Barksy, the MasterPees collection is an art collective that uses a fresh storytelling approach to help shelter dogs generate funding, as well as to raise awareness about their existence, compelling street life-stories and unique, fun and quirky personalities.

How? Through art achieved with the one thing every dog uses to express themselves... their pee.

A unique approach that breaks through social media clutter, disrupts the art world, both physical (art pieces) and digital (NFTs), and engages the audience to help solve an old problem (struggling dog shelters) in a completely new and unexpected way – with pee art.

SITUATION

Only 7% of dogs in Japan homes come from dog shelters, leaving thousands of dogs with no home. Shelters, in turn, struggle with funding, resulting in more dogs having to be put down every month.

In 2020, approx. 30,000 dogs were taken over by public health centres in Japan – 4,059 of these dogs were killed.

However, to this day, lots of Japanese are not even aware of the adoption alternative.

BRIEF & OBJECTIVE

Our main objective is to bring awareness to the fact that shelter dogs exist and need our audience’s help and support, while at the same time it’s important to convey these dogs’ fun, quirky and unique personalities, together with the compelling stories setting them apart from any other dog.

So, how can we raise awareness around shelter dogs across social media to push Japan forward when it comes to shelter fundings and shelter dog adoptions?

Introducing Barksy. The MasterPees Collection. An art collective unleashing the true street artist in shelter dogs, helping them tell their own stories. Stories that set them apart to any other dog. Stories that enable them to save themselves. How? Through art achieved with the one thing every dog uses to express themselves: their pee.

We used a special canvas that reacts to pee, capturing each dogs’ essence and unique personality. Each piece was then sold physically, in art galleries and shelters, as well as digitally, in the form of fragrance-free NFTs, successfully raising awareness about shelter dogs; enabling them to save themselves, and enabling our audiences to help dog shelters beyond donations or adoptions, but instead through art. Monetizing pee art, for shelter dogs.

There were two main components to our target audience approach:

- Encouraging Adoption

reaching those considering welcoming a dog into their homes, raising awareness about shelter dogs and their fun and unique personalities

- Generating Funds

we understand not everyone can bring a dog home, those in that situation could help shelter dogs by purchasing our Barksy pee art, evolving the concept of donations to something that feels new and further rewarding.

Barksy was promoted using social media, especially through Instagram and Twitter with posts and live streams, as well as personal and press invitations to our art exhibition and dog artists meet and greets event – We Are Barksy.

Through each Barksy MasterPees, our audience could find more about each dogs’ story, characteristics, personality and how they could help to make a difference in their lives.

Dog pee is unique to each dogs’ characteristics, including information such as sex, age, and body size. So how could we use this to help us reach our objectives?

Through Barksy, The MasterPees collection, using copper-coated and litmus papers - special pee-reactive canvas known for their colour changing chemical reactions. Our stencil artist Kansuke Akaike then stencilled a portrait of each artist dog, on their one-of-a-kind artwork.

Each unique artwork was then converted into fragrance-free NFTs, so all pieces could be sold and resold on the blockchain, with all funds going directly back to shelter dogs, expanding the ways in which our audience could help:

- Through adoptions

- By purchasing the physical or the digital (NFT) art.

The price? Each artwork is priced based on the cost of feeding and medical coverage for one shelter dog at PeaceWanko – creating a direct art-purchase to dog-protection correlation.

The results proved success on both fronts – generating awareness around shelter dogs and their unique personalities, as well as raising funds to support the shelter forward.

- Barksy generated Media Exposure Worth 75 million JPY, with overwhelming media coverage and social media reactions.

- Dog adoptions increased 130% in the first 3 months

- Dogs earned 247,500 JPY per month

- Record engagement numbers and love on PeaceWanko’s owned social media channels

All featured artist dogs have been already adopted and are home with their new families.

In Japan dog adoption is extremely low and only 7% of the dogs in Japanese households are coming from shelters, which leaves thousands of dogs at risk of being put down with shelters working at and beyond capacity.

One of the main reasons why shelter dogs are not considered, is simply because Japanese are not as aware of their existence. The other main reason is because when searching for dogs, they have a series of specific characteristics in mind (behavior, looks, size, etc) – this becomes a great opportunity to leverage, communicating that shelter dogs can have those same characteristics and beyond, surprising our audience with these dogs amazing uniqueness.