In 2018, artist Colin Egan—aka Clon—had all but given up on his flagship character, Blue Cat.

“I thought it was over,” Clon said to me in a recent conversation. “But then I created Cool Cats, and it wasn’t over. I live by that now—that it’s never over. You can literally pick up the pencil and start creating again.”

Clon and his co-founders went on to launch the Cool Cats brand, using the power of web3 and crypto communities to help launch a nonfungible token (NFT) collection aimed at inspiring creativity in others.

While the collection has had its ups and downs, the constant has been its community first approach.

“We’re really trying to curate a community of creators,” Clon said. “Our mission statement is ‘Inspiring the creator in everyone.’ You might say you can’t draw or can’t do something, but maybe it’s just that you haven’t found your outlet yet. I truly believe everyone is creative, and one thing I really try to do is come up with different ways to make my community create.”

For Clon and Cool Cats, what started as a passion project was transformed by web3.

“I was a freelancer at the time doing graphic design and all of my clients went quiet at the same time,” Clon said. “I knew I had to figure something else out, and that’s when my buddy brought me to web3. We then created the project and it sold out in six hours, something I did not expect. I thought it was a silly little thing that you could own a picture of Blue Cat in a different costume.”

The Cool Cats team started to dream bigger and in 2022 held a live activation in New York called “Cooltopia,” where people would walk in and be transported to the Cool Cats universe.

Colin Egan—aka Clon

Since its initial drop, Cool Cats has gone from an NFT to a billboard in Times Square to a live activation. Now, in the coming weeks, the brand will hoist up a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

“That was the moment I was trying to prove that Cool Cats IP [intellectual property] is bigger than web3,” Clon said. “Cool Cats started in web3, but Blue Cat did not, so my goal has been to turn this character into a household name.”

While Clon’s pie-in-the-sky objective has been to promote and spread the reach of Blue Cat in all its forms, web3 and blockchain have unquestionably aided its quite literal upward trajectory—a trajectory that in large part has been powered by its community.

“The Macy’s Day Parade is one the biggest stages a character can be on,” Clon said. “We’re in this niche market of web3 and by being able to expand within that, we've been able to create a rock solid community of people who really support the brand and only want to see us scale and do better. In turn, it helps them out because they’re all holders.”

The Cool Cats communal aspect has helped push the company forward, while also helping the Cool Cats team keep the community top of mind in the work it's doing. It’s a great example of a symbiotic relationship, whereby the community serves the project and the project serves the community.

“Last year, Macy’s put on a competition because they wanted to enter the web3 space,” Clon said. “They got six projects together and whoever won was to receive a balloon in the Macy’s Day Parade. None of that would have happened for us without our community.”

According to Clon, the community went door to door contacting other Cool Cat holders who may not have known about the competition in order to get them to vote. Because of the collective effort, Cool Cats won the float.

Read more: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong: “We Need to Make Our Voice Heard as an Industry” in Washington DC 

“There are moments like that where the community can really help us out, and then in turn, we need to help them out,” Clon said. “They push me further because I know there’s this group of people who really believe in me and the IP and I don’t want to give up on that.”

He continued, “Someone might even drop you a message like, ‘Hey, I know this person who can really help you out with toys.’ They want to genuinely help make that connection, so in a cool way—and this is what makes web3 so unique—you’re building together.”

In this way, the utility of being a Cool Cats NFT holder is helping grow the art and the brand—not only because the holders are economically incentivized, but because they truly believe in the company and the art—demonstrated by the community’s willingness to avail their relationships and resources to help further the mission.

“For a lot of people, they just genuinely love being included,” Clon said. “There are people who purchased a Cool Cat at $50 when we first sold them, and now this IP that nobody knew about is in a parade that millions of people will see, and they were included in that process. It’s just a really fun thing.”