This contribution explores the Stoffeli®, a handcrafted physical non-fungible token (PNFT), as a material practice through which symbolic value, economic trust, and cultural memory are actively renegotiated in a context of industrial decline and socio-economic fragmentation. Originally produced by the Swiss textile firm Stoffel AG and discontinued following its sale to an American conglomerate in 1965, the Stoffeli® were once widely circulated everyday products – beautifully designed cotton handkerchiefs. Their contemporary revival—undertaken by the researcher in collaboration with the founder’s grandson—extends beyond entrepreneurial innovation and is instead conceived as a culturally embedded practice of repair. Through the creation of materially grounded value objects, the project reclaims local heritage while critically responding to the abstraction and volatility of digital economies.
Rooted in interpretive anthropology and thick description, the PhD project frames the Stoffeli® as a response to multiple interrelated collapses: the erosion of regional industrial production, the breakdown of intergenerational continuity, and the diminishing trust in dematerialised digital assets. The Stoffeli® operate at the intersection of Crypto Art and tangible value objects, positioning themselves against dominant logics of extractive capitalism. As a PNFT, it consists of a multi-material artifact embedded with distillate information based on individualised external references, such as digitally processed photographs or virtually encoded datasets. While the visual reference remains recognisable, the encoded information is secured through an analogue binary or dual coding system that is materially integrated into the object and cannot be hacked or digitally decoded. This analogue design strengthens the artifact’s intrinsic certificate and reinforces its claim to durability, security, and value (Stoffel, 2024).
Stoffeli® PNFTs are currently being distributed and used by buyers as both objects of symbolic value and financial investment. This empirical context enables an analysis of why people invest in NFTs and how similar motivations may be translated into analogue reality (Lee & Cha, 2024; Hartwich et al., 2024). At the same time, the project draws on scholarship addressing trust formation in tokenised economies (Zarifis & Cheng, 2022; Baldwin, 2021), situating the Stoffeli® within broader critiques of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2018). The research therefore critically examines the dichotomy between digital NFTs, analogue value objects, and PNFTs, proposing the latter as a literal store of value articulated through the tagline “Security, Durability, and Value for Generations.”
Drawing on symbolic anthropology, autoethnography, and Swiss economic history, the analysis situates Stoffeli® within long-standing debates on art, money, and value (Binswanger, 2005; von Braun, 2014; Martin, 2013; Dossi, 2007; Findlay, 2012; Sgourev, 2018; Haiven, 2023). Particular attention is given to Swissness and its historical association with manufactured artifacts and trust-based value systems (Charles, 2020; Somm, 2022; Haver, 2023; Müller, 2024).
By foregrounding tactility, historical layering, and material encryption, this contribution argues that PNFTs such as Stoffeli® function as artifacts of resistance—against cultural forgetting, aesthetic devaluation, and the abstraction of value—while offering art and anthropology a shared framework for reimagining security, repair, and meaning in the 21st century.
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