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Avatar company Genies, valued at $1 billion, has set aside $500,000 to incentivise creators to make digital fashion for its platform, making it the latest company to invest in fostering digital fashion talent.
Called the Fashion Engagement Fund, the project comes with a new set of 3D design tools and creative prompts under an umbrella called ‘The Workshop’. The goal is to enable independent creators to design, release and earn money from their digital fashion designs, similar to how Roblox creators can currently sell digital designs on the platform. Future prompts will include co-creation opportunities with cultural personalities such as singer Banks, artist Amber Park, singer Au/Ra, style influencer Clara Perlmutter (known as @tinyjewishgirl on TikTok) and others. For example, when an artist releases a new album, a prompt might invite creators to make pieces that are inspired by the album’s theme.
Banks says that while there is an “undeniable demand for genuine self-expression on the internet”, the current landscape is largely limited to curated highlights, and avatars are a way to add that missing authenticity. “It’s your inner self personified — the highs and the lows. I see avatars having the potential to be a vessel of authentic expression that has been missing.” She adds: “I love expressing myself through multiple mediums and now I get to create digital art — whether it’s fashion or avatars — in collaboration with my fans.”
Genies does not yet have automatic creator monetisation capabilities, meaning that there is no system in place for people to sell their designs on the platform to earn revenue. This early programme is an effort to mimic this functionality, says Genies founder and CEO Akash Nigam. “It s a good way to jump-start [fashion creation] and incentivise the right behaviours.” People who apply and are accepted as verified artists will be paid based on the amount of traction their designs get in a fashion-centric game called Silver Studio on a monthly basis, with the possibility for successful creators to earn thousands of dollars, he says.
“We’re living through an art renaissance, where the barrier to entry for becoming not only a recognised artist, but being able to live off your creative work, is lowering by the day,” says Genies art director at Bo Myles.
The Genies ecosystem is considerably less mature compared to other avatar companies, including Bitmoji, Ready Player Me, Roblox and Meta’s avatars, especially in terms of where the avatars are used and what they wear. However, a 2022 investment of $150 million suggests the investment community sees considerable opportunity. Nigam says the funding has enabled Genies to fast-track its roadmap, which is centred on multiple user-created “minigames” whose assets are interoperable, meaning that the clothing and other digital items created for any of the Genies mini games work in other games created in the Genies platform. It started with the Silver Studio game, where a primarily Gen Z female audience create, wear and thrift digital fashion with their peers. More games are planned by the end of the year, and the fashion and other assets created for each game will be usable in all the other games. The announcement of the Fashion Engagement Fund comes off the heels of Genies’s $1 million Developer Engagement Fund, which rewards developers who build their own games using the Genies developer kit.
Starting with fashion is crucial to success, Nigam says, because users place heavy emphasis on a persistent identity. A culmination of an avatar is largely reliant on its fashion, he says. “At the end of the day, fashion, you could argue, is more important in a digital world, and specifically with this type of identity, than even in a physical world. We’re indexing hard on fashion because we feel like that’s a really good hook to bring people into falling in love with this identity.”
This concept is infiltrating other digital companies’ strategies. This week during London Fashion Week, Web3 fashion startup Syky will unveil the first products to be released from its Syky Collective, a one-year incubation programme designed to help grow a new generation of digital fashion talent. Last week, during Korea Blockchain Week, Adidas announced a new “residency programme” to foster Web3 artists who can co-create phygital goods.
Also last week, Draup, a new company created by digital fashion influencer Dani Loftus, announced the first 26 winning applicants chosen to participate in its inaugural Digital Fashion Residency programme, a free six-week course created with blockchain-based art curator and consultancy Vertical and decentralised social media network Lens Protocol. The programme was marketed to both existing digital designers and those interested in getting started. While about 70 per cent of the 139 applicants did have experience, others had backgrounds in areas including traditional fashion, coding, styling and virtual effects, Loftus says. Workshops will cover the evolution of digital fashion, digital textile creation, AR, gaming and more, and at the end of the programme, residents will work on a final project that will be exhibited in October.
Vertical has hosted a number of other workshops related to Web3 and art, but this is the first to focus on fashion. “We saw artists and creators who were running into the space and then found themselves completely lost as to how to navigate, or what the technology was about and how they could use it to further their practice,” says Vertical founder and CEO Micol Ap. “Digital fashion is an area of art and culture that is so native to the Web3 ecosystem that we decided it would be important to focus a programme specifically on this topic.”
Companies whose futures rely on the success of these artists are investing in creators as a way to invest in their own platforms, similarly to how social media platforms have been known to pay influencers to make content. Fortnite-owner Epic Games has a similar fund to reward talented creators. Syky gets a percentage of revenue from the sales from the artists in its collective, and Adidas earns revenue from any sales related to its recent artist residency. In short, their investments are engineered to make it easier to buy, wear and benefit from digital fashion.
They are also helping to bring it, slowly, to the mainstream. “We hope to inspire by providing not only training but also community,” Ap says. “When the world is mocking what you do, that’s when bonds like this become most important.”
Just don’t say ‘metaverse’
The metaverse and Web3 as concepts have seen public sentiment shift as pop culture hype has waned, which extends to digital fashion, NFTs and digital spaces. Why would a spate of investors and founders dedicate resources to encouraging more people to learn how to create and monetise digital and phygital fashion?
Those working in the space refer to the current time as “build mode”, a necessary and welcome reset of expectations. They point to the ongoing success of gaming, the increasing adoption of AR, the advent of mixed reality headsets and the long-term potential for the technologies to enable virtual identities, new business models and a more sustainable industry — with the tech taking a backseat.
“It’s in times like this where creators have the time to breathe and focus on honing their practice and testing out what works and what doesn’t,” Draup’s Loftus says. “We thought about skills that are pertinent to sustaining oneself as a creative, like how best to market your work and develop your brand.”
Dressing avatars, Nigam says, is one of those core skills. “We think in the future of the internet, you’re going to have to show up as something and we think that something is going to be an avatar. For anybody that actually understands avatars, fashion and Gen Z specifically, they’re like, ‘Oh, this is super dope, this is awesome’.”
Despite the downturn, Genies has continued to hit all of its targets. Like many, Nigam has shied away from the word “metaverse”. “Genies got bucketed into a category of metaverse companies, but we are not a metaverse company; we are an avatar company. Metaverse is my least favourite word because it brainwashed the world into thinking myopically about the future of the internet.”
He is optimistic that Genies, and companies like it, can survive current scepticism, as long as the technology and experience are compelling. “People correlate ‘metaverse’ to [Meta’s] Horizon Worlds. However, people got really excited about [Apple’s] Vision Pro — but they never used the word ‘metaverse’. If you think about what metaverse is, all it’s saying is that we’re going to get more digitally immersed; we’re going to either use a phone more or we’re going to use AR glasses more. And that time is coming.”
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