Original Penguin — A Heritage Brand Speaks Gen Z
An app-free AR gallery and NFT auction co-created with five TikTok artists — raising $10K+ for youth arts education while making a 70-year-old brand culturally current.
Seventy years of heritage, meeting an audience that discovers brands on TikTok.
Business
- Make a legacy brand relevant to Gen Z
- Genuine social purpose, not brand self-promotion
User
- First AR experience for non-tech TikTok audiences
- Bidding without owning cryptocurrency
Technical
- NFT minting and auction mechanics from scratch
- An AR gallery in the browser — no app
Culture without costume
Joining the NFT moment while staying unmistakably Original Penguin.
Five artists, one brand
Creative latitude inside defined brand constraint parameters.
Crypto's velvet rope
Crypto-only auctions self-select for a narrow audience.
Novices in AR
Visitors who had never used AR had to walk a gallery on the first try.
I led the experience across art, tech, and commerce — five artists to one auction.
Owned
- Experience Design Lead
- AR Showroom Architecture
- NFT & Auction Workflow
- Artist Collaboration
Collaborated with
- Creative Director
- AR Developer
- NFT Specialist
- Art Director
- UI/UX Designer
Heritage, made collectible.
The mascot is the collectible
Chasing NFT culture with something invented would read as costume.
Make the iconic penguin logo the raw material — five artists reinterpret one mascot.
Iconic, simple, adaptable — the brand asset was already avatar-shaped.
A campaign grounded in identity yet native to the cultural moment.
Dollars and crypto
2022 NFT auctions demanded cryptocurrency — excluding the brand's actual fanbase.
A hybrid auction accepting both USD and crypto.
A more accessible auction means more bidders — and more raised for the cause.
Broader participation drove the $10K+ FreeArtsNYC donation.
AR for the audience, not the technology
TikTok followers, not early adopters — most had never used AR.
Tap to enter, tap to view, tap to bid — a Miami-themed gallery with zero learning curve.
The novelty is being in the gallery; the interface has to disappear.
An AR gallery accessible from a text-message link.
Co-created avatars
Five TikTok artists' styles fused with one brand mascot.
Hybrid auction
USD and crypto side by side — participation over purity.
Walkable AR gallery
A Miami-themed showroom in any mobile browser.
The trade-off — I spent budget on hybrid payments instead of richer AR interactions. The gallery stayed simple, but accessibility decided how much we raised — the right trade.
What I'd improve — the avatars deserved a second act after the auction — AR try-on or social filters — to extend the campaign beyond the bidding window.
Next time — give people something to believe in, not just consume. The charitable frame turned a transaction into a story, and stories travel further than campaigns.
