From unique avatars to branded clothing and accessories, the metaverse seems to be the new destination for High-end Fashion and Lifestyle products.
Imagine playing a game with your friends while sitting thousands of miles away while adding/removing collectables and accessories of your character. Fairly ordinary occurrence in today’s times, right? Especially in the post-pandemic era. Metaverse has helped us get here – enabling users to be transported to digital settings that would feel real, such as a nightclub or a mountaintop etc. And it isn’t a far-sighted concept of the future. It’s already in use in the real world.
Think of it as the movie Matrix – it’s all around you, at every moment of your day. You just don’t always know it, not consciously at least.
Metaverse is a shared virtual space created by the convergence of enhanced virtual reality, augmented reality, and the internet. It is a digital layer of our lives – the arena where we connect, experience, and create – but online.
The metaverse, in its complete form, will exist once everything we do digitally is entirely and seamlessly linked. For now, it is still evolving. And it’s bringing several ‘connected’ aspects of our lives online while it is at it. Interestingly, the pandemic has played an important role in accelerating the pace of its evolution with the desperate need for a ‘virtual everything’ lifestyle. From here it gets all the more exciting as the possibilities unfold onto various parts of our everyday life such as attending important conferences virtually in a luxury brand limited edition tuxedo suit.
Lifestyle in the Metaverse
The lifestyle industry is now transitioning into the digital realm and expanding horizons from conventional limitations. Art is converging with NFTs – non-fungible tokens – (blurring lines in the process), and we’re seeing a gradual, but firm, move of the lifestyle product industry into the virtual space. By definition, NFTs are digital equivalents of physical, real-world products, that use blockchain to prove their authenticity and provenance. This union of tangibility and tokenization via NFT makes perfect sense in an industry driven by originality, authenticity, and exclusivity.
A number of lifestyle and high-end fashion brands hesitate to sell their collection online fearing the risks of legacy, duplicacy, and consumer experience. With the advent of blockchain and a shift in power towards the consumer, the overall luxury and lifestyle industry is in for a major overhaul. The creator and customer could lead the transformation via NFTs in a metaverse. A solution with the convergence of an avatar-driven metaverse, which our digital selves inhabit in our semblance, this tangibility moves into the digital realm, where our avatar can not only own an original item via an NFT but also make a fashion statement in the virtual space. We’re already familiar with this – from owning collectables in games to building avatars with accessories on websites like Reddit. Such wearable and usable lifestyle products on the metaverse are the next frontiers for the luxury and lifestyle industries.
Plugging Experience into Virtuality
Quite notably, this goes far beyond simply having collectables in virtual space. It is about creating an identity, providing new experiences, and establishing decentralized communities in the virtual world. To fully realize the potential of a lifestyle NFT in the metaverse, the user experience must be transformed from in-store to digital and virtual reality.
The luxury and lifestyle industries are already working hard to carve out a space for themselves in the metaverse, tapping into the massive business potential of the virtual goods market. A market, by the way, is expected to grow to a whopping $190 billion by 2025.
Some brands have already begun to move in this direction by introducing a new category of products, digital NFTs of their products. Take Loreal, for example, which recently launched a digital products category for users to use on Zoom calls. Burberry, on the other hand, introduced a digital category for gamers to wear in the games.
With Facebook declaring a shift from “primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company” and Zoom allowing individual avatars to interact in virtual meeting rooms, it’s only a matter of time before the virtual hologram scene from the movie Kingsman becomes a reality.
Trace Network Labs
Trace Network Labs (previously Trace Network) began its journey with the goal of developing an NFT-based Enterprise DeFi protocol. While it remains committed to this vision, it also intends to use its ongoing work on NFTs and the Bling marketplace to bring luxury and lifestyle industry partners into the metaverse.
The team is now resurrecting these long-term goals and will soon be working on developing a protocol that will create a lifestyle NFT-based protocol for our metaverse.
Often people seek quick fittings and look-n-feel when it comes to clothing and accessories. So their own digital avatars get to own, wear, or use these lifestyle products NFT in their preferred metaverse. Trace Network is developing multichain and multiverse lifestyle products for your digital twins, also known as avatars. By enabling consumers to carry their lifestyle along with their digital Avatars into ‘any’ metaverse, we intend to create a gateway for lifestyle brands to enter ‘any’ metaverse alongside their physical presence in the real world.
This means that the user will be able to easily transfer and travel with their NFT consumables from one metaverse to the other.
With luxury and lifestyle industry partners and celebrities joining the metaverse and offering their lifestyle product NFTs as wearables and consumables in the metaverse, a whole new world, with usable and livable virtual spaces, with a new set of product and service kits, is on the horizon and further possibilities seem fashionable for lifestyle enthusiasts.
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