Open Letter from Addie Tan, Associate Director, Business Development

In recent years, the gaming industry has attracted many players from outside the endemic space. For many, this meant the acceptance of gaming into mainstream culture – but what I’ve learned is that gaming was always its own culture, and it wasn’t the kind that sought to fit in. Having come from a nonendemic background myself, I quicky noticed and appreciated this about the gaming community, and that inspired me to stay true to myself as I embarked on a new challenge with Razer.

As the Associate Director of Business Development, I head up Razer Apparel. In my role I’ve had to build a team responsible for not only launching a new business within the Razer ecosystem, but also making this new lifestyle vertical endemic to the industry. This task came with its unique set of challenges but throughout it all, I stayed true to my vision, and to the company’s ethos to keep gamers at the heart of everything we do, and that has been the key to our success. So, while the rest of the world tried to bring fashion to gaming, we stayed true – we brought gaming to fashion.

In the spirit of keeping true, since sustainability has always been an important cause for me, I made sure I integrated it into my role. As a matter of fact, one of the proudest milestones of my career was working to bring Sneki Snek, our sustainability mascot, to life. The adorable snake has been a fan favorite since inception, and the adventures of Sneki have just been incredible. What started out as a doodle quickly became a beloved character on a mission to save the planet, starting with his first cause – saving trees. In partnership with Conservation International, we’ve already saved almost a million trees! With every sale of Sneki Snek merchandise, we allocate a portion of the proceeds to CI to save trees.?Not only has he rallied the community behind him giving gamers an opportunity to contribute to our green causes, but he also went on to star in his own animation series educating the community about the issues and solutions to the environmental challenges we are currently facing.

I feel lucky that I get to work for an organization that reflects at me that same passion to save the environment. This has allowed me to experiment and excel in my role. For instance, one of our earlier Apparel drops was the Kanagawa Wave collection, which was made using recycled marine plastics. The production process was more complicated, but it was all worth it when we saw how well received by our community the entire collection was – it sold out immediately. That collection was just the beginning of marrying sustainability with apparel – we announced more amazing partnerships geared towards sustainability after that. Last year at RazerCon we announced a partnership with Panerai to support marine conservation, and shortly after we collaborated with Cariuma to release a sustainable sneaker featuring none other than Sneki Snek.

Starting up Razer Apparel was my role, but I took it and made it my own by including sustainability. I wanted to pave my own path in the industry and have found myself at a company of gamers who always remind me of that lesson: stay true.

Paving a path for yourself in a new industry, or any industry for that matter will come with its own set of challenges, but I’ve learned that if you stay authentic you will always be successful.