This article on The Fabricant is part of our Vogue Business membership package. To enjoy unlimited access to our weekly Technology Edit, which contains Member-only reporting and analysis and our NFT Tracker, sign up for membership here.
Dutch digital fashion house The Fabricant made its name when it famously created and sold the first fashion NFT in May 2019 for $9,500. It cemented The Fabricant as a visionary that could not only design, but monetise, high-quality, headline-making digital fashion. Partnerships with brands including Off-White, Google, H&M and Adidas soon followed.
But, at the end of 2021, co-founder and CEO Kerry Murphy made a surprising announcement: the Fabricant was pivoting away from its “service business model”, which created white-labeled digital goods for brands, and toward a consumer co-creation platform, The Fabricant Studio, for people to design, mint and sell fashion NFTs.
Since then, the value of ETH plummeted and consumer enthusiasm in NFTs — especially as speculative assets — has waned. Creating and monetising digital fashion is complicated for the average person — though there’s still interest in goods from high-value brands that promise ongoing utility. Brands, rather than consumers, are most in need of these tools, The Fabricant found.
So now, The Fabricant is pivoting again, this time back to brands. “They’re ready for it and they understand the need for digital fashion. They need help with resources from three different perspectives: production of assets, distribution of assets and connecting those to a business model,” Murphy says.
The Fabricant’s next phase is multi-pronged; co-founder Amber Jae Slooten, as creative director, will continue to design and show in-house fashion under The Fabricant label. Brands will have access to a platform that will serve as their digital fashion extension by producing and distributing digital fashion. This is different from The Fabricant’s early days, as it won’t necessarily be tailoring every project to each brand’s needs, Murphy says; however, it will still curate participants, honing in on “premium, culture-defining brands and creators”, with a specific focus on Gen Z. “That’s where we believe that digital fashion is getting a lot of traction,” Murphy says.
Digital fashion is poised for more stability than the early days of The Fabricant, he notes, because it’s no longer so closely associated with the crypto market. “A lot of people said, ‘Oh, that’s an NFT? That s crypto.’”
Brand strategies have also evolved; now they focus on the long-term. Both Nike and LVMH announced long-term, ongoing partnerships with Epic Games, the maker of game Fortnite and digital asset technology tool Unreal Engine. Gucci has signed a long-term partnership with Yuga Labs, maker of numerous top-tier Web3 IP entities including the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, narrative platform 10KTF and virtual world The Otherside. Adidas, Ralph Lauren, Prada, Balmain and Tommy Hilfiger have expanded projects that create communities around digital goods. “There’s some really great signals coming from Louis Vuitton and most recently from Dior that really showcases that these brands are taking these Web3 business models very seriously,” Murphy says.
Since The Fabricant was founded in 2018, numerous startups have formed to capitalise on the need for the fashion industry to tap into these new technologies, communities and economies: DressX, The Dematerialised, Institute of Digital Fashion and Syky, to name a few. “Without doubt, the field is more crowded now than it was back then, but digital fashion needs digital mastercraft, so I think they re well positioned to guide brands through this still nascent space,” says Matthew Drinkwater, head of the Fashion Innovation Agency at the London College of Fashion (LCF), who began collaborating with The Fabricant’s founders in 2017.
Amid this roller coaster, as Murphy calls it, the company went back to square one: what does a “digital fashion house” mean? In his mind, the ideal business model is a decentralised version of LVMH, in which The Fabricant is just one of the many successful brands — and the most innovative.
To pull it off, The Fabricant is leaning on a “mega grant” from Epic Games in December 2021, and has switched to primarily using Unreal Engine to design its digital materials. (The amount was not disclosed, but grants like this can be a couple hundred thousand dollars.) It also now has investors to answer to. In April, it announced it had raised $14 million in Series A led by Greenfield Capital, with additional participants including Ashton Kutcher’s firm Sound Ventures and Red Dao, among others.
Investors were drawn to the fact that The Fabricant straddles the lucrative industries of fashion and gaming. “Over the past two years, we have talked to many teams in the space and have hardly met anyone so deeply connected in both worlds,” says Jascha Samadi, VP at Greenfield Capital, who also invested in DressX. “They are not crypto tourists. They were working this way before NFTs became cool.” Megan Kaspar, an investor through Red Dao, says that The Fabricant’s founders “have created an exceptional experimental environment for digital products and new business models”.
The Fabricant now counts at least 20 employees, whose backgrounds span blockchain, fashion and gaming, says co-founder and CCO Adriana Hoppenbrouwer-Pereira. The pressure of scaling and profitability are front of mind, but Murphy says its investors have “been nothing but supportive”. “Of course, we report to them, but we’re not being punished for being an ultra crazy startup who can do whatever they like. We re still an early stage series A startup. So, that means that we need to prove product market fit.”
Creation, co-creation and couture
This summer, The Fabricant will begin a timeline of drops of a new six-piece collection, called Primal Rave, whose references combine traditional Dutch dress with rave silhouettes popularised in the 1990s. Pieces range in price from free shoes to limited edition looks for $70 (quantities range from 150 to 350 for the paid items). Some will be given away for free to people who already have certain Fabricant NFTs; other pieces will give early access for previous holders. Owners will receive the full 3D files, which means they can ultimately be worn on their own avatars or digitally tailored on their likeness. The pieces, depending on which designs, will also be wearable on Ready Player Me avatars and via augmented reality filters.
The project is the third part in a narrative arc that was introduced earlier this year, called Wholeland (a play on “Holland”), which refocuses attention on The Fabricant’s creative talent and is designed to showcase the possibilities of its technology to the wider industry. It started with a collection of otherworldly “XXories” NFTs (pronounced “accessories”), such as dripping sunglasses and pearl “tears”. This was followed by a three-piece collection of headwear silhouettes, called Kapers, which XXories holders were able to then customise with their choice of a range of futuristic, animated digital fabrics — all details that would be impossible in the physical world.
The Primal Rave collection is referred to as couture collection, because of the craftsmanship, deep narrative and limitation of supply, says Hoppenbrouwer-Pereira. “If you zoom in, there is such a high level of detail. It is literally handmade on the computer.”
All of these releases, which are designed to be worn together, will culminate in an immersive, interactive, invitation-only digital fashion show this September, in which the viewers participate rather than simply observe by exploring a narrative metaverse experience with six different areas.
The hope is that The Fabricant will be accepted by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode to show during couture week in Paris. This is a notoriously high bar, as applications are by invitation only, and digital fashion technique and workmanship are a relatively foreign field to governing bodies. “They are delivering a quality that few can achieve,” LCF’s Drinkwater says. “When I think about how digital couture or digital savoir-faire will be defined, I think of The Fabricant.”
There are some precedents. The Fabricant participated in a standout experience during Metaverse Fashion Week, and London’s digital fashion brand Auroboros was accepted by the British Fashion Council in June 2021 to show among other emerging talents. The BFC is also working closely with Syky, which plans to launch its marketplace — along with its first collection from its Syky Collective designers — this September.
While The Fabricant is refocusing on brand projects, there will still be a limited co-creation element for consumers, but more in the form of personalisation. “Co-creation is challenging in terms of technology and mindset,” Murphy has learned, adding that brands don’t want a consumer to co-create NFTs, which typically involve sharing revenue with participating parties for the lifetime of the asset. “When it comes down to splitting royalties equally between the designer, the material creator and the co-creator, that’s where it’s a hard stop. We haven’t seen a single brand who is actually really willing to distribute the wealth equally within the ecosystem.”
Samadi thinks co-creation of fashion NFTs will become more commonplace as Gen Z’s gamers age, similarly to how YouTube redefined who can create for television. “There are a lot of strong indications that the younger generation cares about their digital identity,” he says. “The average Roblox user is 13 or 14 years old; in four years they will be 18. They will outgrow that environment and then realise all my precious items that I cocreate [in Roblox] are part of my identity, and they are stuck there and I cannot take them with me because I don’t own them [as NFTs].” But this hypothesis — that the same people who’ve grown up paying for fashion on Roblox and Fortnite will maintain that behaviour — has yet to be proven out.
The Fabricant also wants to encourage more styling of digital pieces, as it is doing with the Primal Rave show. To do this, it will expand its creations from the Flow blockchain to others, including Ethereum, which enables composable NFTs, which essentially allows people to combine NFTs and thus ultimately to style full looks; until now, styling capabilities like this have been a relatively inaccessible option for NFT fashion goods. “Offering a decentralised on-chain option (Ethereum) to digital fashion consumers provides greater ownership control for the user, leading to optimised use-cases,” Kaspar, of Red Dao, says.
And then, of course, it hopes to generate revenues and become self-sufficient by July of next year as it pursues its next investment round, Murphy says. “Digital-only means that we don’t produce any clothing. However, it does not mean that we don t work with companies that don’t produce any physical clothing. The great thing about the vision is that we believe that the way we’re going to reduce the amount of physical clothing in the world is by making a profitable business model that comes through digital.”
Clarification: Article has been updated to clarify that The Fabricant is not moving from the Flow blockchain to Ethereum but rather expanding to use Ethereum. 1 August, 2023
To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
Metaverse fashion companies are pulling millions in funding
