TOP METAVERSE FASHION NEWS 17.08.2022

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Accelerator Dedicated To Defining The Future Of Web3 Luxury Fashion

METAVERSE FASHION COUNCIL is facilitating a series of interviews among our Advisory Board Members in order to address the most important and relevant questions related to Metaverse. This interview is run by the entrepreneur and designer? Julia Daviy Berezovska ?and? Blake Lezenski , investor and Web3 expert will share his opinions and tell us more about?Dream Assembly Base Camp, the result of the collaboration between? FARFETCH and Outlier Ventures .

— Hi Blake, according to the last report of the investment giant SoftBank, this year, the amount of VC investments in the tech area will drop by 20-25 times! (Softbank recently announced an enormous loss on their investments, not sure if that's the best source given the timing) But you and your partners plan to move in an ongoing way. In particular, Outlier Ventures, in partnership with FARFETCH, plan to invest actively in startups linked with Metaverse and web 3.0. What do you see in this market that others do not see?

Hi, great to be here. Thank you for having me. Before we start, just a quick disclaimer - the views represented are my own and do not represent an official stance of OV or FARFETCH. At Outlier Ventures, we have been investing in web3 and Metaverse projects for almost nine years, guided by our thesis,?The Open Metaverse OS, becoming the most active investor globally by the volume of deals. We are an evergreen investor - invest in bear and bull markets and stick with our founders through thick and thin. Investment into web2 tech might be slowing down, but the adoption of web3 is not - for OV, it's business as usual. The partnership with FARFETCH is based on the shared perspective on the broader adoption. FARFETCH enables us to empower the founders with their vast fashion network, market-leading brand, world-class luxury fashion mentors and their eagle-eye view of the entire fashion supply chain. The combined knowledge and experience in fashion and web3 makes FARFETCH and OV a match made in the Metaverse heaven that provides a unique mix of support that founders need to succeed in the space.

— What do ideal participants of your accelerator look like and what will they get from participating in its program?The ideal participant represents a diversity of thought and background, a combination of creativity and coachability. They are storytellers that can effectively communicate their vision but also know how to drive execution. They demonstrate long-term resilience and adaptability to the fast-changing market. They understand the market dynamics and are realistic about the competitive landscape and timing. In Web3 luxury fashion, they represent domain expertise, knowing things that others don't and started developing a network in the space that we can help grow. Finally, they prioritise learning by doing and are excited to fill gaps in their knowledge.The program is a 3 months fully remote accelerator dedicated to defining the future of web3 luxury fashion. We help teams with every aspect of a web3 startup, from legal, commercial, fundraising support, marketing and community, NFT strategy, token economics and design. The only thing we cannot do for you is to build your tech. Access to the combined network of Farfetch and OV, in-house specialists and mentors is something we prioritise from day 1 - in fashion, your network is your net worth and can make or break your brand. The program comes with $150k cash provided upfront, but this is just a cherry on top of our partnership's value add to cohort teams. The best way to describe it is that for 3 months, we act like your co-founder on web3 steroids that knows everyone in the space. The applications close on the 19th of August and we make offers to teams on a rolling basis so I wouldn’t wait to?apply.

2 Trillion Opportunity By 2030

by Slava Noor with Lauren (ALTRA) Kacher Miki Elson Denis Belkevich Sonia Stubblebine

Fuelarts together with Denis Belkevich and DAO METAVERSE FASHION COUNCIL have recently hosted a webinar in order to discuss collaboration between metaverse fashion and digital arts, NFT technology in the fashion sector, financial opportunities for fashion brands in Metaverse and much more. Here are some of the highlights from the webinar:

— "2 trillion opportunities by 2030". What does this number stand for?

“2 trillion opportunities by 2030”. What does this number stand for? Everyone understands that no company can get $2 trillion alone. Yet, according to the recent McKinsey report, Metaverse has a potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030 and it is a fair guess that the fashion industry would take up about $2 trillion. This market can be taken by young startups, developing Metaverse Metaverse already today. There are many forecasts as well as speculations on the future of Metaverse Fashion Metaverse, but we already understand that DAOs (not the big brands as in physical world) will play a key role in Metaverse Fashion. This can be explained by the decentralized nature of metaverse as well as by GenZ’s desire to manage their own assets (as well as their identity through the world of fashion). From 2023 we're enreaching Fuelarts' mentors team specialized in Art+Tech & NFT with digital fashion designers and metaverse architects. These mentors will help startups, that are merging art and fashion in the metaverse. Denis Belkevich

—?From 2020 we see a lot of collaborations between fashion brands and digital artists / NFT startups. Do you think these brands try to speak the digital language of Gen Z, persuading them into buying real clothes? Or these brands see full-fledged digital apparel as the future? What do fashion brands currently create within Metaverse?

With the latest release of the Tiffany’s x Crypto Punks project, it was interesting to see the fashion industry connect directly to a crypto native community and to customize a product with no true connection to their own current market or brand audience. This strategy leveraged existing holders within key web3 communities using the access already proven to be valuable and reduced the risk of the brand needing to invest in it themselves. To truly characterize a project as web3, I believe it should authentically align with the brand message, leverage new and existing communities through an open dialogue, and utilize the revolutionary technology that is the blockchain Lauren Kacher

—?How can NFT technology improve and develop the fashion sector? What issues can NFT possibly solve within the industry? What makes MFC special?

NFT technology can democratise access to the industry for both creators and fans. By providing transparency through on-chain data we can start to make the fashion supply chain sustainable and purpose driven. We can allow creators and designers all around the world direct access to consumers and events through the metaverse. Culture and ideation will be nurtured and supported globally and locally, direct to consumer. New forms of creativity, meaning and production will be born through DAO and decentralised collaboration methods, that remove the need for gatekeepers in the industry.What makes Metaverse Fashion Council special is that we are dedicated to supporting the development of the whole digital fashion ecosystem. Focused on community driven standards, transparency and creative incubation. We provide advisory, education and project launch/collaborations services to the rapidly growing industry, while providing a safe and equal space for DAO members to share knowledge and learn.

The Metaverse Will Enhance — Not Replace — Companies’ Physical Locations

Harvard Business Review by Vladislav Boutenko Richard Florida and?Julia Jacobson

If the combination of Covid-19 and remote work technologies like Zoom have?undercut the role of cities in economic life, what might an even more robust technology like the metaverse do? Will it finally be the big upheaval that obliterates the role of cities and density? To?paraphrase Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky: The place to be was Silicon Valley. It feels like now the place to be is the internet.

The simple answer is no, and for a basic reason. Wave after wave of technological innovation — the telegraph, the streetcar, the telephone, the car, the airplane, the internet, and more — have brought predictions of the demise of physical location and the death of cities. Time and time again, such prognostications have been proven wrong. And while the pandemic?has?changed?where and how people work, the trend of talented people, innovation, and economic activity becoming increasingly concentrated in fewer and larger superstar locations has?consistently proven durable. Cities?aren’t going anywhere.

Still, the metaverse?feels?different. Its combination of technologies driven by virtual and augmented reality promises to make the virtual world a far more realistic substitute for the physical one. New remote work and virtual collaboration tools like Meta’s Horizon Workrooms, Microsoft’s Mesh, and Arthur are huge advances beyond Zoom and will enable workers to brainstorm, discuss, and interact with one another’s avatars. They will create a much more realistic consumer experience for shopping for everything from fashion and luxury goods to art. It’s easy to see why such an advanced technology might render cities and physical locations obsolete.

But the reality is that this metaverse, like each major previous wave of innovation before it, is less a substitute for location and more a complement to it. Even as the metaverse enables a far more realistic experience of the digital world and enables us to do many more things online — expanding access to rich content and wider pools of talent, lowering switching costs between locations and transaction costs in general, and vastly augmenting data-based decision making and personalization — it will still be unable to replicate the emotional cues, body language, serendipity, and diversity that happen when human beings cluster and collaborate in real places.

The irony is that even as it stretches out the nature of location and enables workers and consumers to connect from just about anywhere, the metaverse is likely to reduce the set of places that truly matter. Only a relatively small number of large global cities have the size, scale, and connective infrastructure to function as the global collaborative hubs. These superstar cities will continue to be the great clusters of innovation, global corporate headquarters, flagship locations for high-end brands, and the world’s leading artistic, cultural, and research institutions.

The metaverse will make physical location a more — not less — important consideration for business. To some extent, this is already playing out: Cities like?Dubai and Shanghai?are launching strategies aimed at attracting metaverse-focused businesses and people. For brands, this could mean ideal locations to experiment among enthusiastic early adopters. Companies will have to think more strategically than ever before about where to place offices and innovation hubs to attract and connect talent, where to locate retail shops to attract customers and heighten brand awareness, and more generally how to balance their physical and virtual footprints.

The Metaverse and Cities Are Complements

In order to think strategically about the metaverse and location, it is important to understand the way the two act as complements to one another. Here it’s useful to think of both as a channel — each good for transmitting different kinds of information.

The metaverse is a channel for delivering and using a lot of information in a convenient form. It builds on and is a step beyond previous digital channels like Zoom, email, messengers, chatrooms, and social networks. It will deliver video, sounds, pictures, text information, data, simulated videos, and avatars at tremendous bandwidth. A?2018 study?estimated that 20 minutes in a virtual reality simulation allows some two million or so body language recordings. This substantial and immersive virtual connection offers real advantages. Companies can collect richer data across broader networks than is possible in the physical world or existing digital channels. For many companies, this means new, cost-effective ways to improve their products, processes, and experiences. While some of this may involve virtual reality, it can also include more readily accessible modes like smartphone-enabled augmented reality.

While it is an improvement on what came before, the metaverse still will be insufficient to replace the fidelity of the physical world. It is the difference between experiencing a live performance as opposed to viewing one online. The physical world can deliver much deeper social, emotional, and sensory data — the ability to pick up on emotional cues, or influence the room by modulating voice, moving around, and using body language. This kind of interaction remains necessary to build trust and social capital over time.

The metaverse is a mechanism for enhancing the physical world. A museum tour will be much more realistic supplemented by metaverse technology. A person shopping for a home will be able to take a much richer online tour of the property and the neighborhood before opting for a physical visit. Augmented reality glasses can add an overlay to a live event — live stats at a basketball game or viewer comments at a talk that’s also being livestreamed. More to the point, a company might simulate and test a product digitally — a new shoe design, for instance — and tailor the final product according to social feedback before producing a physical version. Workers can engage online and prepare for their much richer on-site physical collaborations. In this way, the metaverse and physical spaces are better understood and acted on strategically in concert and together.

Consumer Engagement Across the Virtual and Physical Worlds

A good example is customer engagement and the retail experience. A couple of decades ago, e-commerce revolutionized how businesses engage customers by adding a virtual channel alongside the physical one. The metaverse offers rich new opportunities for gathering data to improve consumer engagement and experiences. Companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Apple are building AR headsets that will enable consumers to engage in live events such as conferences, performances, and sports games as if they were physically there, with the additional overlay of digital content, data, and messages. Metaverse-enabled technologies could drive the next wave of personalization. And indeed companies are already trialing new ways to enrich the customer experience through things like?metaverse games with NFT rewards, exclusive drops and experiences to reward?loyal “real world” customers, and?digital twins of physical goods. So far, companies have dipped their proverbial toes in the water here by porting the real world into the digital one — for example,?virtual burritos,?Wendyverses, and?re-creating urban districts virtually?in places like Decentraland. These are fun, but to date they offer little promise of replacing the rich experience of the physical world.

This is a sizable improvement over what is available today, but still no replacement for seeing, feeling, or experiencing products and services in the real world. Consumer spending — especially among millennials — continues to shift from products toward experiences, and the enduring lesson from two and a half years of Zoom fatigue is that screens do not satisfy our desire to interact in person. This is what cities are particularly good at providing. In doing so, they provide platforms for using digital and physical channels as complements that reinforce each other.

Companies, including digital-native ones, have often used physical stores in key urban hubs — whether through permanent locations or temporary pop-ups during peak times — as complements to their digital strategies.?Glossier?uses its physical retail spaces to engage consumers and promote its brand with a highly Instagram-friendly store design, uniting its physical and digital channels.?Nordstrom’s Local?model uses small-scale, service-oriented physical locations to augment its e-commerce offerings in key urban hubs like New York City and Los Angeles.?Meta is opening a physical store?to sell its AR/VR devices to access the metaverse. Instead of replacing actual stores, physical spaces can provide a way for customers to access the metaverse — maybe for the first time — and experience the latest AR/VR technologies. Physical spaces and locations combine with metaverse technology to offer more opportunities to add value by enriching experiences. Read more...