Image source @Visual China
Titan Media Note: This article is from the WeChat public account Silicon Race (ID: sv_race), author | Otter, editor | Zi, Titanium Media is authorized to publish.
The post-epidemic era is facing a downward cycle, and this year's graduates are facing the worst job market in decades. According to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics in July, the unemployment rate of people aged 16 to 24 in China reached 19.9%, up 0.6 percentage points from the previous month.
In contrast, although Europe and the United States have returned to normal life before the epidemic, the instability of inflation and geopolitical are still plaguing everyone, and rounds of layoffs are sweeping over.
Snap layoffs 20% of its employees... Wayfair layoffs 870 people... Robinhood layoffs more than 1,000 people in two consecutive rounds, Shopify layoffs 10% of its employees... 7-Eleven layoffs 880 people... Vimeo layoffs 6% of its employees... According to Crunchbase statistics, more than 41,000 people have been laid off in the US technology industry.
In such a cold environment, new careers and new opportunities are even more eye-catching.
01 New career and "cold" says NO
Digital fashion designer Samuel Jordan is from Florida, USA. At the age of 22, he sold a total of 25 million pieces a year with virtual items such as game design accessories, wallets and other virtual items for the Roblox platform, and made a net profit of $1 million.
Jordan first started playing Roblox when he was 12 years old. After conducting enough trial and error, his work was included in the Roblox creator program in 2019 and has since embarked on a career path. After successfully becoming a famous brand, he also became a co-branded designer and digital design consultant for well-known brands such as Burberry, Stella McCartney and Forever 21.
Jordan provides digital design services to the Stella McCartney brand. Image source: Samuel Jordan
Digital fashion designer Mishi McDuff. After earning his first pot of gold of $60,000 through the Roblox platform, he began to engage in digital fashion business full-time and founded his own virtual fashion house Blueberry, with an annual income of around $1 million.
It is reported that Blueberry's sales this year are expected to reach US$1.8 million, and it has joined platforms including Roblox, Fortnite and Spatial, and has designed a series for Metaverse Fashion Week in collaboration with luxury brand Jonathan Simkhai.
Image source: Blueberry
Karlie Kloss As the most Geek supermodel, he not only taught himself programming, but also founded the Kode company for women's computer education. This year, he quickly devoted himself to the metaverse and jointly created 5 virtual fashion pop-up stores with Roblox community designers, and launched a metaverse event called "Fashion Klossette Designer Showcase" .
The Roblox platform alone shows the development potential of digital fashion. Christina, Roblox's global cooperation VP, provides a set of data: "In 2021, Roblox digital fashion designers designed a total of 25 million virtual items, and 1 out of every 5 daily active users has updated their clothes every day. "
02 Digital fashion
Technology companies and major first-tier brands have joined the virtual fashion track.
On March 24 this year, the yen universe platform Decentraland held the world's first Metauniu Fashion Week. It is currently the largest completely digital fashion week, with artists and designers from more than 70 brands participating.
Facebook parent company Meta announced the opening of its first digital clothing store, Meta Avatars Store, which was officially opened to the public in the United States, Canada, Thailand and Mexico markets. The first batch of brands to be opened to the public include: Balenciaga (Balenciaga), Prada (Prada) and Thom Browne (Tom Brown). According to Reuters , these virtual clothing will be priced between $2.99 and $8.99, which is much cheaper than real clothing.
BALENCIAGA has released the 2021 autumn fashion series through the specially created VR game "Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow".
Adidashml8 creates the first virtual clothing with Boring Yuanyou, generating US$22 million in revenue.
htmlOn the evening of August 5, Prada2022 autumn and winter men's and women's clothing fashion show Yuanyun Live was held at Baidu Xirang Yuanyun magazine house Meta ZiWU. Prada launches Timecapsule series of clothing and brings 100 Ethereum-based NFT. The Timecapsule NFT program is built on the Ethereum blockchain associated with the Aura blockchain alliance, and shoppers will receive free NFT airdrops when users purchase Prada products.According to a survey by market research firm Emarketer, the number of gamers around the world will exceed 3 billion by 2022, accounting for more than one-third of the world's population. With this trend, the demand for virtual clothing, accessories, etc. for players' virtual clones will become increasingly large. At present, the target group of virtual clothing is mainly the "digital natives" of Generation Z.
The domestic virtual clothing market also showed huge growth space. In April this year, Xiaohongshu , a digital art platform under R-Space, released 18 new limited virtual fashion products. The price of virtual clothing items ranges from tens of yuan to 5,000 yuan.
Some "virtual clothing NFT dressing bloggers" have also become popular on Xiaohongshu. They publish notes on trying on virtual accessories and virtual clothing themselves. These bloggers obtain a unique serial number on the corresponding blockchain by purchasing virtual clothing, and provide their own full-body photos. The designer then optimizes and models them to fit the body shape, completes the "try-on" and finally displays and shares them.
followed by a talent gap. Virtual clothing designers also offered monthly salary of up to 50,000 yuan in a certain job. From the perspective of recruitment requirements, they need to have experience in gaming, animation, digital people , and also have threshold requirements for CG modeling, CLO3D, programming and other technologies.
Source: Zhihu
03 Digital fashion business is favored by investment institutions
Space Runners is an American meta-universe fashion clothing brand that focuses on designing digital wearable clothing NFTs for virtual environments such as virtual world, games and social media. In December last year, it launched its first NBA champion sports shoes series together with former NBA champion Kyle Kuzma and Nick Young, and casting NFTs on the Solana blockchain. Recently, it announced that it had completed a $10 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was led by Polychain and Pantera Capital, with Yat Siu, executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, and Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch, and others participated.
Source: Somag News
Wild virtual fashion brand - Tritte Brand, released the "THE DEMATERIALIZED" NFT series products, each piece of clothing costs between US$29 and US$699, and they are all available in limited quantities. Tribute Brand was founded in 2020 by two fashion designers Gala Marija Vrbanic and Filip Vajda, Marina Jukic, and programmers Igor Lipovac. Tribute Brand has built itself into the world's first 100% virtual fashion brand, providing services for the production of 3D products and AR/VR assets for games and virtual worlds. It has announced that it will complete a seed round of $4.5 million, led by Collab+Currency, and participated by Alice Lloyd George (Rogue VC), Lattice Capital, TCG Crypto, Red DAO, Neon DAO, Flamingo DAO, Gmoney, Megan Kaspar and Kanosei Ventures.
Currently, virtual reality technology is becoming more mature, and virtual clothing is becoming more and more refined and real. However, from the perspective of design concepts, simulation model rendering, accurate handling of dynamic wrinkles and dynamic changes of clothing, virtual clothing designers still face extremely high artistic and technical challenges.
In the future, will customers who purchase virtual fashion be satisfied with the 2.0 version of the "QQ show"? How to better present and display virtual clothing is still a problem that designers and practitioners need to solve.
