You’d never guess these 3 nationwide brands started as crypto experiments

Jordan Bauer // OpenSea

You'd never guess these 3 nationwide brands started as crypto experiments

Some shopping scenarios seem as timeless as shopping itself: a parent at Walmart dropping a whimsical stuffed animal into the cart for their grinning child, a college student grabbing a carbonated drink at 7-Eleven, a woman at Ulta Beauty picking up a sunscreen bottle splashed with appealing colors. Today, all of these products are on store shelves right now—and three of them, specifically, started as crypto experiments.

To understand exactly how a crypto experiment becomes a plushie, we need a little context: Shoppers today don't operate like they used to. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Americans started doing everything online, from ordering groceries to seeing doctors over video and partaking in live-streamed workout classes. These behaviors might have otherwise taken a generation to catch on, but because of digital acceleration, they became routine in under a year.

They also stuck around: McKinsey's shows that over 90 percent of U.S. consumers said they shopped at an online-only retailer in the previous month, and nearly a third reported buying a brand they heard about through social media.

Returning to those three products referenced above—the stuffed animal, the energy drink and the sunscreen—they were all born as projects during or shortly after the craze over , or NFTs.

You remember NFTs, don’t you? They are a type of crypto , akin to a digital deed or a record that shows who purchased something. The phenomenon of buying NFTs arose around 2021 when online communities were flush with pandemic-era screen time and people sought ways to connect with one another on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter).

While many NFT projects fizzled after the crypto hype, three unique brands positioned their product as comparable to household names and have since made an unlikely migration to physical retail. You may have seen them on store shelves as , a line of plush toys now sold at Walmart and Walgreens, , a canned energy drink carried at 7-Eleven and Giant Eagle, and , a sunscreen brand stocked at Ulta Beauty.

Ahead, explores how these once-niche internet products made it to national storefronts.

A playful cartoon went from the internet to WalMart and your iPhone

In 2021, a group of cartoon penguins took over certain corners of the internet. Named , the characters were rotund, playful-eyed and endlessly remixable through a process known as “generative art,” which uses algorithms to make combinations of various illustrated traits. The project took off online, so much that New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose of the 8,888 characters, joking that he did it because “… well, it’s August and I’m bored.”

Roose interviewed American university student Clayton Patterson, one of Pudgy Penguins’ original founders, who said he wanted to make owning one of the NFTs as cool of a status symbol as owning a Rolex. Early buyers became friends with one another and started chatting online via the messaging platform Discord. They used their penguins as profile pictures on X and built Pudgy Penguins fan accounts, some even making memes that spread like wildfire across social media.

Soon, however, the fanfare turned critical as the project stalled. Pudgy Penguin buyers wanted the characters to grow into an intellectual property franchise, robust enough to pursue licensing and merchandising opportunities, like Pokémon characters or Mickey Mouse.

So, in 2022, entrepreneur took over and announced he would launch a line of stuffed animals based on the arctic cartoons. He debuted them on in 2023. By 2024, Pudgy Penguins plush toys were on shelves at , and . The characters now appear as viral GIFs, memes and stickers on iPhones, shared between people who have no idea the artwork began as an NFT. The brand has of over one million physical units and more than $13 million in retail sales and has opened a .

A beverage company started as a crypto token before breaking into Giant Eagle and 7-Eleven

In 2022, a crypto trader named , who goes by “OSF” on the internet, launched an NFT collection called . It gained an online following, and eventually Snoop Dogg of the collectible tokens. The artwork depicted hand-drawn skull characters guzzling bottles of psychedelic fluid. The collection’s irreverent energy and neon colors seemed to resonate with crypto enthusiasts, and an online fanbase formed around it. For two and a half years, Faruq kept the Rekt brand alive through a podcast called “Rekt Radio.” Then he decided to sell listeners something to drink.

It took 18 months to get from idea to product, Faruq once in an interview. The first flavor was Liquidated Lime, a caffeine-free sparkling water that sold 222,000 cans in under 48 hours of launch.

Today, shoppers can buy Rekt energy powders on . The brand’s sparkling beverages can also be found at select , on across 200 U.S. grocery stores (mostly Giant Eagle) and at 100 Waitrose stores in the U.K.

A trendy sunscreen brand has been all about leisure since day one

In 2014, a Scotland-born designer named built as a passion project. It was an internet radio site that played nothing but 1980s dance-pop for anyone who wanted to feel like they were perpetually on vacation. As niche as that may sound, it , and by 2019 the project had grown enough to rebrand as Poolsuite, perhaps foreshadowing that a “suite” of leisure-related offerings would soon follow.

Follow they did: In 2021, Bell and two co-founders launched a sunscreen line called Vacation SPF. The waitlist before the product shipped. That same year, Poolsuite released 2,500 that digital membership passes. Fans could buy one and gain limited access to exclusive beach houses and events, including in-person parties in famous vacation spots like Ibiza and Miami.

The sunscreen packaging, with its bright primary colors and vintage cursive, looks straight out of a 1985 beachwear ad. And when Vacation released a whipped cream-style sunscreen, it on TikTok.

Vacation is now stocked at , has collaborated with and , and has been searched on Amazon at least

Takeaways from these viral NFT products

So will consumers start to see more products emerging from crypto communities like the ones born from Pudgy Penguins, Rekt and Vacation?

Oliver Maroney, head of business development at OpenSea, says that while brands might look to these companies for inspiration, launching a successful product with digital tokens is harder than it looks.

“It's a significant undertaking from a logistics perspective,” said Maroney. “It’s still not that common.”

The brands that successfully make the transition from memes to mainstream shelves usually have a strong identity and a cohesive story behind what they do.

“If people love your brand and have bought into the culture or ideas behind it, they expect a certain narrative to continue. It's no different than Nike releasing a new shoe—they have to be thoughtful about their audience, what they've done before, what works and what doesn't,” Maroney explained.

That said, he argued that NFT fans have even higher expectations than the average consumer.

“It is a different dynamic when people are buying your digital tokens. There's a different level of care that these users expect,” he said.

Of course, once an item makes it to the shelves of Ulta or the aisles of Walmart, shoppers will care about what they’ve always cared about: quality. That penguin stuffy has to be soft and huggable, the beverages have to sparkle and the sunscreen has to prevent burns.

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