Interview: 'New Customer Touchpoints' Created by Adastria's Metaverse Fashion Initiatives
In the second installment of the series 'The Era of Digital Fashion', we delve into the metaverse fashion initiatives of leading fashion corporation Adastria Co., Ltd.
In its medium-term management plan, Adastria has devised four growth strategies, one of which emphasizes 'digital customer touchpoints and services', and in July 2022, the company launched its efforts in creating new customer touchpoints through its metaverse project.
In October of the same year, Adastria launched its first metaverse fashion project, which involved creating original avatars and skins for '.st' in collaboration with external popular creators. Additionally, in April, Adastria started creating metaverse fashion in-house by hiring enu., a metaverse fashion creator.
In this interview, we spoke with Atsush Shimada, the manager of Adastria's metaverse project, and enu., a 3DCG designer, about the current status of and future plans for Adastria's metaverse fashion initiatives.
Background of the Metaverse Project
First off, can you tell us about the goal of Adastria's metaverse project?
ShimadaHere at Adastria, we run a official WEB store '.st' with 16 million users, providing touchpoints with a variety of brands and customers.
We started our foray into the metaverse as a challenge under the growth strategy of developing 'digital customer touchpoints and services'. Our goal is to introduce Adastria's brands to users who have not yet had a touchpoint with us.
The first metaverse fashion initiative was the .st original avatar 'Ao Masuhana'. Can you tell us why you started your metaverse journey by creating an avatar?
ShimadaJust as clothes worn by models and influencers sell well in the real world, we thought that awareness would spread in the Metaverse through the medium of avatars, the fashion icons of the metaverse. Therefore, we decided to create an avatar as the fashion icon for our initiative.
Our main priority is our target audience. After researching what kind of users are in this world and what they are looking for, we believed that having popular creators who understand the world of the metaverse creating the avatars would result in the best product.
In our quest, we connected with Hyuganatsu, a highly dedicated and respected creator in the digital space. We felt confident that our request to them, based on our intuition, would result in a great product.
The design they initially presented was almost complete. I believe that it isn't right to keep adding requests to something that a creator has produced. We asked the creator because we valued and trusted their unique insight, so I didn't particularly order anything special.
Creating Clothes that Can Be Enjoyed in Both Real and Virtual Worlds, Regardless of Gender
You chose 'VRChat' as your platform. How did you understand your target audience in this context?
ShimadaWhen we started working on VRChat, I personally used it and thoroughly researched what kind of avatars and clothes users liked by talking to many of them.
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