British luxury department store Harvey Nichols launched an NFT space called “HN NFT Vault” in its branch in the Pacific Place mall in Hong Kong yesterday.
For Londoners, Harvey Nichols is synonymous with a two-hundred-year-old premise located in Knightsbridge, an international retail center in the city’s West End.
Harvey Nichols and NFTs are not an obvious match, but as of yesterday, the brand may have become the first luxury department store to exhibit and retail NFTs.
The HN NFT Vault hosts a variety of “top blue-chip projects, for exploration and sale,” including CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, CloneX x Takashi Murakami, Azuki, and Doodles.
The majority of NFTs in the collection can be bought with crypto and credit cards. The store promises “a seamless purchasing journey.” Prices range from 5,000 Hong Kong dollars (currently $637) at the lower end to a million HK ($127,000) at the top.
NFTs can also be purchased with a “cold wallet” (a type of crypto wallet that does not connect to the internet), where the NFT can be securely stored.
Harvey Nichols: an NFT gameplan?
Harvey Nichols’ new retail concept space probably won’t be a limited pop-up; it looks like it plans to stick around.
In a press statement, the store said: “Through the new space, Harvey Nichols aims to make NFTs more accessible to a broader audience by featuring a range of NFTs from some of the most successful projects globally available for in-store exploration and purchase.”
Harvey Nichols also encourages current NFT owners to exhibit and sell their NFTs through the HN NFT Vault. Still, he says that only “select, reputable projects” will be selected after first having been vetted by the store.
At the end of last year, the luxury store dipped its toes into the NFT market by announcing a competition for UK and Hong Kong customers to win an avatar from RTFKT Studios’ Clone X Project.