in a digital jpeg? One of the people hoping to offer concrete answers to these questions is Michelle Reeves. She’s the founder of Mavion, an NFT brand that focuses on uplifting independent artists and designers while bridging the gap between fashion and web3.

She evolved her jewelry company, Accessory Junkie, seamlessly into the NFT world by offering unique art that also comes with a limited edition physical accessory. She also has a long term vision for how this model can translate digital and physical assets into items of value that exist in the real world and in the metaverse.

That’s why she’s so passionate about introducing more women to crypto. In fact, she hosted a road show in March where she set up 2,000 women with wallets and gave them web3 101 trainings.

Reeves is also pioneering ways for the fashion industry to get their brands integrated into web3. Her first fashion collaboration kicks off this week with Rebecca Minkoff, who has developed a line of unique accessories that can only be accessed through an NFT collection that drops July 14th.

Mavion hosted a series of 30+ events during NYC NFT Week at the end of June through a partnership with Luminary called the MoveMINT. The goal of the event series was to encourage more women to get comfortable with crypto and to push for more equity in the world of web3. I sat down with Reeves in between events to talk about her experience as a pioneer in the fashion and accessory NFT space as well as her predictions for the future of both industries.

Amy Shoenthal: As the founder of an accessories company, how did you make the pivot into crypto?

Michelle Reeves: It was the logical next step. I was personally involved in crypto back in 2016, investing, learning, getting some skin in the game. Back then, if you found anyone talking about crypto it was like finding a unicorn, so I really found a core community of people who were interested in this.

In 2020, we were still building Accessory Junkie as a web2 company, hitting our stride solving problems for the independent designers we work with. But we realized there were problems web2 couldn’t solve, like how to help some of our designers scale. If a designer only makes 50 necklaces, it is finite, so we were trying to figure out how to scale without mass producing.

There was a conversation about gaming that made us realize we could produce digital assets in honor of each accessory that could be replicated. But we were way too early. The consumer in February 2020 was not there yet. We figured in 3-5 years, we'd get there.

Then came the pandemic, and our digital lives totally changed. Now NFTs are being talked about everywhere, the consumer is interested and even though the conversations have been mostly art-focused, we realized this was the moment. Mavion was born in 2021 as the web3 extension of our company. We launched with our Genesis collection which includes 5,000 NFTs that are currently being minted.

Shoenthal: How did you come up with the name Mavion?

Reeves: The two words we use to describe designers we work with are the maverick and the maven. They’re brave, bold and go stylistically where no one has gone before. Then we asked, what are we delivering to our consumers? Not everyone has access to jump on a plane to go to Greece, Brazil and Japan and meet these amazing designers. We bring these designs to them. ‘My plane’ in French is ‘mon avion’ so all these words together created Mavion.

We also loved that it was a gender neutral term. This is not just for women. There are plenty of men in our community. These are bold accessories that are not mass produced. You're not going to see anybody else wearing those big crazy parrot earrings. It's just going to be you. That sense of yourself, it's a mood, it's a feeling.

Shoenthal: So how does that feeling translate into web3?

Reeves: Our digital benefits extend to the real world. Each NFT features a unique accessory and the holder gets the physical accessory depicted in the image. We combine digital, physical and experiential, which is part of the value for our community.

Those pieces now live as a digital asset in gaming or as assets that people can buy for their avatars in the metaverse. For every unit sold on the secondary market, the holder and the independent designer receive royalties. That's an infinite opportunity to drive revenue in perpetuity. So we can save people time and earn them money by having their Mavions go to work for them.

Shoenthal: Talk to me about the minting process.

Reeves: When you mint, the images are randomly generated. They’re all the same price, .14 eth, which is actually a steal right now. Some pieces are more rare than others, but they’re all very limited.

Minting in general happens when you choose a price and you get an NFT at random. Of course, you can shop for NFTs on the secondary market on OpenSea and that’s where you can choose which one you want. When you mint, you go to Mavion’s website, and when you buy secondary you go to OpenSea.

Shoenthal: Does the physical accessory get sold along with the NFT on the secondary market?

Reeves: There’s only one time the physical accessory is redeemed. If you’ve already redeemed it, it is yours. The person buying it from you will know whether or not that accessory has been redeemed.

Shoenthal: What’s your long-term vision for Mavion?

Reeves: We want to go beyond just accessories. Eventually we will activate all of the layers you see in the art: the wallpaper for people to buy at home and in the metaverse, the makeup, the hair, all different products that will be available in both real and virtual worlds. Then they’ll just keep activating royalties for holders.

The alpha (a term that means “first to know” in the NFT world) is that we’ll be dropping collaborations with talent, designers, and more. Our first collaboration is with Rebecca Minkoff. We have two drops, the first one coming up on July 14th with 55 NFTs in a collection called the ‘Unlockables.’ They unlock physical, digital, and experiential benefits. For the first time, Rebecca Minkoff will have five one of a kind bags. If you mint one of those, you’ll get this super rare limited edition bag, a Mavion accessory, two tickets to fashion week, two free mints to the second drop happening in fall, and a $500 crypto currency card to add to your crypto fund.

If you’re already a Mavion holder, you’ll be able to attach these new assets, like a new Rebecca Minkoff bag, to your Mavion, and by doing so you build on the value of it. We’re giving our holders the foundation with which to build upon.

I’m annoyingly focused on wanting to put revenue into women’s pockets. Women are notoriously underpaid and their time is overused. So how do you make women’s time more valuable? You make your NFT work for you. When you buy a Mavion, that digital jpeg becomes your mini retail empire, and that becomes your generational wealth to hand down.

Shoenthal: Would you say Mavion is setting the bar for fashion and accessory brands to show how NFTs can offer true utility for consumers?

Reeves: Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking community is the only NFT utility. In fact, community is not a utility. Women don’t have time to be on Discord. Don’t make the community benefit and then ask women to spend time doing one more thing. That’s not a value for us.

Shoenthal: That’s a great point. Let’s talk about web3 in general and why so many women are hesitant to move into this space.

Reeves: In March, we held a road show where we onboarded over 2,000 people, setting up their wallets, offering a basic education in web3. We made it free and available to anyone, but attendees were overwhelmingly women.

60% of women shared with us that they want to be the crypto manager for their household. So many of them shared that their husbands always handled the stocks but they want to be the crypto holder, to own this. We heard things like, they want to build NFT portfolios to give to their kids when they graduate college in ten years. So women are really looking at this with big thinking.

The interest is there. Where they are being stopped is relatability.

The six categories that women show most affinity for are family, travel, wellness, fashion and beauty. Those core interests translate to web3 but they are not being met. 81% of crypto is owned by men and 90% of NFTs are owned by men. There’s nothing wrong with the projects they’re building – men are great. But investor capital is only going to the core audience, serving only men.

I hit the investor circuit during NFT week, and it’s been almost comical to walk into these meetings. Right away, they ask, are you a founder? Clearly you’re a woman, what’s your email? I ask if they want to know more about my brand, and the answer is no, they just need to check that box or meet a certain requirement.

But there are other investors who are really taking us seriously. Whoever we take money from, we need to make sure their demands serve the community and the founding teams. If you take someone’s money, be sure you know what you sign up for.

This ecosystem is so new, so it’s a lot of gut inclination. Decisions can’t be made with data or precedent. I mean, our model doesn’t exist. VCs are coming to us because they want to be in this experiment together. Holding us to web2 milestones is only going to crush the growth that brands like ours can have.

Shoenthal: Can you talk about the dip? When you talk about building generational wealth, how do you account for a bear market or Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam’s statement that 90% of NFTs won't be valuable in a few years?

Reeves: It’s a build market not a bear market. If anything, this moment is an opportunity to leverage all the mistakes we made in this first wave of web3. And it might actually be beneficial to women because at this moment, the mainstream female consumer hasn’t dipped her toe yet. Meanwhile, if you’re curious about buying NFTs, there are some absolute steals out there right now.

Shoenthal: There was a recent Atlantic article that criticized the “women in crypto” movement for being the next #girlboss a.k.a. using feminism as a marketing ploy. Do you have any reaction to that?

Reeves: Perception is not reality. I can tell you firsthand that from the outside looking in, these groups look like they have incredible events going on. It is only happening through partnerships, and it is women helping women. Our events at Luminary during NFT Week were only possible because Cate (Luzio, the Luminary founder) is an amazing ally. There is absolutely no way we could hold 30+ events in NYC as a company with no VC backing.

When women founders get together, we’re like, what do you need? How can I give to you? This collaboration is extraordinary. And it's the only reason we've gotten as far as we have.

Another generalization I take issue with is the notion that women inherently don’t like to take risks. I mean, the irony of that statement when women only take risks. We have the least access to capital. We deal with the most bias. We take risks walking down the street every day, wearing whatever we are wearing. We take nothing but risks. We are the most likely to be studying while holding one if not two jobs. And yet we do it anyway. We get the least sleep, the least access to promotions, but still we show up and we take those risks. So I don’t want to hear anyone promoting some narrative that we are risk averse.

Shoenthal: I loved that rant, thank you. So my last question is, as one of the leading women pioneering in this space, as one of the Queens of Crypto, how can we truly build accessibility and diversity into web3?

Reeves: We are all entering the space from different places. None of us have the same background but we all share the same curiosity to just see what we can build.

We’re so trained in web2 to scale everything quick and fast. It doesn’t work that way when you have a new revolution taking shape. Web3 is not difficult but it’s not intuitive. We need to help everyone get on board. Be curious. Find a free Zoom webinar to join. Update your feed. Follow a couple of people in this space on social media and get a sense of what they’re talking about. Leaning into curiosity is step one for a lot of us.

I want to set up a stall in Central Park and say, ‘tell me your business and I’ll tell you how NFTs can make it better.’