Luxury, calm and NFT. Gucci, Balmain, Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga… Luxury brands are taking over NFTs to rejuvenate their image, or quite simply to offer unique experiences to their customers. And it works: sales follow, and NFTs are now claimed by customers to show that they belong to a community gathered around a large house.
Let’s meet the big houses that have made a success of their incursion into Web3.
NFTs, but for what?
Today, major houses use NFTs in several ways. We can cite four particularly promising ones.
The NFT portables, first, referring to virtual ready-to-wear items that can be “worn” in the metaverse, or viewed via a mobile application applying an augmented reality filter. The marketplace DressX is the best known in this niche.
The POAP (pronounced “pow ap”, pour “proof of attendance protocol”) are used to indicate that customers have attended a particular brand event. A way to accumulate loyalty points. The House Estee Lauder offered POAP tokens to watch his parade in the Decentraland metaverse.
The NFT phygitaux (contraction of physical and digital) serve as digital doubles associated with a physical product sold by the brand. Prada has unveiled 100 shirts with an associated NFT, in partnership with Damien Hirst’s son, artist Cassius Hirst.
The PFP (pour “profile picture”) images for which the purchaser obtains the rights at the time of purchase, and which he can use as a profile photo on social networks or as an avatar in the metaverse.
Crypto-assets are a risky investment.
2022, a pivotal year for collectibles from major fashion houses
At the beginning of August, we brought you thehe record sale achieved by the high jewelry house Tiffany & Co. for his 250 necklaces. $12.5 million in twenty minutes for necklaces set to replicate their buyers’ CryptoPunks as jewelry.
One of many successful use cases since January.
👉🏻 Nike leads in NFT sales, with $185 million raised on virtual sneakers and other collectibles sold in partnership with the artist collective RTFKT. Nike has also acquired the future rights to the collective’s creations. The Nikeland, metaverse of the brand, should also soon open its doors.
Interestingly, half of Nike’s NFT revenue comes from primary sales, while royalties from “second-hand” market sales generate the other half. Together, these two generated approximately $1 billion in the secondary market, of which Nike made a total net profit of $93 million!
👉🏻 The Italian house Dolce & Gabbana remained as active as in 2021. Last October, the house struck a blow with its Genesis collection. A collection of nine pieces of physical clothing and associated NFTs, auctioned for nearly $6 million. Since January, D&G has generated nearly $24 million in NFT sales.
In total, these are no less than $23.7 billion that have been generated thanks to NFTs since 2020 by companies in all sectors in luxury and ready-to-wear, according to data from the company Dune Analytics.
Three players to watch, at the intersection of luxury and Web3
👉🏻 RTFKT (pronounced “artefact”) describes itself as a community of collectors, investors, artists, gamers and enthusiasts. The concepts of virtual/augmented and 3D reality are at the heart of this very active club on Twitter (360,000 subscribers) and on Discord (170,000 members). RTFKT has many prestigious collaborations to its credit, including Takashi Murakami and the artist FEWOCiOUS whose work was recently presented at Sotheby’s.
👉🏻 The LVMH group said during the meeting VivaTech, Porte Versailles, that it was exploring various options to integrate NFTs into its payment options, customer tracking, digital doubles (NFT coupling & physical products) as well as the customer experience. You may have heard of the game Louis : The Game unveiled on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the founder. A quest game, downloaded over 2 million times!
👉🏻 Arianee is the Parisian startup behind the majority of NFTs used by major European houses. Founded in 2017, its specialty is the niche of “certification” NFTs: giving a digital identity to physical products, by linking them to a smart contract to ensure traceability and the fight against counterfeiting.
Is the craze of luxury labels for NFTs destined to last?
Until now, the NFTs offered by the big luxury houses have found a real echo with the markets. A craze that has led Morgan Stanley analysts to estimate that the Metaverse and NFTs could represent a financial windfall greater than $56 billion by 2030 in the luxury market.
Same story on the side of the crypto portal Coingecko, which has just unveiled a study on the brands most involved in the creation of NFT. A clear statement, as it appears in the image below. Luxury and ready-to-wear houses are leading the pack.
Based on a panel of 52 brands, the report also highlights the usefulness of NFTs for major luxury and ready-to-wear houses (19 out of 52):
- Propose unique experiences to their customersand exclusive when possible,
- Gather a community of hand-picked customers, more committed in the long term. It is also a question of highlighting “superfans”, of rewarding them with unique objects,
- Achieve a new audience of enthusiasts and potential ambassadorsbeyond traditional customers,
- To assure a certain traceability to the products up to the secondary marketand dealing with counterfeiting – the real scourge of high-end craftsmanship
- Participate in the brand growthas the value of collectibles increases with a house’s reputation.
