Customers react to initial mergers of fashion and gaming companies inside the Metaverse

Will the Metaverse ever materialize? Will many of us put on the VR glasses and play, shop, and communicate inside the “not-so-real” new world? If you ask some of the top fashion designers and brands, the answer is a clear “yes”, as they began to make some small steps and test the waters of the existing and far-from-developed metaverse. Those brands and other retailers figured out that they simply can't stay behind.

Ultimately, the customers would be the ones to decide just what part they want to take inside this future, including what type of shopping they opt to do and how they will pay for the newly created products. Affogata tracked a couple of the recent moves by those companies and analyzed what customers had to say about them. Can the customer's initial reaction give the rest of us any indication of what lies ahead for the Metaverse?

We still don’t know exactly what type of eventual collaboration Balenciaga and Fortnite will have in the metaverse, but both brands have already started to plan ahead. The French luxury house and Fortnite-creators Epic Games introduced the game’s new clothing collection. Leading the various components of such a collection was a “fit set” that dressed four top Fortnite characters in clothes from previous Balenciaga collections as well as some items from the 2021 fall items. Affogata tracked the November 29th-December 20th time period and found out that customers were mostly curious about the pairing of the fashion and gaming brands while commenting was taking place mostly on Twitter. There were two peaks in the mentions on two separate days in December, as a result of a popular YouTuber called Karl Jacobs who posted pictures of the clothes and received some reactions.

Customers were also reacting to how Zara landed in the metaverse, as the Spanish brand launched its unexpected AZ collection on December 6th, the result of its new partnership with South Korean brand Ader Error. Affogata found that, again, Twitter led all other platforms with mentions of Zara and the Metaverse with two December peaks when customers were reacting positively to the new collection. During that same period of Nov. 29th and Dec. 20th, the hashtags of both Zara and Ader Error appeared multiple times together with a peak of four days (Dec. 5th-Dec. 9th) when consumers remarked on the collaboration announcement of the planned entry into the virtual world. Interestingly, most comments arrived from Japanese and Korean users.

2021 saw other developments such as Jacobs and co. selling the first NFT watch at an auction and fetching $100,000 for it. There was also the story of Nike acquiring NFT collectibles studio RTFKT, in preparation for entrance into the VR world. All of these activities received much media attention, but as they are just the first steps, customers are still pondering how much of all of this will materialize within the next few years.

Currently, there are two camps. There are customers who think this is truly our creative and unique future and there are those that find the whole idea utterly foolish. So developers, marketers, and sales person would need to test products, services, and even newly developed metaverse areas to figure out what are the best prospects of this futuristic world. Customers' opinions and comments would be crucial to each segment of this work-in-progress. That is where Affogata can provide its comprehensive data analysis of customer feedback and show professionals real-time customer intel which would enable them to make actionable insights and decisions about their products, services, payment methods that work or don’t work inside the metaverse and even on where customers stand between the physical and virtual worlds.