In Evelyn Mora’s early career, she realized that fashion designers, although often deeply focused on sustainability, couldn’t stage environmentally friendly large-scale fashion shows.
In 2021, she launched VLGE, a gaming and immersive-world-building platform that specializes in working with brands. It lets brands build their own worlds, fill them with interactive content and games, and export said worlds to other platforms like Roblox. The product is revolutionizing what shopping could be in the future — a world where brands can create interactive worlds to connect with Gen Z rather than hosting fashion shows and filming campaigns.
VLGE has worked with names such as Lancome, Charlotte Tilbury, and Vogue Scandinavia, and has raised a total of $5 million in capital from investors such as Lammont J. du Pont of the du Pont family, L’Oreal Group, and the British Fashion Council.
It made headlines for launching the world’s first 3D and gamified fashion week. On Thursday, it announced plans to take things one step further. It said 50 fashion brands would launch their shoppable worlds for World Fashion Week, all powered by VLGE. World Fashion Week is an initiative of VLGE and is supposed to act as a bridge for creators to launch shoppable games on other platforms, like Roblox.
Image Credits:Lucie Baudi
Mora said this is the brand’s first large-scale activation, showing how the platform can let users build across browsers and, first, on Roblox, in real time. She decided to focus on making Roblox easier for brands to use because of the market potential, she said. VLGE is also compatible with Unreal Engine and is working on compatibility with Meta Horizon World.
“This is significant because Roblox has become fashion’s most powerful youth frontier, yet until now, world-building there has been costly, technical, and complex,” Mora told TechCrunch. “We make it instant, affordable, scalable, and interoperable, bridging the gap between e-commerce, gaming, and cultural creation.”
In other words, anyone building on VLGE can launch on Roblox instantly, without needing to know Roblox’s coding language or having any substantive background in tech at all. “They also don’t need to pay tens of thousands and wait for months to launch.” (It can cost anywhere between $10,000 to $100,000 for a brand to pay an agency to build it a world on Roblox.)
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VLGE offers four payment tiers: Freemium, and three paid tiers for creators, small businesses, and enterprises, respectively.
Mora is banking on gamified commerce becoming the next frontier in fashion and said VLGE plans to launch an online store, an e-tail store, that will sell both physical items by emerging brands, as well as 3D assets that can be exported into Roblox. The technology showcases how the fashion world is trying to make use of the increasing prominence of games and immersive worlds when it comes to connecting with the next generation.
“This moment isn’t just about fashion, it’s about the infrastructure that will power the next generation of commerce for the new generation,” Mora said.
TechCrunch news report on fashion’s revolutionary leap into virtual reality.
Fashion and Gaming: Rewrite the Rules! Old runway shows are a thing of the past – brands are instantly creating their digital worlds.
Новостной материал из TechCrunch о революционном переходе моды в виртуальную реальность.
Мода и игры: Перепиши правила! Старые модные показы уходят в прошлое – бренды создают свои цифровые миры мгновенно.
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