Digital Fashion in Roblox, Fortnite & Zepeto - Colin Brown, Dubit.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so I would like to welcome to the stage our next uh solo speaker who's going to be talking about digital fashion in Roblox uh fortnite and zetto uh we've got uh Colin Brown uh Colin Brown from dobit thank you come on up to the stage Colin thanks man thank you very much there your clicker your timer hey guys um hopefully you all stay for the remainder of the talk um so Colin British actually live in hinki so local resident um so specifically we're going to be talking about fashion in the

metaverse um hold on okay so if you're not aware of dubit it's a British company uh and this is our goal so we want to be the largest retailer and creator of fashion in the metaverse we still believe the metaverse is alive and well with 400 million monthly active users we don't think it's dead yet um and effectively to be able to create and Retail at that sort of scale is a bit of a task um we're going to dig into that today uh and that's what we're talking about okay so majority of this talk is going to be about Roblox I'll talk a little bit about fortnite a little bit about zetto but they're all very much three different Virtual Worlds we spend a lot of our time in Roblox but we also do the other stuff as well but Roblox is the most advanced in this area which is why I'm going to spend more time on this area so um 1.8 billion avatar clothes is a lot of digital

much right yeah that's not insubstantial in terms of its base and if you want to compare it this is where it stands in terms of retail of brands that you know right so Gucci out sells Roblox and fortnite this year probably next year Roblox and fortnite will out sell Gucci yeah and they've already overtaken Ralph Lauren La cost Prada and lots of other brands so this is big business right and remember that Roblox and fortnite do not have stores right they don't have stores in the real world they have stores in the metaverse okay now the problem with selling that much stuff is discover

Y is a big problem right cuz you're going into a store that has 80 million avatar clothes right it makes Amazon discoverability problems look easy because you're focused on specific lines there's a ton of merch the vast majority of this merchandising is obviously created by Roblox itself at this point in time but that is Chang and that has changed and that's where we kind of pick up our story but search and Discovery is a huge problem when you have a store that big it's different when you go into a normal physical retailer what you see is what you get find something that generally fits with it that you were looking for off you go yeah classic male fashion experience okay right so dubb it what do we do okay so dubb it is a British company about 140 staff been involved in

Virtual Worlds and working with brands for many many years specifically Roblox over the last few years we are one of seven Roblox Partners in the world there will be more coming but we are one of seven and we're the only British one uh to play with Global Partners that we work with Roblox okay now over the last couple of years we have built up a network of basically gaming Partners inside Roblox right so either games that we run ourselves experiences that we've created ourselves or partners that we've worked with you have a game you have an experience we will also include you within Network quick variation a game is kind of semi-permanent right designed to be played over a long period of time and experience is basically like a popup shop yeah so it's time limited it's specifically there for a particular point in time now some

games kind of a little bit like experiences has anyone heard of Walmart land in Roblox hands up okay Walmart land I found two people who'd heard of it that's probably the two uh daily active users that they have like no dis supect sorry if anybody loves Walmart why would you create a permanent game in Roblox if your brand is Walmart like Walmart I lived in the states for a couple of years Walmart is not cool it's cheap right it has massive range yeah it has weird crocodile heads that your kids can wear while you're getting the shopping right that's what Walmart has it's not a place that you want to hang out in Roblox so again what we recommend when we're working with Brands is is basically temporary popup experiences time limited unless your brand is super cool if your brand is super cool do something permanent if your brand is Walmart don't okay so over the last

couple of years we've built a network of about a hundred games and experiences that we've either developed ourselves or worked with others inside roadblocks that gives us about 100 million users passing through those experiences each month okay it's not small Roblox is not a small place it has large traffic volumes 100 million users is good right uh but that also gives us some data to play with now um why have we created this network of 100 million uh sorry 100 experiences roughly 100 million users we've done it so that we can bridge the gap between the brands and the consumer okay so this isn't direct advertising one because direct advertising in roblo is rubbish that would be a British word American word trash finish word can't remember

yeah I can say Moy and kitos and Kus that's probably my limit okay now it is it's just advertising in in in a 3D virtual world is like I'm running through this amazing experience oh look a billboard how exciting I must give it my full attention while shooting killing jumping on and doing stuff it doesn't work like that to engage a consumer with a brand you have to do something more interesting yeah so we have some interesting brands that we work with nas are UA for ETC and we bring those experiences into our game world right now once we've created a bunch of experiences and also worked with a bunch of Partners we drive traffic across that Network we use portals simple magic doors to basically get people to move from A to B so that we can look at what we're doing we're very careful on data so again we're not really collecting the data but you can see where someone went from A to B to C to D did did they enjoy that experience did they churn did they

like that car experience did they not like that car experience did they buy digital merch did they wear it in game A B C D did they take it off there's a lot of data to be gained and a lot of the user experience data to be gained without revealing the identity of the individual and without profiling individuals yeah if you're familiar with roblox's numbers basically it's large um so they have effectively a range of stats but effectively 215 million monthly active users is a big number yeah but actually more impresses is their 66.1 million daily active users now don't get me wrong when we're talking Millions it's really easy to be impressive but 200 million is great 66 daily is so much better so so much better because what

that is is those are people that are coming every day they're your active consumers they are very much hooked into your platform and Roblox really has that YouTube of gaming thing going on where people come in they watch one thing they try one thing they jump into another they call their friends they message them they join them in the other they try something else it's not Netflix they're not watching a series they're jumping between experiences they may stick for a while but they're jumping between experiences so again an interesting stat for most people who don't follow Roblox Community is the one where we talk about 53% of Roblox users are over 13 right so either those of you with kids or those you you know you've kind of got used to Roblox being a very young person community like 8 to 12 year olds is like 8 to 12 year old boys but actually that's slightly dated Roblox is basically almost 50 50 gender which as

we know in gaming is so unusual it shouldn't you know it's like a massive oh my God 50/50 right spot a girl on fortnite you've done super well right it's just so very unusual so it's around the 50/50 and what Roblox has done now is they've aged up so they've kept the bottom coming in but they've kept the top staying so you have now Roblox really core demographic is between 8 and 24 like really old yeah says the 50-year old guy okay so again Roblox is a fascinating Community let's try and land this and find something else right so digital merchandising they love but one thing more than they like buying their Avatar cloes is they like getting them for free right they you know kids in Roblox like getting the free merch like everybody else gets the free merch and then you

can see their consumer and engagement by how long they wear the merch um so what we've focused on is we've done a lot of user generated content giveaways right plus we've done a lot with branded items okay so that's that means that we've created something right and we've also put it alongside a branded item and we've then seen how it compares the ugc item versus the Branded item now um is anyone familiar with the store decathlon does that ring any bells okay some people okay French French store basically produce all their own physical clothes but also bring in the brands and then compare and they sell like the adid Das shirt for like €25 and they sell the daflon shirt for like5 yeah so the the Branded makes their stuff look really good pricewise yeah but it also gives them comparisons of what's really selling versus what

they have yeah so mixing the Brand Plus the user generated content um is a very very interesting way of looking at what's selling within Roblox and let's just be clear at the moment I mentioned briefly earlier Roblox has shifted from everything being created in terms of digital merchandising by them to now a small number of trusted creators creating merch and then at some point we hit the opra moment and everybody's a Creator yeah so that 66 million daily active users as long as they're an authorized account etc etc been on the platform for a while which would still only cut it down to like 40 million a mere 40 million they could all create and place in the store The Challenge with creating and placing in the store is you end up with those 80 million items in the store which is why we've ended up going and putting stores in individual games games so almost

replicating the model that we've that we are used to in retail you know you wouldn't go to one great big retailer with 80 million items and try and Shop right that would kill most people right even the D diard shopaholic would struggle with that but you would be comfortable going to a smaller retail so we've replicated that model here the other model that we've replicated anyone familiar with the brand she in okay and anybody who's not familiar with shien you're either male or too old um okay um so Shen just to give you an example sashin is a Chinese company that doesn't sell in China um so they basically sell outside China they are basically the super fast fashion company yeah so fast fashion was very much pioneered by Gap and Zara then effectively Ultra fast fashion came for with a few UK companies boohoo and others and shean have just done it

better than anyone else right so the ingredients here are very important and I'm the reason I'm spending a bit of time on that is again if you're wanting to Dev develop digital merchandising at the scale of Gucci and Prada and Ralph Lauren you have to also look at what's the lessons to be learned within the fashion industry um so this is shien's business model if you're familiar with it it's a classic flywheel yeah so effectively it starts with kind of realtime data analytics realtime optimization ver integrated integrated Supply lowest price Superior user experience Word of Mouth referrals W and back to aggressive user acquisition right Sheen has been the most popular brand on Tik Tok since Tik Tok basically invented right it's the number one by a long a long way uh influencer based marketing the critical element here is very much

around spotting Trends small batch sizes instant deployment analyze the data spot more Trends small batch sizes etc etc this is what Sheen does in real time what they managed to achieve was a vertical integration into the Chinese manufacturing base so they went into low Tech warehouses where clothing was produced and they gave them the operating system they gave them literally the software in which they could see how much capacity that individual Warehouse has now that doesn't exist in the metaverse so it's much easier to build but it's effectively the same model right you need to be able to look into a game see what cool merch an individual creator has created potentially replicate that merch or create something similar put it in your store Drive eyeballs to it look

at longevity it's the same model yeah it's just done within Roblox it's done within that confines and it's done at massive scale um okay so that was a little bit of an overview I'm going to leave some time for questions um so again if you're not familiar with Roblox I would encourage you to strongly lean into it fortnite's and epic games Unreal Engine for fortnite is only a bit of a step behind yeah so discoverability is much harder there um because epic hasn't really built the tools out and the the front end to do discoverability well because it's still very much transitioning from fortnite to individual creators utilizing the Unreal Engine to create thought like like experiences uh and zetto how many people have heard of zetto

cool I think one so toet is basically coming from Southeast Asia where it's very much coming out of that kind of K-pop school right it's coming from more of a social media presence but coming more into being a gaming community and it's definitely at the moment probably the third largest community that we look at right so we've LED on Roblox because the infrastructure and the numbers there we've started a lot of work in fortnite and we've started working Soto but they're further behind but it would be effectively the same model create a network spot Trends distribute via the network catch the data spot Trends distribute by the network and utilize it for brand awareness brand engagement and monetization process and I would argue that you could monetize now better utilizing and selling digital merch then you could in terms of any of

the in-game robo currencies and a multiple other merchandising is well look at Who's the who you're competing with if you can sell more stuff than Ralph luren you've doing quite well in the business world right um okay um and a couple of funny quotes again the metaverses a t has come out of fashion this is a lovely quote from Tim Sweeney who was the who is the founder of of of fortnite and and uh and basically going let's all have a weake for uh the metaverse because effectively it's over well apart from the 400 million monthly active users that occupy it uh and then this is my favors which hopefully you can read which is and we ignored it and therefore it went away obviously the whole Trends in AI gen AI large language model stable diffusion Etc separate talk that just Powers all of this yeah cool that was the end of there

happy to take questions in my remaining one and a half minutes perfect well thank you very much what a great talk thank you colen amazing and I mean huge numbers there and the the graph comparing the sales of uh digital merchandise with with digital uh you know clothing with the big brands that we're all familiar with astonishing um we've got yeah we've got a time for a couple of questions probably is there any one oh sorry I can see with got one question uh so what is there some kind of digital pirat or bootlegging going on in this kind of digital stores I would imagine somebody being quite easily able to replicate these things being sold like how do you have the prestige on these items you don't really so obviously if you utilizing branded clothing so added as I mentioned earlier then they can go in and protect their brand yeah uh and there is now Roblox are building mechanisms for them to report kind of brand theft in some instances they don't want to do that same as what happened with Peppa Pig in

China sometimes the big Brands don't actually want to shut down the black May the black market side because actually it just raises awareness uh but those mechanisms are there the challenge is discoverability if you're in a store of 80 million assets yeah you're you know what is it the best place to find a dead body is the second page of Google because nobody looks sure take one more question um so you share that CFT with uh roblo and fortnite versus um conventional stores and Brands um is is the data on the sales only on digital clothes or do they so for example roblo has ingame items or in-game perks do are they included in that data or do you have oh so when I did the Ralph Lauren Gucci question yeah

no that was specifically skins so that was specifically digital merch it wasn't related to in-game currency or boosts or any of the other stuff which actually then shows you the real scale of what we're talking about right yeah and and and as I said that's today like next year that graph will be different because Roblox will be Roblox and fortnite put them together they will be ahead of Gucci right and this is the where you know you saw this in if you added the TV industry and the movie industry together gaming was smaller and then gaming got bigger and now gaming is twice the size of TV and movie put together and the same thing plays out here and when you solve the problem of interoperability the ability to take the shirt and wear it in different places oh it it goes up another layer right so you 2x that graph uh which is why I would encourage any body if they're in this space seriously lean into roblox's

Community because it's only just starting to monetize and it's only just getting bigger amazing but we're out of time another round of applause for Colin that was great really really enlightening appreciate that thank you and uh