Why the metaverse is moving into physical retail

To promote the launch of its new lipstick — a buttery matte formula called Spike Valentino — Valentino Beauty opened a pop-up in New York’s Flatiron Plaza this October. Like many such previous branded experiences, the activation offered sweet treats (donuts) and product samples, in the hope that they would translate to sales at the nearby Sephora store. It also found a way to bring the metaverse into the real world: visitors could stand in front of a mirror to digitally try on the lipstick, then take home a printed image of their look. It brought in about 1,500 people over a two-day period, says Dmytro Kornilov, co-founder and CEO of Ffface.me, which provided the smart mirror tech. It also led to an increase in sales of the product, he adds. (Valentino Beauty declined to share specific sales figures.) This joins a spate of new fashion and beauty experiences that lean on immersive technologies to blend the physical and the digital, offering a shared experience in the physical world that doesn’t rely on individual, at-home devices or familiarity with new technologies. It’s still metaverse tech, but it’s a new, post-pandemic slant that prioritises in-person interaction. This offers a way for brands to take advantage of emerging technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality and immersive digital experiences, without as much of the pushback risk that often accompanies totally virtual projects. In September, Shiseido brought a 360-degree ‘pod’ to New York’s Macy’s Herald Square, where people felt physical wind and smelled fragrance choreographed to accompany a virtual reality experience. Designed to educate consumers on the brand’s Future Solution LX product line, guests were transported to the mountains of Japan to literally smell and feel the home of the product’s signature ingredient, the enmei herb. On 15 November, Vogue will unveil an immersive exhibit created with London’s Lightroom; called ‘Inventing the Runway’, it will take visitors on an archival runway journey through a massive space that is somewhat akin to a shared virtual reality experience. After visitors are welcomed through a lobby that hints at being backstage at a fashion show, they join up to 300 others in exploring a 5,500-square-foot room, where video projections span 38-foot-tall walls, in addition to the floor space. Through a series of themed segments, the 50-minute loop takes visitors through the history of fashion shows, covering locations, personalities and audiences. “You are within video,” Lightroom CEO Richard Slaney explains. “Your peripheral vision is filled, so you’re not conscious of anything but video.” Physical displays are being used to broadcast digital products as well. To illustrate her explorations into AI-generated fashion designs, eponymous designer Norma Kamali opened an installation at her Manhattan HQ, where her own audio narration accompanied a massive video compilation alongside physical, larger-than-life ‘glamazons’ wearing the avant-garde results. At New York Fashion Week in September, a ‘Fashion Week Connect’ event at immersive art gallery Inter highlighted digital fashion through movement-triggered AR installations, interactive displays whose contents were manipulated with physical objects, and a 3D photobooth integrating digital fashion (pictured at top). And during London Fashion Week in February, digital fashion platform Syky displayed both digital and physical works by KWK and Taskin Goec, in partnership with the British Fashion Council, at a physical event. While these types of hybrid experiences borrow technologies and formats from film, gaming and social media platforms, they are anchored in familiar settings and — crucially — are easy to experience: you just walk in and look around. The Valentino Beauty event, for example, used a smart mirror from AR company Ffface.me. People only needed to stand in front of the mirror, and the team made a conscious decision to avoid any options to swipe or interact. “People like it because people don’t like to feel stupid,” Kornilov says. “You don’t need to download and install and scan anything, you don’t need to push buttons. You just need to stand in front of the mirror, and that’s it.” The format of the Vogue exhibition is “quite easy to be mainstream and accessible to people”, Slaney says, adding that while visiting is akin to visiting a museum or a theatrical performance, it taps into pop culture’s more recent comfort with sensory overload, courtesy of constant screens. This prevalence of metaverse technologies in fashion and beauty hotspots might come as a surprise, given that metaverse hype has waned and brands have pivoted efforts from the fantastical to the practical. But proponents say that this evolution is perhaps a consolation that digital technologies and products still have legs; they just might — for now, anyway — be firmly rooted on dry land. Even the Apple Vision Pro, the first virtual reality headset to enjoy mainstream traction, seems to have been bogged down with waning interest. “There are many established and compelling use cases for VR, but the reality is that consumer adoption has been slower than anticipated and device abandonment is high. These were the principal reasons we chose to bring [immersive 4D experience] The Essence of Enmei to the consumer at retail, versus developing a standalone app experience for a VR or spatial computing device,” says Dina Fierro, SVP of the Web3 and metaverse group at Shiseido Americas. Mixed reality and the next phase of pop-ups Tech extras like virtual reality experiences, smart mirrors or immersive screens can help increase dwell time and create more memorable moments in pop-ups, where a lot rides on a short period of time. In other words, similar to the educational perks of VR, people who experience these immersive extras tend to remember what they’ve seen and learnt more acutely. It “alleviates many of the barriers to entry for consumers and — when utilised well — allows for richer, more engaging and more memorable brand experiences”, Fierro says. “The success of branded experiences and pop-ups this year has only reinforced the importance of IRL experiences and connections to beauty consumers. These are irreplaceable touchpoints for brand discovery, relevance and contextual world-building.” The Shiseido pod, for example, was fully branded on the outside; and, on the inside, enabled people to virtually transport themselves to where the herb was harvested, right in the middle of Macy’s, says Xydrobe co-founder and CEO Nell Lloyd-Malcolm, who worked with Shiseido on the experience. Xydrobe has also worked with Manolo Blahnik and Harrods. Anecdotally, she says, it leads to “incredible” conversion rates. Consumer sentiment surrounding The Essence of Enmei was universally positive, Fierro says. “The nature of the Xydrobe pod allowed for a singular and captive consumer experience, which is a rarity in a world of increasingly fragmented attention.” Ffface.me measured that about every 30 seconds, someone engaged with the Valentino Beauty experience, with the specific analytics enabled by the AR mirror, according to Kornilov. Ffface.me has also worked with brands including Mugler, Prada, Ralph Lauren, Dolce & Gabbana and Fendi. Concrete metrics are a key draw at a time when brands are more rational in terms of tech and innovation investments, he has found. And visitors who attended previous Lightroom shows — such as an experience created by artist David Hockney and an exhibition covering moon exploration narrated by Tom Hanks — tend to stay an average hour and 20 minutes, even though the runtime of the full loop is less than an hour, Slaney says. On the consumer side, there is a feeling of tech fatigue and saturation, coupled with nostalgia for a simpler time in which always-on devices and screens weren’t so prominent. Just look at the earlier-than-expected popularity of the Ray-Ban Meta smart-glasses, which are designed to blend in and capture content inconspicuously. “The more digital our lives get, the more we crave real life. ‘Offline’ is a new trend in social media,” Kornilov says. That’s why, instead of offering visitors the option to download and share a digital picture, the Valentino Beauty pop-up offered visitors the option to take home a physical copy — especially because so many already organically filmed the process of using the smart mirror as they explored. “These shows are not available to be experienced at home,” Slaney says of the Lightroom exhibit. He has been surprised to observe that most visitors, instead of filming the whole thing with their phones, tend to capture a moment they especially like and then put their phones down again. “The tech is not the point of the enterprise. It is just an enabling tool to tell a story in an interesting way.” Syky, which specialises in digital and phygital fashion, sees physical events as a core perk for its community, says founder and CEO Alice Delahunt. The physical events offer education and access both for those working in the space and for those who want to learn more. “For those who are curious about the space and not quite understanding what digital fashion means, it can feel scary and dystopian, and they may not be up to date on the creativity that is coming from the space,” she adds. “Coming into a Syky environment is a chance to be enveloped by the physical world and digital fashion, as well as what that means. So often we see campaigns with traditional brands that actually feature CGI and people do not even realise it.” In many ways, this merger divorces the ‘either/or’ debate that is often repeated between digital and physical efforts in fashion — perhaps a natural evolution whereby the benefits of the tech, rather than the bits and bytes, comes into focus. “People don’t care how the TV works, whether it’s liquid crystals or how electricity turns into a video. Instead of focusing on the technologies, we need to focus on the needs of our society,” Kornilov says. Delahunt believes that the return to simplicity and physicality will coexist with new technologies. “We never build for the principle that digital worlds will take over the physical world. It’s not actually something any of us want to live in… Although we are working with digital fashion and incredible digital fashion designers, [so] we recognise first and foremost that the physical world is the most important thing that we inhabit and it is beautiful.” Sign up to receive the Vogue Business newsletter for the latest luxury news and insights, plus exclusive membership discounts. Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.

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