From doodling on a notepad in finance meetings to creating the popular NFT collection Rektguy, Ovie Faruq's journey shows how web3 can turn a creative side hustle into a thriving brand.

As the CEO and Co-Founder of Rekt Brands and the rapidly expanding Rekt Drinks, Faruq, better known as OSF, has masterfully merged traditional consumer products with web3 principles, creating a brand that resonates both within and beyond crypto communities.

What began as a free NFT mint in 2022 has evolved into something much bigger – a brand with a strong community, innovative rewards, and IRL products. Most recently, RektDrinks has partnered with OpenSea to create a limited-edition flavor launching June 3. OSF shares with us how his background, combined with a passion for art and technology, led to the creation of a brand that is attracting everyone from NFT enthusiasts like Snoop Dogg to traditional beverage consumers.

The following interview explores Rekt's journey, its approach to community building, the challenges of bringing a digital brand into physical products, and hints at what's coming next as they continue to blend web3 community with mainstream consumers.

Note: This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

OpenSea: I know you originally started your career in traditional finance, and you did that for around 10 years. What prompted a shift in your career and how did it influence Rektguy?‍‍

OSF: Yeah, that's a good question. I sort of started buying crypto while I was still at my old job, just on a personal basis. I started with Bitcoin, then bought ETH, and like everyone else, I kind of got lost in NFTs — basically went down the rabbit hole. I got really, really deep into NFTs, and I just found it really fun and enjoyable to be involved in that part of the world because I have a really strong interest in technology, a really strong interest in art, and a really strong interest in finance and trading. This felt like everything in one.

I just got completely stuck into NFTs. I had some time off work, and when I went back to my job, I think pretty much on the first day, I just didn't feel that motivated. I was so infused by the world of crypto and NFTs that I just wasn't really connected to my old work anymore. I remember one day, I was on a phone meeting, kind of zoned out, and I started doodling on my notepad. I ended up sketching this skull, skeleton character wearing a hoodie. I thought it looked kind of cool, so I decided to mint it as an NFT. I sold it as a one-of-one, and someone actually bought it. I was like, "Oh wow, someone actually paid money for this."

Then I made another piece, then another, and over time, they started to sell for higher prices. I started to get a bit of traction as a creator, and I noticed this recurring character across all my pieces. So, I thought, why not make this into a profile picture project? That was the fun thing at the time, but it wasn't really a main focus for me. I spent my evenings and weekends working on it, but I didn't have any plans to monetize it. I just gave the entire thing away for free. It ended up being a free mint, and that became Rektguy. We launched it in 2022, right when the markets crashed, and everyone kind of identified with being 'wrecked.'

I think that was when we hit this viral point. The whole thing was kind of an accident - maybe 'accident' is the wrong word, but I had no real plans for what we're doing now. It just all transpired over time, organically, I guess.

OpenSea: Since it was 2022 and the markets weren't doing that well, is that why you decided on the free mint? ‍

OSF: Yeah, I think the main reason I made it free was because I just didn't want people to have expectations of it, you know? I felt like I made something quite cool, and I wanted people to own it and appreciate it, but I didn't want to make money from it. For me, it wasn't like, "Oh, let me just sell this and make a load of money." It was more like, I just want people to appreciate this collection without having any expectations of me.

And when we launched it, I think I specifically stated, "We have no road map. It's a free mint. It's just art." And that's all it was ever meant to be to be honest with you.

OpenSea: One of them sold to Snoop Dogg, right? Was that like really where it started to pick up for you and did you think, "Oh, I could also make a career out of this”?

OSF: Yeah, I think so. I think at that point in time, we'd started gaining traction. I remember I was at a bachelor party, halfway through drinking a beer, and someone was like, "Hey, Snoop Dogg just bought two Rektguys." And I was like, "What? What the hell?" That was a really surreal and crazy moment.

And yeah, at that point, it wasn't like, "Oh yes, I can make a career out of this," but it was clear to me that there was something to it. There was something about Rekt. I couldn't quite pinpoint it, but clearly, people identified with it a lot. We spent the next two years building a really strong community, even through a very bad bear market. Organically, we were able to attract people who stuck around for a long time and stuck around for the right reasons.

So, it was only really one and a half, two years later where I felt like myself and my co-founders were like, okay, there's obviously something here. I think we can be bigger than just an NFT collection and just a Discord and Twitter account. We felt like people strongly resonated with this ideology of being 'wrecked,' and we realized there was a bigger opportunity to make it into a more recognizable brand, not only within crypto and on the internet but also outside of it. That's when we started thinking about what we could do next, and how we ended up with the idea for drinks. But yeah, it was just over time we felt more and more like, damn, we should really try and do something here because it's an opportunity.‍

OpenSea: Yeah, it sounds like you saw the potential to fully lean into this and transform it from an NFT project to something much bigger. You’ve mentioned in the past, "Web3 principles allow you to build a brand and IP in an accelerated fashion." Could you elaborate on the specific web3 principles that have been most valuable for Rekt?

OSF: Yeah, absolutely. I think the history of what we've done is really about growing a community by giving things away for free and getting people involved in our ecosystem. So, you know, I mentioned Rektguy was a free mint, and after people minted it, they were able to earn loads of free stuff from what we did in the future. When we incorporated the company, Rekt Brands Inc., we actually gifted equity in that company to all our NFT holders. So now, our entire community actually owns part of the company.

And I think we were the first crypto-related company to actually do that, and do it in a compliant way. We also have our Rekt token, which was airdropped to people. Many of the people who got involved in our community never spent a single dollar on anything, but they've made money from it. They've been invested in the story, and they still are. And I think especially with the equity component, there are probably hundreds of people out there who have never owned private equity in their lives and maybe never would, but now they own a stake in this company, which is starting to do really well. All of this is really only possible with web3. 

It's this idea of like, when you buy a Coca-Cola, you drink it and that's kind of it. That's your entire engagement with them. Maybe it tastes good, maybe it's kind of cool, but that's where it ends.

But when you buy a Rekt drink, you end up being part of everything we're doing, almost like a stakeholder. That's a very material difference between traditional B2C principles and web3. If I woke up tomorrow and decided to start a drinks company, it would be very hard. It's a super competitive, saturated industry. But because of the way people are rewarded within web3, we were able to grow a large community in a very short space of time. Now, when we want to make a product, we have an army of people backing it. I think that's the big difference, and that's what I mean when I talk about web3 principles allowing you to grow that IP very quickly.

OpenSea:Yeah, that's really cool the way you've integrated ownership and rewards for Rekt. I know for Rekt Drinks, it took around 18 months to fully launch. What were the biggest challenges throughout that entire process?

OSF: Yeah. I mean, look, we've been a team of three full-time people, so it's a very, very small team. And we have zero experience in drinks, CPG, or manufacturing. Like, completely zero experience. My background is in finance, so it's one thing to draw an NFT and mint it with a few clicks, but to actually manufacture a physical product in quantities is really tough. We went through a huge learning curve.

When we did our first batch, which was supposed to be 15,000 cans, we lost 5,000 cans. The original cans basically peeled because of the pasteurization process, and when we shipped them, they were all damaged in transit. We thought it would take about three months to manufacture drinks, but the whole process ended up taking like 12 months because we had so many mishaps.

And when you're starting out, most manufacturers have been working with the same big drinks companies for decades, making hundreds of thousands or millions of cans every year. So when you come to them and say, "Hey, I want to make 15,000 cans," you don't really get the customer support. People are slow to respond in the traditional world. It's not like web3, where it's a quick Discord message or Telegram ping. In this world, you're calling a landline in rural Scotland, trying to figure out what's going on.

It was tough. But now that we're manufacturing larger quantities and have been through the process two or three times, we've gotten better at it. We know where we made mistakes, and we know what we need to get ahead of each iteration. But yeah, there were times when we thought about just calling it quits, but we just soldiered through.

OpenSea: Well, it's good that you did since you guys consistently sold out! Pretty fast too with Liquidated Lime and Abstract Apple. Was it surprising to you that it sold out that quickly? Did you think there would be a high demand for it?

OSF: It's a good question. When we did the first one [Liquidated Lime], it was still very hypothetical. We'd never sold drinks before, and we just went straight in with this massive quantity of 222,000 cans. We just shot our shot and went big. I had no idea if people would care, if they'd buy it, or if it would just flop. It was unproven as a concept. But it sold out in under 48 hours, which definitely surpassed my expectations. I thought maybe we'd have to push it really hard for a couple of weeks to get it sold out, but it just happened, that was really crazy. I guess the concept maybe worked, but we weren't really sure because we'd only done it once. 

And then, when we got around to the second drop [Abstract Apple], I was like, well, we did it once and it was a success, but can we do it again? Like, was it a one-hit wonder? Will people really care the second time around? I had real concerns about that. We even thought about reducing the supply multiple times, but we just went for it.

The reception from the Abstract community felt so strong and powerful, and from our social engagement, we could feel the momentum was there. So, I was like, cool, if we can sell out in under 24 hours, that would be an amazing result. But then it sold out in 40 minutes. Europe sold out in 13 minutes, and the US sold out in 16 minutes. That was just crazy, way beyond my expectations. I had no idea it would go that fast. After that, I was like, okay, I really think we're onto something here. Now that we've done it twice, it's not a one-hit wonder, and I think we can do some cool stuff going forward.

OpenSea: That’s amazing! I had the Liquidated Lime one in Marfa. I was like, "Oh, perfect. Here's my chance to try it." You guys have the DRANK points system that seems to be a key engagement mechanism. Are you able to discuss the philosophy behind creating the loyalty program?

OSF: So, the way the DRANK point system works is that every time we launch a season, people are able to earn points for doing social quests. In the first season, people could earn points for making content, and they could also earn points for buying drinks. I think a lot of companies have loyalty programs like this, but for us, it’s different because we airdropped REKT coin to people based on the DRANK points they earned. Some people made between three to 10 times their money on buying drinks, depending on when they sold the coin and how long they held it.

And with the second drop we just did with Abstract, people were able to earn DRANK points, and there will be a REKT airdrop. They were also able to earn Abstract XP as well. It’s like how in crypto, people dangle a carrot in front of you — like, "Hey, we’ll give you an airdrop for conducting on-chain activity." But going back to the whole web3 principles accelerating IP, we've done the same thing but with incentivizing off-chain behavior. That's how I view that system working.

OpenSea: I know you previously mentioned that 50% of sales were fiat and only 50% of people claimed DRANK points. Was that surprising to you? Did it tell you anything about your customer base and how did it influence your strategy going forward?

OSF: Yeah, it was really surprising to me. The first time around, it was about 50/50, fiat to crypto. The second time around, it was more like 65/35. So there's a really big fiat component. That was surprising because it means there are clearly a lot of non-crypto people buying these drinks.

I think a big part of that is we really encouraged our holders to get their friends and family to buy the drinks. Like, if each person gets just one non-crypto person to buy, that adds up quickly. For a lot of people, they don't want to do the whole crypto thing, so we just said, fine, send them to rekt.com, it's our Shopify site where they can pay with a credit card. It's easy.

And I think most people did that. I even got some of my friends and family to buy drinks. So that makes sense for the first drop, why it ended up being around 50/50. And for the second drop, I think we've started to build a bit of a web2 following, which is why it skewed more towards fiat. It's surprising, but it's also encouraging to see that we're getting non-crypto people into what we're doing. 

OpenSea: Yeah, it’s a good way to have people in web2 onboard into web3 without having a big jump. So you have Rektguy AI, which also creates really cool artwork. I think that X account is super interesting. What prompted you to create that?

OSF: Yeah, I think AI is going to become really big within crypto, and I'm really fascinated by AI agents, especially from an art and creativity standpoint. I just think it's really cool. So, we trained the AI agent on my style of artwork, which includes animations and everything.

What the agent does is it reads crypto Twitter, generates a prompt for something that's topical within crypto, and then creates a piece of artwork based on that prompt using the trained model. I just think conceptually, it's a really cool thing to be able to do that.

And you know, in this day and age where everyone's trying to figure out how to use AI to become more efficient, help with marketing, and all that kind of stuff, this felt like the perfect use case for us. I was like, let's make our AI agent our number one fan. All it does is talk about Rekt and how bullish it is on web3, and it makes artwork alongside that.

I spent time writing the code and creating the model myself. It was really an experimental thing I think more than anything else. I think everything I've always done has kind of been experimental and then it eventually evolves into something. At this stage, it's still experimental, but I just find it really fun to see what it comes up with.

Over time, it starts to remember all the data and kind of grow its personality, which I think is pretty funny. We've even put in a little backstory, like how the agent likes to go to the pub a lot, gets drunk, and then starts talking about Rekt to random people. It's just meant to be a bit of fun, really, in everything that we're doing.

OpenSea: Yeah, it's cool to see how these agents can evolve over time as they learn and develop. Speaking of creative collaborations, I’m excited about our partnership with Rekt Drinks. What can consumers expect?

OSF: So, we originally started speaking to OpenSea because I’m really good friends with Matt Miller [Balon]. He said we should do something with the AI art stuff, and we were like, oh, maybe we should just do an OpenSea drink – that would be cool. With Abstract, it was like, okay, it's a consumer chain, how do we get involved? We didn't have anything actually on-chain, so we just said, let's make an Abstract drink.

And then with OpenSea, we were like, why don't we do this cool thing where we make an OpenSea drink and sell it on OpenSea’s marketplace? Wouldn't that be a really cool crypto-native thing to do, but with an actual IRL product?

So that's what we decided to do, and the OpenSea guys were really keen to do it. They were like, yeah, let's just do it, we can have OpenSea XP with each purchase, as well. So people will be rewarded both on the Rekt side and the OpenSea side. Plus, we can have it at events. We're going to be in Lisbon next month, and I think OpenSea will be there too, so it'll be great to have the drinks at all these events.

Fortunately we had one flavor, and I actually don't want to give away what the flavor is because it'll be good to see when people try it, but we had one flavor that had been through the testing. So, like, okay, we had the flavor done. Then we worked with [OpenSea] on the design. It was pretty easy — use the OpenSea colors, get the ship silhouette in the background as a print. We also have a really cool name for the flavor, which was just a natural fit. It was a pretty smooth process overall, and the team was really easy and helpful to work with.

OpenSea: I’m glad! Yeah, once I joined the Slack channel, I was scrolling through previous messages because I wanted to see what the cans looked like and they were really cool. I'm excited to try it. At this point you guys have the NFTs, host IRL events, have a podcast, and have consumer products. What's next?

OSF: Yeah. So, we've just launched flavored sparkling water, but we've been in development of other products actually for the last few weeks.

So within the drink space, it won't just be limited to flavored sparkling water. And then within just the whole like food and beverage space, it won't be limited to just drinks. And I think the functional nutrition space is something that's really really taking off right now. You know, it's big. People love to have clean energy drinks. People love to have focus drinks. People love to have hydration powder, protein. All this stuff is massive now, and it's growing quickly. It's also something I have a personal interest in. I like to think I'm pretty healthy — I like working out, I like playing sports, and everyone on our team is into that too. So, it feels like a natural extension for us.

We've been in development on products in this space, and I think that's when we'll really hit the mainstream. Right now, this is a great novel product for web3, and I think traditional people like it as well.

The growth in the functional space, which is what it's called, is massive. It's like three times the growth in just sparkling water. That's what's got all the supermarkets and distributors interested. We definitely want to enter that space. And hopefully, in the second half of the year, we'll have some of those products ready to launch. We're really keen to get mainstream distribution. It's amazing to be able to sell these products DTC right now and grow that grassroots feeling, but our goal is to make Rekt a global brand, both in and outside of crypto. To do that, we need to be able to sell and stock as many units as possible. That means traditional distribution, traditional wholesale, and being in every single supermarket, just like you might find any other mainstream brand.

We've been working with some experienced people in the beverage industry, both in the US and in Europe, and I'm hopeful that by the end of the year, we'll get some good results that people can get excited about.

OpenSea: Oh, cool! I can't wait to see what it is.

OSF: Yeah, it's going to be fun, I think.

OpenSea: Well, thank you for taking the time to chat with me!

OSF: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot, Hannah.