admin Lisbon – One of the new products that The Fabricant will launch next
year will be digital clothing for Zoom. This was revealed by Adriana
Hoppenbrouwer, co-founder and chief marketing officer of the digital
fashion company on Wednesday at Web Summit, the technology conference
taking place in Lisbon this week.
Hoppenbrouwer stated that as many as one billion people worldwide
regularly use Zoom. “And when you meet online, you have a digital presence.
We already live digital lives,” she stressed, “and it’s my/our job to give
you the coolest clothes to wear in those digital lives.”
‘The future of digital fashion is promising’
“What is digital fashion? That is exactly the question I asked five
years ago,” Hoppenbrouwer said, when asked. “I have over 20 years of
experience in physical fashion. In my last job, I was head of marketing
e-commerce at a major retailer in Europe and we saw that returns were high.
Returns are a big problem in fashion,” she told the audience. “During a
survey, we found out that in 2018, 10 percent of returned items were used
for a photo on Instagram.”
“My other division was gift cards, where sales were declining. I
discovered that parents were not buying gift cards for physical goods for
their children, because they preferred a Fortnite card. (…) With that
knowledge, Kerry Murphy, Amber Jae Slooten and I founded The Fabricant,
with the vision of making a new business model that was emerging
mainstream. Today, the prospects are great and the industry is already
sizable.”
According to a State of Fashion Technology report by Business of
Fashion, consumer spending on digital fashion is expected to reach 135
billion dollars by 2024. In 2021, 110 billion dollars was spent on virtual
goods, more than double the 2015 figure.
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A recent success story
Hoppenbrouwer also shared a success story. The Fabricant recently
released two pairs of glasses digitally from the collection of “the Gen Z,
H&M brand” Weekday. “More virtual than physical copies were sold,” she
noted. The digital eyewear not only gained popularity, but also contributed
to a double digit increase in total sales of the collection. “Which is huge,
because a 2 percent increase in sales is already huge in fashion,” she
explained. “This shows that the Weekday community and fans want to express
their identity in unique ways in the digital space.”
Expressing yourself with fashion in the digital world
Jascha Samadi, co-founder and partner of European crypto investment firm
Greenfield, took part in the talk ‘Is consumer web3 having a moment’
alongside Hoppenbrouwer, where he said he has been looking into fashion as
a crypto company for the past two years. “Our clothing choices are a
reflection of our values, identity and what we want to express or tell
others,” Samadi noted. The desire for self-expression is deeply rooted in
our culture and he called it logical that there is also a need for virtual
fashion. The internet does not stop the desire to express oneself.
“On Roblox, for example, more than 100 million users bought or sold
fashion items last year and there are 11.5 million users who have designed
virtual clothes and accessories for their avatar,” Samadi illustrated.
Finally, to answer the first question: digital fashion is not one thing,
but it encompasses several items, the speakers made clear. Besides virtual
garments, such as Fortnite skins for example, which exist exclusively in
the digital world and are meant for digital avatars, there are also
augmented reality-enhanced products. To these garments, digital elements
are added to the real environment when viewed through an AR device or
application. Chipped clothing, where physical garments are equipped with
chips that bridge to digital experiences, also falls into the category of
digital fashion.
About The Fabricant and Web Summit
The Fabricant is a digital fashion house and platform. Hoppenbrouwer
said: “We work with big names and independent designers in the industry,
mainly ‘physical’ fashion brands, whose collections we bring to life
digitally. At The Fabricant, you can buy and wear digital clothes.”
Web Summit is one of the world’s largest technology conferences. It is
an international event where tens of thousands of people, including
entrepreneurs, investors, speakers and company representatives, gather for
the latest developments in technology and innovation, welcoming more than
70,000 visitors from 153 countries this edition. The conference took place
until 16 November in Lisbon, Portugal.
