Yam Karkai — World of Women — women-focused PFP collection

2021

Artists: Yam Karkai, Raphael Malavieille (co-founder) · Year: 2021 · Medium: 10,000-edition PFP NFT collection featuring illustrated women portraits with diverse representation · Substrate: Ethereum; ERC-721; illustrated women-character PFPs with diverse skin-tones, features, and styles · Place: France / distributed · Institution: World of Women Yam Karkai, a French-Moroccan artist and illustrator, launched World of Women (WoW) in July 2021 as a 10,000-piece PFP NFT collection specifically designed to address the substantially-masculine demographic composition of the 2021 PFP NFT market. The collection's 10,000 characters were algorithmically generated from a base of women-character traits (skin tone, hair, clothing, expression) drawn to represent substantial racial, ethnic, and presentational diversity. The collection sold out; WoW subsequently became one of the most-commercially-successful women-led NFT projects of the period. Karkai's specific innovation was operational. The 2021 PFP market was not specifically exclusionary to women buyers, but the dominant collection aesthetics (Bored Ape's aggressive masculinity, CryptoPunks' retro-masculinity, Doodles' softer commercial-friendly cartoon) did not meaningfully support women-centered collector identification. WoW was explicitly positioned to create such an identification vector: buying a WoW meant buying into a specifically women-centered community project, and the collection's holders subsequently organized community events, charitable initiatives, and professional-networking programs under the WoW brand. The specific commercial metrics of WoW's success — the collection's floor price was substantially high through 2021-22, the project received institutional commentary from places like Vogue and Forbes, and celebrity-buyer engagement (Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria, and others) was unusually substantial — position it as one of the 2021 PFP projects that broke into mainstream-press coverage primarily through its specifically-demographic-positioned community rather than through pure commercial speculation. Karkai has continued to lead WoW through 2022-25 with additional collections (World of Women Galaxy, Women of Our Time) and sustained community initiatives. Lore Karkai had been working as a freelance illustrator in Paris with a practice that had been modestly successful but not widely-visible before the WoW launch. Her specific decision to launch a women-focused NFT project came, by her own later account, from personal observation of the 2021 NFT market's demographics and from direct conversations with women NFT-collectors who had expressed frustration with the available collection options. The 10,000-piece generative illustration was produced by Karkai essentially alone over approximately five months of intensive work; subsequent operational management has included broader team collaborations. Sources • World of Women — worldofwomen.art (project archive). • Karkai, Yam — public interviews and project governance records. • OpenSea — World of Women collection.