A leading digital fashion house has raised €12.8m in funding to build ‘the wardrobe of the metaverse’ as well as a new economy.
The Fabricant won the Series A round of financing which was led by Greenfield One, an early stage crypto and blockchain venture capital firm. The Amsterdam-based digital fashion house has said the sustainable fashion grants will support and expand the company’s initiative through its Non-Fungible Token (NFT) co-creation platform The Fabricant Studio.
The Series A round of financing was participated by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s venture capital firm Sound Ventures and crypto group Red DAO, among others, with renewed participation from previous investors including 4impact, Slingshot Ventures and Borski Fund.
What will this digital fashion group do with the grant?
Having previously worked with brands such as Adidas and Epic Games (who recently awarded The Fabricant with a mega-grant for projects utilizing its Unreal Engine software), The Fabricant will partner with World of Women, the largest female-led NFT community, and The Sandbox, with COO Sebastian Borget acting as angel investor.
Amber Slooten, Co-founder and Creative Director at The Fabricant said: “The story behind digital fashion is in need of a new narrative. One that leaves toxic behaviours and waste behind and looks into the 21st century and beyond. In the metaverse, we get to create a new playing field where everyone can benefit and enjoy the love for self-expression and create an economy around it. We’ve designed the tools to help construct a new fashion industry, one in which we believe we will all thrive.”
How will new fashion house technology create new fashions in the metaverse?
The Fabricant aims to build a decentralized fashion house to kit out the population of the metaverse and create a more sustainable and equitable fashion industry, estimating that 100 million people will be metaverse-ready by 2025, and wearing digital garments minted in their studio.The Fabricant Studio platform allows anyone to create, trade and wear digital-only garments to participate in the digital fashion economy.
Other contributors to the A round include pioneers in the crypto community such as Sfermion, Koji Capital, Stefano Rosso (OTB Group), Marc Weinstein (Partner at Mechanism Capital), Trevor McFedries (Brud), Shari Glazer (Glazer Foundation), Angel Xu (Venture Partner Quantstamp), Benny Giang (ex-Dapper Labs), Richard Ma (Quantstamp and owner of Iridescence Dress), Sillytuna (Crypto Investor), Chad Knight (Head of 3D Wilder World), Victoire Maureau and Anoop Kansupada (Nifty Gateway)
How does a digital fashion group change how we approach fashion?
Jascha Samadi, Partner of Greenfield One said: “Within virtual environments, we are likely going to have multiple digital reflections of our physical self. The Fabricant Studio allows any creator to become their own fashion designer in the metaverse - paired with Web3 technology, digital fashion becomes unique, tradeable and accessible for the masses.
“The team behind The Fabricant identified this paradigm of user-generated fashion very early on, long before NFTs caught mainstream attention.”
Maaria Bajwa, Investor at Sound Ventures, said: “Everyday users become creators using The Fabricant Studio, which allows users to craft high-end digital fashion NFTs in collaboration with their favourite brands.
“The Fabricant is building a very user-friendly end-to-end experience that obfuscates the complexities of blockchains, while still giving users all of the sovereignty and interoperability and distribution value that NFTs can offer. By being the first to tackle UGC on the blockchain, The Fabricant is introducing entire new ecosystems to this community and showing them the power and value of NFTs for creators.”
What is Acre's view on digital fashion house technology?
Jacopo Cesari, Research Consultant - Europe, at Acre, said: “The metaverse is one of the main projects in the emerging market of extended reality. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is competing with tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple for the control of what might be the greatest innovation after the smartphone.
Whether the metaverse is going to be the next big platform or not, extended reality will be increasingly present in our life within the next five years. The “wardrobe of the metaverse” is an example of the numerous ways this new technology will reshape our consumer experience and the process of buying a product.
“For the fashion industry, this is extremely relevant as will generate new ways designers can create and consumers can purchase, experience, and express their identity through fashion. For instance, the opportunity for customers and designers to wear clothes in a virtual setting might result in an indicator of fashion trends that can potentially reduce the number of unsold clothes that go wasted every year.
Moreover, we can expect that reducing the distance between brands and customers will create more pressure on sustainable standards and demand for accountability with positive consequences for the supply chain.”
Jacopo Cesari works as a Research Consultant in Acre’s Amsterdam office. Before joining Acre, he was a trainer and a career counsellor in Italy.
Jacopo has a strong track record in Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI), working and volunteering for three of the largest Italian platforms for Human Rights. His bachelor dissertation on LGBTI+ history was published as a book in 2019 and acquired by international archives such as the Library of Congress of the US.
Jacopo holds a Bachelor’s in Communication Sciences and a Master’s in International Business and Management.
