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.”
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.”
‘Roblox’ Gucci Garden Event 2021: Limited-Time Items, Exhibit Duration, and How to Enter
Gucci is partnering with “Roblox” to open the virtual version of its artsy Gucci Garden, bringing the iconic fashion brand’s digital items into the gaming platform’s metaverse for a two-week limited run from May 17 to May 31.
This virtual space is actually a counterpart of a current physical installation called the Gucci Garden Archetypes, which is ongoing in Florence, Italy, The Verge reported. These virtual and real-world experiences have a series of themed rooms, such as “Tokyo tribe” or “urban romanticism,” all to pay tribute to the fashion house’s creative director Alessandro Michelle’s advertising work and to mark Gucci’s 100th anniversary.
‘Roblox’ Gucci Garden Experience: What to Expect
Entering the digital version of the Gucci Garden experience, users will see their avatars turn into a mannequin–albeit neutral, which means these humanoid-shaped mannequins will have no gender or age. As they explore each space, the transformed avatars will be able to “absorb elements of the exhibition” and retain fragments from their spaces, and eventually become “one-of-a-kind” Gucci-minted creations, Hypebeast noted in a report.
The virtual experience emphasizes a person’s quest for individuality, as users begin their journeys as mannequins to symbolize their “wandering life like a black canvas” yet eventually determining that they are “one among many, yet wholly unique.”
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‘Roblox’ Gucci Garden Gaming Environment
The gaming environment leverages on recent developments on the “Roblox” game engine, taking users to a highly dynamic array of environments that they can cross as blank “genderless” and “ageless” mannequins that visually evolve as users go from one virtual room to another. These rooms get their inspiration from various Gucci campaigns in Michelle’s past six years with the global fashion house.
In a Tech Crunch interview, Gucci Chief Marketing Officer Robert Triefus praised “Roblox' for creating not only an exceptional virtual experience, but also developing it at so short a time. “Hats off to Roblox, scale came quickly,” Triefus said. He added that while it had taken them 100 years to build the Gucci brand, “Roblox” took only 100 days to build something as spectacular.
Triefus added that Gucci intends to depend more on digital platforms as a way for pushing and keeping a fashion brand that promotes inclusion.
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Roblex Gucci Items: Avatars for Sale
In addition to their partnership with Roblox, Gucci had also gone into a special alliance with startup Genies to style user avatars, as the market for digital items are currently flourishing.
The virtual “Roblox” Gucci Garden, in addition, will sell limited-edition avatar items inspired by its IRL counterpart experience in Florence.
“Roblox,” on the other hand, expressed its satisfaction in this successful partnership with Gucci. Company executive Christine Wootton told Tech Crunch in a separate interview that working with Gucci had been “very special” due to the fact that the fashion brand had taken the time to fully understand their brand and what message they want to send to their community.
In order to visit the “Roblox” Gucci Garden, visit their website for more info.
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