Do you want to shop in the metaverses real estate, with 3D garments, motion and virtual experiences using your personalised avatar. Or, would you prefer to shop on a traditional e-commerce 2D platform?
The user owner Amazon is coming.
Fashion houses are starting to create digital twins of their collections, with the intent to mint NFTs. One benefit of this, is that this asset is trackable, allowing visibility to the full life cycle of the product.
This allows brands to fully understand and report on the circularity of their product. It also means that the customer can replicate their item of clothing in their alternate reality, their virtual world, the metaverse and they know, because they own the NFT and their asset is authentic.
Creating digital twins isn’t just happening for clothing. Brands such as Nike and Adidas are already building cities, head offices, stores and experiences in the metaverse using platforms such as Decentraland, Sandbox, Cornucopias and Axie Infinity.
These decentralised metaverses are selling parcels of land off as NFTs, which means it’s unique and can’t be duplicated, basically the same as buying physical land in real life. These parcels of land are divided up into interactive, specific zones such as the gambling district, the shopping district and the sports district etc. Once a company buys a parcel or a few parcels, they can build, resell or lease, just like in the real world
Thus far, fashion real estate seems to be a very popular and prized asset. Within Decentraland, Boson bought a giant mall for $700 thousand back in May to create a virtual mall. The retail space will allow players of Decentralands browser-based game to purchase digital assets they can then exchange for physical goods and services. Estate owner and digital real estate firm Republic Realm is turning an estate it bought back in June for $913 thousand into a virtual shopping district. If these prices weren’t insane enough, back in November, a sought after piece of land within the fashion district sold for £2.4 million to Token, a crypto investor betting big on the future of this metaverse. The fashion district of Decentralands map may play a central role in the future of virtual commerce; hosting events, selling virtual clothing, and helping to bring more brands into the ecosystem.
There is no doubt that this will open the doors to emerging and smaller brands who will be able to enter into this digital twin eco-system and rent or buy spaces to showcase their digital collections. Brands will be able to sell their digital assets to customers who can try the garments on their personalised avatar. Once they are happy they can click through to the real retail side and the physical garment can then be shipped to the customer. This provides a unique shopping experience and synergises the world of digital twins in both the retail and e-commerce space.
Can you imagine the opportunities that this level of immersion can give to brands. This will not only improve their acquisition rates but will improve their retention because all of these experiences enhance the overall value stream.