Now it plans to make real sneakers, said the company's CEO Ryan David Mullins, who noted the first batch of 500 has already been sold before production even began. The Aglet app, which mixes virtual sneakers and augmented reality, has created its Telga shoes, similarly to heavyweights Adidas or Reebok. "We think that emotional bond to physical objects is still important and can increase the attachment" to digital products, Benoit Pagotto, one of the founders of RTFKT, which was acquired by giant Nike in December, told The Wall Street Journal. One aspect of the operation was to match each digital pair sold that day with tangible shoes, which each buyer could pick up six weeks later. The coronavirus pandemic has helped shrink the distance between virtual and real by pushing many designers to create in three dimensions, for lack of being able to meet physically, the consultant added.Īt the end of February 2021, RTFKT studio, together with Seattle artist FEWOCiOUS, launched a limited edition of 621 pairs of virtual sneakers via their NFT - digital items that can be bought and sold using blockchain technology. This is part of an underlying trend of exploiting data collected online "to develop better collections, to do better forecasting" said Achim Berg, partner at McKinsey & Company consulting. How users interact with online goods - what they flock to and what they ignore - offers a relatively low-risk and low-cost opportunity for firms to develop products.
In recent months, a growing number of brands have been trying to establish a presence on buzzed-about platforms from Roblox to Fortnite, for fear of missing a major tech and societal shift. The clamor over virtual goods comes amid feverish predictions that the metaverse - a virtual reality version of the internet - will eventually replace the web of today. Online is "a place of openness to test things virtually and recreate an extremely precise connection with the real-life experience," he added. "In real life, it's extremely expensive to make any product," said French couture designer Julien Fournie, who runs his own eponymous fashion house. NEW YORK - Online platforms that are precursors of the metaverse vision for the internet's future are already serving as workrooms to develop products destined for real-life sale.įrom sneakers sketched in the virtual world but produced in the real one, to designers who preview clothes on avatars before making them - the barrier between digital and tangible is thinning.
French couture designer Julien Fournie is among those seeing the online universe as lab for products that can be then produced in the real world