Every now and then, business landscapes undergo transformative changes that redefine what the needs of consumers are and how they interact with products. Brands looking to achieve sustained success over a long period of time must make adjustments to their value propositions to cater for new consumers’ needs and maintain competitiveness. Over the last few years, the global fashion industry has been witnessing a new trend characterized by young fashion enthusiasts craving for and exploring new ways to express themselves and interact with fashion products.
This new trend has resulted in fashion brands taking their products to metaverse platforms where there is a sizable number of fashion consumers, particularly young people aged between 16-24 (Gen-Z). Metaverse platfroms, as has already been extensively explained, are basically virtual and digital spaces where multi-dimensional digital arts and animations are employed to engage individuals in immersive experiences. These kind of arts and animations have found innovative and impressive expressions in gaming, as there are now a growing number of gaming platforms with metaverse spaces. Two of the most notable examples of gaming platforms that have incorporated metaverse technologies into their gameplay include Roblox and Sandbox. Roblox, for instance, is a gaming platform with 70 million active daily users. A few prevalent ways that fashion brands employ to establish their presence on these platforms are through Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and fashion-themed games featuring virtual worlds.
The idea of launching fashion themed games is to use the games to showcase fashion products and enable gamers, which make up for a large majority of young fashion consumers (Gen-Z), to make fashion items purchases through game-play. This is an innovative marketing approach. This section identifies a few examples of high profile brands that have explored the metaverse to market and sell their products. These are highlighted below: