Cool Cats — the producers behind an NFT collection that counts Reese Witherspoon, Marc Benioff and Alexis Ohanian as owners — has signed with CAA.
The collection was co-founded by Colin Egan, Evan Luza, Tom Williamson and Rob Mehew and first launched on the Ethereum blockchain last July. Since then, sales of the collection’s avatars — of which there are 9,999 of them — have amounted to roughly $250 million. With CAA, the producers of Cool Cats and its spinoffs Cool Pets will look to expand use of the characters across licensing and merchandising, animated content, brand partnerships, live events and publishing.
“People’s perception of Cool Cats solely exists in the NFT capacity right now, but that’s really just our launching platform for the brand as a whole, so we intend to take it in just about every avenue that we possibly can,” Luza (a.k.a. “Elu”) tells The Hollywood Reporter.
The cats that form the Cool Cats collection were originally created by Egan (a.k.a. “Clon”), who illustrated an early version of the cats in high school. Those who purchase an NFT from the collection have non-exclusive rights to use the characters, so the Cool Cats co-founders still have the rights to use the avatars for new projects, Luza explains, but the goal is to “transcend the small niche that is just NFT, blockchain-centric” and expand the Cool Cats IP outward.
“The world that we’re building is full of imagination and full of just things to explore,” Egan says. “It’s going to be more of an experience, rather than just a JPEG.”
