Gucci Enters The Metaverse With A Virtual Experience On Roblox
After bringing some rare items to Roblox last year, Gucci is entering the metaverse with a virtual experience on the online game platform.
Intent on expanding its brand awareness to younger audiences, Gucci is taking its collaboration with Roblox to the next level, by creating Gucci Garden, a virtual brand experience right within the online game platform.
Last year, the fashion powerhouse collaborated with Roblox to release rare virtual accessories on its platform but has now recreated an entire virtual art installation.
The virtual event is a reproduction of Gucci’s real-world multimedia installation taking place at the Gucci Palace in Florence, Italy, in celebration of the brand’s 100th anniversary. The IRL space, “Gucci Garden Archetypes,” is available for virtual tours on a dedicated website.
However, anyone can wander through space on Roblox, and buy Gucci virtual items for two weeks, starting Monday, May 17, 2021.
The exhibition revisits Gucci’s creative work under the creative direction of Alessandro Michele, presenting rooms and spaces celebrating some of the most audacious campaigns of the past decades.
Among others, it features iconic rooms such as a sensory-overloaded “Tokyo Lights,” filled with endless noises, lights, and colors, evoking the clamor of the Japanese city’s streets.
Morgan Tucker, Roblox senior director of product, recently explained to Vogue Business that the metaverse experience has added “a level of immersion that would match, if not exceed, what you see in the real world, and really pushes the limits of what the platform is capable of.”
All users are able to enter the event with a gender-neutral avatar reduced to a mannequin. This represents our experience of coming to this world as blank canvases. As the experience progresses, and the avatar mingles with surrounding rooms, patterns and colors emerge. These then begin to take shape as though the avatar is “absorbing” the experience inside out.
Virtual accessories and clothes can be purchased on the Roblox catalog to be collected and worn. The resulting outfit will then be displayed temporarily in the main lobby of the event server for users to download and share on social media.
Roblox, which has historically been popular among pre-teens, is rapidly growing among 21 to 30-year olds. With its 42 million daily active users, and 17-21 year-olds as its fastest-growing audience, the platform is deepening its relationship with the culture of a new generation.
Gucci won’t allow itself to be left behind on this trend – and is seeking to establish brand awareness among teens in their familiar territory.
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Inside Gucci and Roblox’s new virtual world
To this end, many luxury brands are racing to stay on top of the gaming and metaverse ethos. P&G-owned skincare brand SK-II just launched its own virtual branded world, SK-II City, inspired by the city-building game SimCity, while Valentino, Burberry, Tatcha, Balenciaga and Net-a-Porter are among the luxury brands that have created virtual spaces amid the Covid-19 lockdowns. Roblox isn’t the only space in which Gucci has been playing; it has also appeared on Zepeto, Tennis Clash, The Sims, Genies, Pokémon Go and Animal Crossing.
At the Vogue Business and TikTok Technology Forum in March, Gucci’s EVP of brand and customer engagement Robert Triefus said Gucci first considers whether its presence on a new game will help players or users express themselves. Then, it builds relationships with the platform’s users and creators before contacting the developers or owners. In this instance, Gucci has been in conversation with Roblox for more than a year.
“Working with a partner like Gucci that wants to enable people to express themselves seemed like a perfect fit,“ Wootton says. “They are so forward-thinking. They were open to working with the community, open to what would work well and to listening and experimenting. They understand that even though you have this massive brand, you have to enter a new platform authentically, and it has to be organic.”
From gaming platform to experience platform
Roblox hopes that the Gucci Garden, which shows off its latest developer tools and lighting technology, will attract a new audience and encourage other developers to dive in. “When Christina [Wootton] and her team brought the opportunity to us, we thought a lot about how we could take a brand that is uber lux in the real world and translate into the metaverse?” says Roblox’s Tucker, who also worked on the Lil Nas X concert. “How could we create an experience that exemplified what Gucci stood for and bring in existing and new users into the space? It’s not just about games.”