Gucci Enters The Metaverse

Gucci, an Italian fashion and leather goods brand, is now hosting its own metaverse experience in The Sandbox. The fashion house is the first major luxury brand to build a digital world in the metaverse platform.

Gucci’s experience will feature “Gucci Vault Land,” an experimental space where users will go on a journey through the fashion brand’s history through games and NFTs.

Millions of people all over the world are already joining the metaverse, an interconnected, immersive, persistent digital environment. Gucci’s new initiative is part of a larger trend of major brands wanting to capitalize on the opportunity to boost the sale of physical goods and sell virtual versions of their products to metaverse users.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley has predicted that digital fashion could increase the industry’s sales by $50 billion by the year 2030.

Exploring Gucci Vault Land

Gucci has a history of being a groundbreaking brand on the cutting edge of metaverse and Web3 technologies. In May 2021, Gucci became the first luxury brand to launch an NFT, and they launched the Gucci Garden experience on Roblox in the same month. The digital Gucci Garden — an immersive multimedia experience set in Florence, Italy that celebrated the fashion house's creative vision — was visited by over 20 million users.

The new Gucci Vault Land, which was available from October 27 to November 9, is built on The Sandbox, a virtual world where players can own, build, and monetize their gaming assets and experiences inside an enormous virtual world.

Here are a few of the things users could do within Gucci Vault land:

• Learn about Gucci’s heritage and core values through vintage fashion NFTs
• Compete with other players for a chance to buy digital collectibles
• Play mini-games and complete tasks to earn blockchain-based rewards and reinforce everything they’ve learned
• Hold Gucci Vault Aura NFTs wearables, which they can use to equip their avatars in The Sandbox metaverse
• Interact with non-player characters (NPCs) that are available as guides in the digital world

What Gucci’s New Metaverse Experience Means for the Future of Luxury Fashion

In the new frontier of the metaverse, avatars are everything — which means some users will shell out big bucks to outfit their avatars with luxury goods like clothing, accessories, and home decor. In the persistent metaverse, users will be able to carry their avatar’s items between platforms (for example, from Meta’s universe to Fortnite’s gaming world).

Major labels like Gucci are jumping on board to capitalize on this trend by launching avatar clothing and accessory collections and building immersive experiences for fans.

Building worlds within the metaverse has major benefits for brands, including:

• The high margins of creating digital items that can be infinitely replicated for free and distributed for far less than their physical equivalents
• Access to a new generation of customers who are often younger than traditional luxury shoppers
• Purchasing luxury goods in the metaverse could lead new customers to buy real-life goods in the future
• The ability to road-test designs in the metaverse before putting them into real-life production
• Decreasing the problem of overstock and oversupply of physical luxury goods
• The creation of new revenue streams for brands, including bringing back archival designs
• Ongoing royalty fees and revenue shares on future transactions for smart certificates and NFTs for virtual items as items change hands

Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri told Vogue Business, “Gucci is not afraid to be a first mover in many areas and will continue to adopt this mindset and challenge the status quo. Other big players prefer instead to wait, following up at a later stage, adopting a more conservative approach — a respectable strategy, but it is not ours and it never will be.”