Metaverse Fashion Week, NFTs, wearables, and future retail locations are some of the digital fashion industry’s expected growth. The CFDA’s latest $15,000 NFTs with Coach, Michael Kors, Tommy Hilfiger, and others, or “digital couture house” Auroboros, seem to ignore the experiential element that premium consumers value. However, premium clients have yet to see a true innovation jump. After FTX and Bitcoin’s falls, we sometimes seem to be floating in the same air.
A minority of digital immigrants behave differently. Zero10, a 2020 AR fashion platform developed by George Yashin, uses try-on technology to bridge the gap between the traditional and digital fashion. Former Ralph Lauren digital executive Alice Delahunt will establish Syky in 2023. London-based Xydrobe. We examine a prospective player that could change your shopping habits.
Xydrobe?
“Zai-drobe” Xydrobe promises “a physical venue and experience that will enhance your premium apparel experience.” Enterprises have physical and digital parts.
“Xydrobes” are 2.5-meter fiberglass spheres that can be entered. Wheelchair-accessible, it suits 99th percentile males. Sit or stand inside. The nine surround sound speakers, scent machine, temperature and wind machine, a premium headset that measures eye movement, and scent machine allow marketers to house smells or mirror the environment with a particular smell. Visual and aural cues help customers through the digital experience.
Inside these Xydrobes will be customized virtual experiences, whereby customers can get access to a unique landscape that the brands have designed themselves that can either speak to the history or future of the brand, its present day, but it doesn’t look anything like a shop,’ Nell Lloyd-Malcolm, CEO states Wallpaper. ‘It can be whatever they want. Customers will be able to shop real products, such as limited editions available exclusively via the Xydrobe, as well as other treasures that might inspire greater connection to the brand.’
The appeal is broad. “At the moment, we are mostly working and talking with top-tier luxury brands that span from fashion, jewelry, real estate, beauty, automobiles, to fragrance,” Lloyd-Malcolm says. “The traction we’ve had to date has been a resounding yes from every single one of our brands. Eight founding brand partners for each premium vertical with multiple retail locations have ordered Xydrobes (all currently under NDA). The 2024 “at home” headset application has many confirmed companies.
Xylab, pronounced “zai-lab,” was formed as a sister brand of Xydrobe to handle the flood of requests from businesses for help with increasingly complex digital needs. Chief Marketing Officer Michael Pegrum said Xylab is the greatest place for businesses to assess their NFTs, Web3 strategy, retail-based VFX content, and digital or LED experiences.
Xydrobe can build digital and sensory worlds for brands without the skills or confidence to do so. “Brands we’ve been working with so far are trusting us a lot creatively with what their worlds might be like and what they could create within that experience because they don’t have pre-existing teams that already work in this kind of environment,” said CBO Isabella Gallucci.
Who created Xydrobe?
Xydrobe’s imaginative youthful staff is amazing. CEO Lloyd-Malcolm produced Star Wars and Mission: Impossible visual effects over a decade ago. She started her career as a coffee runner in Pinewood Studios’ visual effects department, carrying coffee to Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata facial motion capture artist. She learned from top VFX artists. Gallucci, CBO, worked at Matches Fashion for almost seven years. The CMO, Pegrum, has 15 years of PR and marketing experience for Vivienne Westwood and Perry Ellis. She has a global luxury network.
The Shoreditch trio have been friends for over a decade since meeting at Vivienne Westwood and a foundation course. Lloyd-Malcolm pitched Gallucci and Pegrum her idea to combine Hollywood’s VFX expertise and luxury fashion’s desire for the future in early spring 2021. She says that we each have unique skills that were vital to our three areas of competency.
Why is Xydrobe working?
Lloyd-Malcolm loves fashion and VFX. “Luxury and gaming consumers are distinct.” “The luxury consumer is very different from the gaming customer,” she said. She knew high-end fashion houses. The crew started an NFT of Harry Styles’ viral JW Anderson cardigan in December 2021. Since NFTs were so common in the art, the fashion industry had to follow the pace. The team quickly abandoned NFTs and focused on Web3 experiences that grabbed users after realizing how important the experience was.
“We quickly recognized that the customer bases of someone who understands and appreciates luxury fashion, and someone who holds value with an NFT are two very different customer bases that have not yet overlapped,” Lloyd-Malcolm says. Brands and customers care more about the experience than controlling digital IP because most luxury fashion shoppers don’t have an avatar they can wear.
“We know that VR memories are recognized as real memories. When you remember a VR experience, the brain recalls the real emotion of that moment. ” .”‘Universally, everyone wants an amazing experience. Luxury knows how to do experience phenomenally within retail, but often many new companies are not engaging with retail as they see the future as all about digital and all about scale. But there’s going to be no world in the future where we are all sitting at home on VR headsets: we are human beings, and we need human interaction.”
“Retail is still where 90 per cent of luxury brands derive 70 per cent of their sales. And so creating something that enhances an already amazing in-store experience with something that can provide a customer with a level of understanding about a brand, but also a feeling that can’t be created in real life. Who doesn’t want that?”
What is Next?
London clients and businesses can experience a prototype Xydrobe in spring 2023. A French luxury fashion label will be the exclusive fashion launch partner. North America, Europe, and the UK will get Xydrobes in 2023. The at-home headset application will emerge in 2024, offering multi-brand v-commerce from the couch.
“Our ultimate aim is that we produce a kind of ecosystem within brands, helping companies to produce 3D assets at scale for multiple purposes that means that they become more sustainable with the number of physical samples they’re creating,” says Lloyd-Malcolm. The creation of digital products has a positive impact. “The ecosystem is important to us because it became very clear that for brands that engage with this on a long-term scale, we need to be able to produce something that’s going to sit inside their own organizations using talent that they already have, rather than needing to pull resources out of the film industry, which is already a limited resource.” the company says.
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