Inside Gucci and Roblox’s new virtual world

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.”

Gucci brings digital items and experiences to Roblox in new partnership – TechCrunch

As gaming platforms capitalize on pandemic-fueled traffic to their digital worlds, brands that drive culture in the physical world are fighting to ensure they don’t miss any new opportunities. A new partnership between Roblox and Gucci brings digital items from the fashion house into the platform’s metaverse alongside a new limited-run digital experience.

Gucci’s new experience teams a set of virtual spaces with a set of digital branded items in an effort to immerse Roblox users inside a world that feels unique to the Gucci brand and Roblox platform. The new space, called Gucci Garden, debuts today for a two-week run on the Roblox platform.

The environment takes advantage of recent advances in the game engine powering Roblox, bringing users a high-dynamic set of environments that they can traverse as blank mannequins, which evolve visually as users move through different spaces. Different rooms in the experience draw influence from different Gucci campaigns of the past several years. The digital event’s rollout accompanies a real-world multimedia event in Florence, Gucci Garden Archetypes.

The rollout follows an early pilot with creator Rook Vanguard in releasing Gucci-branded digital items to the platform this past December.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Gucci CMO Robert Triefus details how the luxury fashion brand has been redefining its approachability as it extends its reach to digital platforms like Roblox — which the company sees as an opportunity that’s growing too quickly to ignore.

“Hats off to Roblox, scale came quickly,” Triefus tells TechCrunch. “Gucci is scale, though it’s taken us 100 years, and it took Roblox about 100 days.”

For high-fashion brands, the digital sphere has presented plenty of challenges when it comes to preserving exclusivity on a medium that begs for mass adoption. Triefus says Gucci has aimed to lean into the access offered by digital platforms as a way of promoting a more inclusive brand.

“There’s so much talk today about the metaverse,” Triefus says. “In the last six years, [Creative Director Alessandro Michele] has created a Gucci Metaverse but it’s not necessarily a digital manifestation, it’s a narrative.”

Luxury and authenticity have been some of the central sells of blockchain-based NFTs, something Triefus still sees opportunities for down the road. “It’s astonishing to me how fast the conversation around NFTs has exploded,” Triefus says. “We’ve been studying blockchain for a long time as you might imagine, authenticity of product and of experience is extremely important.”

In addition to experiments with Roblox, late last year Gucci partnered with startup Genies to outfit user avatars.

Virtual items from real-world retailers have been relatively slow to pop up inside digital worlds, though as user perceptions of paying for digital goods have shifted, platforms are moving to capitalize.

“We don’t partner with very many brands,” Roblox exec Christina Wootton tells TechCrunch. “One thing that was very special when we started speaking with Gucci is that they took the time to understand our platform and what works well for designers and creators in our community.”

You can now explore a surreal Gucci garden inside Roblox

For the next two weeks, the virtual realm of Roblox is getting a dose of high fashion. Currently, fashion house Gucci is hosting an artsy garden space, which will be available for Roblox users to explore starting today through to May 31st. The space was conceived as a virtual counterpart to a real-world installation called the Gucci Garden Archetypes, which is taking place in Florence, Italy.

Both the virtual and IRL spaces are described as multimedia experiences, which are divided into a series of themed rooms with names like “urban romanticism” and “Tokyo tribe.” It all sounds pretty surreal. Here’s the official description of what you’ll be doing in the digital version:

As they enter the Gucci Garden experience, visitors will shed their avatars becoming a neutral mannequin. Without gender or age, the mannequin symbolizes that we all begin our journeys through life as a blank canvas. Wandering through the different rooms, visitors’ mannequins absorb elements of the exhibition. With every person experiencing the rooms in a different order and retaining different fragments of the spaces, they will emerge at the end of their journey as one-of-a-kind creations, reflecting the idea of individuals as one among many, yet wholly unique.

Related The latest modern art installation is inside Fortnite

It may sound like a strange combination, but over the last year, fashion and gaming have become much more closely connected. Burberry launched in-game outfits for a Chinese strategy game, Balenciaga made a post-apocalyptic world in place of a traditional runway show, and Louis Vuitton dressed up a virtual hip-hop group made up of League of Legends characters. In fact, this isn’t even Gucci’s first foray into the space; the company previously made a pair of virtual sneakers.

Just remember: Roblox is definitely not a video game.