Meet the Female Creators Behind Shiba Pets NFT

While many in the Twitterverse have been spending their time during this NFT market correction licking their wounds and dwelling on the terrible decisions they made, or didn’t make, other creators and investors in the space have taken the opportunity to innovate and make something…terrible.

About one year after pivoting their existing company to a web3 model in the winter of 2021, CEO Apple Vuong and her double-digit, full-time team are dropping the first project of their Shiba Pets collection. According to their Medium article, the Shiba Pets collection, “will pioneer a novel format and way to use NFTs that we’re so finger-licking lit about. We have apps built already that make ‘making stories’ with the Shiba Pets content easy, fun, and social. And there will be many Shiba Pet NFTs to make those experiences as awesome as they can be.”

What are Shiba Pets?

Shiba Pets is a “first-of-its-kind” NFT collection where the community collects and utilizes NFTs based around a cast of eight main characters, the Shiba Inu Pets. In conjunction with the deep and layered backstories that these characters have through content put out by the team, holders use their NFTs as building blocks to create comedic memes, stories, and comics that provide for an innovative way of content creation utilizing this co-creation model.

What are the Shibafriend Shiba Pets?

Shiba Pet is the first collection from the Shibafriend NFT Metaverse ecosystem. It is a limited collection of genesis NFTs that serve as an early access pass to the Shiba Metaverse ecosystem and a sub-community of early adopters who can help drive the direction of future projects in the Terrible Pets universe.

“It’s a pass to everything we intend the community to become,” says Hai, Designer. Hai who has worked in gaming graphic design industry for the last ten years, emphasizes that this small, intimate group will play a big role in the collaborative future of the brand. “We wanted a collection for the Shiba because the Shiba are our base community and we really want to make it possible for Shiba holders to work with us, create with us, and have a big influence on what we are doing and what the Shiba universe looks like,” says Alan.

How is this project different from all the others?

“As a project, the major differentiated utility of our NFTs is that they are building blocks for content, individual moments of a focused small cast of deeply built-out characters whose stories will be told through and with the crowd.”

While many Discord communities have fallen into the pattern of waiting passively to be spoon fed the next announcement to create some excitement in their server, the Shibafriend NFT team envisions a strong (and fun) collaborative ecosystem of kind users & creators who want to learn, bond, and create together. The Shibafriend NFT team sees its job as a project to make it fun, social, and worthwhile for people to partake in the creative process.”

The sense of creativity in the community is evident right from when users can “choose their own bespoke traits” from Shiba Pets at the time of mint. “We want to give people something from the start that people can interact with,” says Hai. “I’m really excited with what they do with what we give them.”

“When we pivoted in this direction, I was really excited at the opportunity to create content for a new audience and the new challenge of how to create content.” Apple understands the importance of this innovative co-creation model and believes it has the makings to be successful. This model is something “that traditional media is scared of,” but the people will be excited about it.” “People want community and we have a community that wants to hang out and take risks together,” she adds.

Who are the characters?

Instead of hundreds or thousands of characters, or PFPS, the Shiba Pets has a cast of 15 main characters, all having documented storylines within the universe, and all relatable on some level given their issues.

“It’s a collection of characters working through their own unique traumas, together,” notes Apple.

“I’m trying to make our (characters) special, fun, and authentic.” says Nguyen, who writes and has built out the storylines for the 15 main characters in the Shiba Metaverse.

Apple adds that many of these conversations are especially important to those currently in the web3 space. “A lot of people have trauma, a lot of people have issues in this space, and our characters have heightened issues,” she notes.

Our 15 Shiba characters and their respective backstories have been revealed to the community so far but as the community builds and more content and collections are released, members of the community will definitely have more to work with in terms of context.

The Shiba Pet collection mints in September for .05 ETH. Currently, there is no set mint date for any other drops in the Shiba Pets collection. To woof woof with the team or get more information, visit https://shibafriendnft.io/ for more information.