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On Monday, Coach launched a collection within The Sims 4, marking the first time a fashion brand has partnered with the video game in five years. All players will be able to access the new collection, which is free and features customizable items from Coach’s ready-to-wear line, including its Tabby and Brooklyn bags, as well as decorative objects that can be used to craft Coach-inspired interiors through the game’s build mode.
It’s Coach’s fourth gaming activation in the last two years, which is no coincidence given the brand’s success among Gen Zs. “Our goal is the acquisition of new customers and Gen Z, and we always want to make sure we’re meeting the consumer where they are,” says Kimberly Wallengren, Coach’s VP of North America marketing, adding that the brand also chose The Sims 4 to tap into its predominantly female user base, versus male-leaning games like Roblox and Fortnite. “Our core customer is spending so much time in these gaming worlds, so why wouldn’t we make sure they have the opportunity to interact with us there, too?”
Gaming traditionally offered a popular inroad for luxury brands looking to tap into a dedicated audience via high-impact moments like Roblox’s virtual Gucci Garden, or Balenciaga’s Fortnite digital skins and virtual hub. But the strategy waned as metaverse and digital fashion efforts fell to the wayside. Now, gaming is returning as the latest weapon in fashion marketing teams’ arsenals when looking to reach Gen Z.
Late last year, Balenciaga launched collaborations within the PUBG, Fortnite and Rematch video games, in what the brand pitched as a “convergence between the cultural roles of fashion, gaming and esports”, and their shared interests in “creativity, technology and found community”. In May 2025, Fenty Beauty launched a digital world within Roblox through a new Shopify integration that allowed the in-game purchase of real-world products; in July, Puma partnered with DressX to launch virtual styling game DressGo within Roblox; and in December, Skims founder Kim Kardashian created a customizable skins collection within Fortnite.
As platforms like Instagram and TikTok move from active spots to connect with friends to hubs for passive, short-form content consumption, 2026 is the year marketers are unpicking which online spaces consumers are spending more time in. For luxury brands wanting to tap into Gen Z, experts say a non-negotiable presence is online games. Nearly three in four Gen Z consumers identify as digital gamers, according to E-Marketer data, a trend that spurred Roblox to expand the scope of in-game brand activations with more immersive features and new homepage ad slots this January.
“If you speak to anyone under the age of 20, and ask where they’re hanging out, it’s not Facebook and it’s not Instagram,” says Charles Hambro, CEO of gaming insights platform Geeiq. “They’re consuming content on TikTok and Snapchat, but they’re actually socializing in Roblox and Fortnite.”
Today’s gaming strategy has evolved from fashion’s metaverse-era flirtations to a full marketing channel, as teams are placed under more pressure than ever to prove a clear ROI.
Does gaming fit with your brand?
Experts say brands should establish who their target customer is and the story they’re trying to tell before they start showing up in games. In the age of AI, many brands are currently under pressure to prove their quality, craftsmanship and value. For some, especially the more heritage-leaning brands, this has spurred a renewed marketing focus on telling stories that resonate with their millennial and Gen X customers, via human-led visuals and films, supported by behind-the-scenes content and traditional social media channels. But Hambro advises brands to think holistically and split their focuses between this old world of social media and gaming, to reach customers from Gen Alpha to Gen X alike.
“The significance and cultural relevance of the younger generation is incredibly important to a lot of brands, because the older generation end up wanting to dress like the younger generation and it becomes that cycle,” Hambro says. “At the same time, if you ask any Gen Z or Alpha inside Roblox, ‘What handbag do you know?’ They’ll go, ‘Gucci Dionysus handbag with Bee,’ because that was their first Roblox limited item that came on the platform in 2020, and became a huge cultural moment.” Like all Gen Z-coded marketing strategies, brands hope this cultural significance among the younger aspirational consumer will translate to sales as they age and gain more spending power.
For Coach, gaming aligns with its core brand values, the brand’s SVP of global visual experience Giovanni Zaccariello says. “This is our way to connect with Gen Z emotionally online,” he says. “But we’re not just partnering with any game for the sake of being into gaming. We’ve really been narrowing down on games that allow for self-expression.” The Sims made sense for Coach, Zaccariello says, because users can build their own avatars and looks from scratch, as well as living environments, which opened the door for Gen Z players to interact with their products when they can’t afford them in real life.
“You don’t want to go into an area that’s so personal without having a clear point of view and opportunity to make the experience better for customers,” Wallengren adds. “So I think in fashion, gaming is moving from a moment of hype and one-off statements to a more fully integrated ecosystem that offers Gen Z a cross-reality from what they might experience in-store. It’s a bridge that gives them this dual world of self-expression.”
Wallengren says her team is still in its “experimentation phase” with the gaming collaborations they’ve launched in the last 18 months. But now Coach has validated the community’s appetite for the brand, it’s exploring “how deep to go” with further experiences like full brand worlds, which cost more and require a deeper understanding of each game’s mechanics. “When you think of a holistic brand campaign, launch or strategy, gaming should be there. It shouldn’t be an add-on or a PR thing. This should now be a part of everything that we do,” she says.
Similarly, Balenciaga prioritized the notion of self-expression with its gaming activations in late 2025, which made sense given the brand’s core values of “creativity and innovation”, according to Balenciaga CEO Gianfranco Gianangeli. “Through this partnership [with PUBG] we merge the artistry of fashion with the cultural reach of interactive gaming entertainment and redefine how style and self-expression can exist in virtual worlds,” Gianangeli told Vogue Business over email. Experts say the gaming communities that thrive the most are those where Gen Zs are constantly creating new assets in-game, so brands should be willing to relinquish some control to enable user-led content that’s built upon their visual codes.
Approach gaming as marketing, not the metaverse
Fashion’s previous flirtations were often conflated with the industry’s metaverse experiments, when several brands hired large innovation teams and poured thousands of dollars into headline-grabbing virtual reality activations between 2019 and 2023. Very few of these experiments translated into real revenue gains, however, establishing these innovation teams as some of the first to go during the slowdown that followed.
“When the metaverse was a thing, gaming was a PR play led by innovation teams that could tick the metaverse box,” Hambro says. “But the reality of the situation since, is that it’s now a marketing-led initiative, with completely different objectives. It’s about raw engagement, user time, sales and impressions.” This re-centering on business objectives means that brands should now view gaming as a pure marketing distribution channel, he continues, adding that cost-per-impression is much cheaper in virtual worlds than across traditional social media — in part thanks to the significantly longer dwelling time of sociable online games like Roblox and Fortnite.
Gen Z and Alpha players are now spending an average of 2.7 hours per day on Roblox, compared to an average of two hours per day on TikTok, 1.3 hours on Instagram and 1.2 hours on YouTube, according to Geeiq data. At the same time, the average engagement time on an Instagram post is one to four seconds, while the average engagement time for a branded experience within Roblox is 11 minutes, per the gaming company.
“The way we look at our collections within games at Coach is with the same KPIs as our main line collection,” Wallengren says. “We look at brand lift, consideration intent, try-ons, conversions and purchases. We’re creating the measurement framework for gaming on the fly as we learn more and test things more.” So far, Wallengren says, customers’ in-game purchasing patterns have echoed those of real life. Since the brand launched its Bitmoji closet last summer, its Terry bag has come out on top as its bestselling product each week, mimicking real-world sales.
Active co-creation trumps surface-level skins
Another key lesson from fashion’s previous gaming experiments is that it’s not enough to just show up inside games with a set of digital products and expect gamer buy-in.
“Last time around, brands built spaces that felt right for the real world, but gaming has really specific semantics. People are there with purpose, and that purpose is definitely not to shop,” says Leanne Elliott-Young, CEO and co-founder of the Institute of Digital Fashion. “Your customer within a game is active not passive, they’ve likely built the space next to a luxury brand pop-up and it has all sorts of add-on features that would out-charm any digital luxury bag with Labubus. You need to think about the tangible value your items have as a gaming world asset.”
Fashion brands can choose how deep they want to go with gaming integrations, ranging from digital product collections, which are free to launch in online games, to digital integrations that run like ad campaigns, where, say, a brand can launch a billboard or a custom area for a certain period. The deepest integrations are dubbed “own worlds”, which Hambro likens to the gaming equivalent of a brand Instagram profile, where brands can establish specific branded interactive areas and gameplay, as per Alo’s 2022 Sanctuary Roblox integration, or Tommy Hilfiger’s Tommy Play.
Wallengren says that Coach is taking an iterative approach to the brand’s gaming presence, starting with product collections that have co-creation features for gamers to design Coach-inspired environments, before the brand expands to deeper features if they resonate well. Experts advise brand marketing teams to take a thoughtful approach to what their collaborations will actually contribute to the game, and recommend partnering with developers and external agencies with deep understanding of the games they’re wanting to enter.
“A lot of fashion gaming collabs struggle because they just import a digital asset without embedding the social mechanisms of the game,” says Emy Cies, projects administrator at the London College of Fashion, and an ambassador for non-profit Women in Games. “It’s not just about surface aesthetics — a garment within a game has to do something, or denote skill or identity, or something that’s achieved through the core narrative of the game.”
Cies points to Moschino’s 2019 The Sims 4 collaboration as a rare example of a fashion tie-up that resonated well with gamers, as the brand went beyond just importing digital assets to creating a fashion career path program for gamers in which they could unlock levels of progress. Elliot-Young suggests brands spend time listening to how gamers interact with their first activations, before prioritizing tools for co-creation and customizable looks to become part of the game itself.
“Last time around, fashion brands spent a fortune on gaming collabs and the truth is they entered via innovation teams, without any understanding of what success looked like and without clear objectives,” Hambro says, stressing that today, the fashion brand that enters Roblox or Fortnite isn’t going in for innovation or hype, but “to communicate with Gen Z and reach marketing quotas at a competitive price”.
“Brands always need to communicate, and they should now be looking at games as pure communication verticals just like they do Instagram and TikTok,” he says. “These gaming platforms are essentially the future of social media.”
