This is the transcript of a recording from a session at PI Apparel Hong Kong in 2023. You can watch the full session here.
So, I kind of want to start off first of all just to gauge how much everybody knows about my side of the fashion industry by just seeing who here has heard of Web3 and maybe owns a Metamask wallet or a Web3 wallet with a show of hands. So not too many. Okay, how many here have actually bought or have an NFT or a digital asset? Okay, a little bit more. So this is perfect because what I want to do here today is kind of, you know, give you an overview of what it is to be working in digital fashion. What is digital fashion? What do Brand New Vision do? And then where does this come in for your side of the industry and, you know, how does it all get enveloped within co-creation?
Brand New Vision was started in Hong Kong in 2019 by our CEO Richard Hobbs. He comes from decades of working in traditional fashion, especially in denim, and was Hong Kong based for many, many years. He’s now in Singapore. He came together with our other founders, Daniel Lin, our CPO, and Andy, our CTO, and together they sort of tried to understand how to make traditional fashion more efficient through digital flows. So, you know, having digital outputs within technological places, within factories to make the distribution more efficient.
That very quickly sort of dissipated when the hype of NFTs and the world of NFTs came into fruition, and they realized that, you know, there was a whole market within digital fashion. So digital fashion is many things. It’s AR filters for social media. It’s holograms within physical spaces. It’s skins for video game characters. It can be, you know, augmented pieces of garment that have video screens on them. That is the point of, you know, the metaverse. It’s not one singular thing. It’s many, many things put together. It’s AR, it’s VR, it’s AR, it’s XR, it’s everything together. All the Rs.
And so Brand New Vision is a very unique, if you will, player in the digital fashion market because it’s an ecosystem. So we don’t just create our own clothing that go on video game characters. We have a whole ecosystem that works around it. That means that your NFT, which we now call digital assets, your digital asset or your wearable if you will, you buy this digital asset from us on the marketplace and you can wear it in various metaverse games like High Street, Sandbox, Decentraland. But more than that, it is your proof of authentication into the Brand New Vision community. And you basically are granted access to digital and physical games, experiences with fashion brands, as well as weekly and monthly dividends in tokens.
So when you receive FASH, which is our token, you can then essentially convert it into real money outside of the ecosystem of the game. So this is where it becomes interesting for you, because when a digital asset in the shape of a wearable, of a fashion item, isn’t just an artistic collectible, but it’s actually a membership pass that you can collect points and build up data points on your customers and understand them better and offer them exclusive tools and exclusive entrance into specific experiences. That’s where it becomes more and more exciting. So just to give you a bit more of like, you know, less of a philosophical theory and more of like a practical understanding of what we’ve done.
We recently teamed up with the CFDA, the Council of Fashion Designers of America. And we worked with seven of the biggest designers that you could think of. We had Michael Kors, Diane Von Frostenberg, Michael Koch, Tommy Hilfiger, Carolina Herrera, Uli Schavaria. And with each one of them, we basically created a one of one unique NFT, which is these that you will see in a minute being played on the video. So we created one of one NFTs that are video assets, if you will. Each one of these NFTs was bought for charity. They sold between 15,000 and 25,000 US dollars. And the owner of one of them, for example, the Vivian Tam dress that we created, was bought by Kathy Hackel.
The godmother of the metaverse, if you will. What does Kathy Hackel get from owning this beautiful dress apart from having an awesome collectible that she can display on a screen? She will have access to behind the scenes access to Vivian Tam, a one of a kind physical dress made of her, access to AR filters, access to front row seats to the next show. And so already you’re building this sort of VIP exclusive experience. Now, where BNV is really fighting to sort of make that not just an exclusive VIP experience is that we’re trying to democratize fashion. So just like somebody buys this for 25,000 US dollars, somebody can buy a similar piece for five US dollars and gain access to games within the metaverse to store openings in the real world to weekly dividends, like I said.
And so you’re building this idea that clothing isn’t just something that you wear to flex, but it’s also something that you can be proud of the earnings that you get in return. And so we’re moving away again from this top down situation where brands create beautiful clothings, they go on marketing and campaigns on social media, consumers like it, and then that’s all that is sort of happening. We’re sort of moving into a situation where tipping is the new liking. So if you like something that somebody is wearing in the virtual world, you can tip them with Fash, whether you’re the brand or another consumer. So brands have the opportunity to give back to the consumers and give them both in financial gains and experiential gains.
So as you can see with the CFDA videos, each one of them is very unique. The way that it works is that our team at BNV is made up of incredible digital designers that some of them are here today, like Rachel, our senior Metaverse tailor, and a whole team of tech developers. So when you bring digital designers that have a background in fashion that come from central St. Martins and SCAD and you put them together with developers within the world of blockchain and Web3, what you create is that you basically create beauty and fashion out of technology. So technology becomes the main power and the main power source of sort of expanding into this new universe.
This that you’re seeing right now on the screen is actually something that we did recently with a K-pop group called Lightsome with Cube Entertainment, who are also one of our investors. We joined forces with Victor Vincente, a young French designer who worked under Jean-Paul Gaultier and basically brought him together with the band members, together with our digital designers, and turned his 2D sketches into 3D wearables that you can wear in-game or play with as AR filters. Now what does everything that I’ve just said have anything to do with co-creation? So all of this is co-creation. You bring a designer together with a consumer, with a music band, or with a sports celebrity, you bring a brand into this, you figure out if it’s for a physical event, so you start working with someone like New York Fashion Week or Paris Fashion Week, and all of this is co-creation, which we’re very used to in our world.
Where it becomes more interesting is now the consumer becomes part of the creation process. You create a digital wearable, you put it into the metaverse, and then these consumers, they can either, you know, they’re walking billboards, they basically decide how they represent your brand. They can go into a metaverse game and start dancing and being really happy, or they can go and be angsty and political. They can go into a game that will be dynamic and the shirt will start ripping off as they run around through a forest, and suddenly your garment has been modified. Or they come into B&V World, which is the metaverse world that we’re launching over the next few weeks and months, which is the world’s first fashion metaverse, and they will be able to utilize various different tools from AI tools to creative, PFP and image uploading to basically work on top, a new layer on top of the wearables and the designs that you’ve created with Brand New Vision as brands, and basically modify them and create them into personalized items for each and every single one of them.
So co-creation becomes very interesting because it means that everyone within the traditional world of fashion has to relinquish the ability to regain all of the power on what it is that they create. You have to be open and accepting of the fact that if you want the consumer to be part of your product in this metaphysical, cross-digital, real-world situation, they have to also be active producers and co-creators. So that goes from just remembering that community is everything. You used to rely on big billboards in Times Square with celebrities to get people to desire your products, but now what they are moving towards within Web3 is the desire to be able to influence, modify, change that product, make money from that product, sell it, regain social value on social media as creators and designers.
And so all of these possible opportunities that you’re giving people through these digital assets, wearables, NFTs, whatever you want to call them, is something that you should be proud of. What you’re seeing on the screen right now is our latest product that we’re very excited about. It’s the B&B vending machine. Think of it as a physical meets digital potential product. We are basically understanding that the way that people are currently sliding through ASOS or social media to purchase and buy fashion products is just not the way that it’s going to continue to be. It’s a little bit too mundane and flat.
So what we’re moving towards is a three-dimensional space like B&B World and the vending machine where you as your avatar, which you’ve constructed and created in our ID station called MeID, you create your avatar in our system, you dress it with different wearables that you’ve sort of collected from different brands, and you run into the wheel of B&B World. In this world, which is an infinite loop, you will find different pavilions from brands like Tommy Hilfiger and DVF and other brands that we will start working with or have worked with in the future, if you will. And you are basically able to modify your wearables, go through a wardrobe system, and then upload into what we call the vision feed, which is the next generation of social media.
It’s not selfies of yourself and your friends and likes, but it’s you with your digital assets gaining financial tipping, if you will, from brands and other consumers, gaining likes and emojis, as well as entrance into special events. So again, I think when we discuss co-creation, it’s important to remember that it’s something that is open for variance. So depending on what your company is looking to do, if you will, with the consumer, you can decide what this co-creation is.
The co-creation can be in the design process, where you decide what do you create, what is the wearable itself, what style, what trend. The co-creation can be in the decision making of how is this item going to be presented. Is it an item that is strictly digital? Is it a phygital item or metaphysical item, if you will, that you can have a physical item with an embedded microchip, an NFC, and that scans you into the metaverse when you arrive into a specific place. There’s honestly infinite possibilities of creativity. So to bring it back into how can this be a powerful, profitable part of the fashion industry, we take it back to tokenization.
Tokenization means that you take these digital assets that people buy and you basically construct an entire ecosystem around them. These tokens give people access to, as we said, services as well as experiences, as well as creative tools. But they also offer your brand a way to monitor data points and understand your consumer better. And hopefully in the next few months and years, use AI tools to really understand how you can empower people through these digital assets that you create. You can see that 30 people went into Decentraland to go to a Pride event wearing a Tommy Hilfiger Pride t-shirt.
And so that means that we should be doing more stuff around LGBT events and customers. Or you can see that actually I’ve been missing out on a whole side of the world like Africa or the Middle East and there’s events and experiences that we should be creating for that part of the world. I just came back from Dubai and had a lot of conversations also with people in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia. And it’s very interesting to see how fashion is sort of being utilized and digital fashion is being utilized in a very different way on that side of the world and still empowering customers and empowering communities. So I think when we talk about tokenization and digital assets and co-creation, it’s really discussing this independent freedom that we’re giving consumers to not feel like they’ve basically been bought by an advert, purchased an item and sort of disappeared into the abyss of your brand’s existence.
I think with co-creation you’re always reminding the consumer that they are at the forefront of your business’s success. I think, you know, taking it back a little bit towards what it is that we want to discuss in terms of fashion, tokenization, co-creation, I think we need to remember that fashion is everything. Fashion is sports, it’s beauty, it’s cinema, it’s music, it’s fitness, it’s political, it’s culture, it’s entertainment, but it’s also industry. It’s also fabrics, materials, ecological issues that we have to face. And so when we discuss bringing fashion into the metaverse, we’re really discussing bringing an entire industry that affects the way that our planet is run and affected and sort of finding ways to maybe, you know, remove the parts that don’t need to be physical or anti-ecology, if you will, and putting them into the metaverse.
There’s a lot of things like conferences, showrooms, fashion shows that could intrinsically be brought into the digital and virtual spheres without needing to necessarily affect the physical world so much. So you know, the pandemic was a perfect example of this, but suddenly we had entire conferences and schedules that were moved into the virtual world, but it was moved into Zoom meetings with cubes and squares. And that’s where, you know, you suddenly realize, okay, fashion is everything, because if I was a three-dimensional avatar wearing my personalized clothing that represents me rather than just a square of my head, then I could probably evoke who I am better as a person and a speaker to the people watching me.
And so I think it was exactly around that time where, you know, Richard Hobbs and Daniel Linf, our founders, sort of understood the power of fashion, digital fashion, sorry, beyond just game character skins, but actually as assets of your social and cultural existence. That’s why we’re calling our wardrobe system, Me-ID, because we believe that everybody’s gonna create an ID in the virtual sphere over the next few years, whether it’s to enter a bank, or as a student to go to a seminar, or as an artist to present your work. It’s just, it would be ridiculous, I think, to think that this is gonna overtake the physical world, but what we are hoping and believing is that it will be a beautiful layover on top of what already exists.
And that’s why so many people are betting on AR and augmented reality, and not just fully immersive VR, ready player one, fictional type metaverses, because the idea that this event, within a year, rather than just watching this stuff on the screen, would actually be popped out on holograms, personalized to each one of you, depending on which NFT and asset you own. And you walking across a shopping mall, and rather than not knowing where to go in, being sort of guided and saying, you just bought this item three weeks ago, come and check out what’s happening in there. So there’s a lot of interactivity, but beyond interactivity, what it is is gamification. So gamification, tokenization, co-creation, those are three verticals that come together beautifully within digital fashion.
You know, it’s very easy to get someone to, not very easy, but it’s very easy to purchase a digital wearable, put it on your avatar in a video game, and then what? What do I do? What does that mean? That’s basically the outcome of the last year and a half of trying to understand what is the next step? What do we want people to do with these digital assets? And that’s where gamification comes in. When you gamify a situation, rather than just having people watch your advert, then you’re offering people a way to interact on a deeper level with the narrative of your brand, with the narrative of this new garment, this new line that you’ve produced, and this, if you will, messaging from the designer or the brand itself that you’re trying to evoke.
Games don’t necessarily have to be quests like little five-year-old, 10-year-old kids play. Gamification can be intellectual. It can be going through seminars in the virtual world and gaining information and having to complete a quiz afterward to get something in return. It can be fun. It can be everything that you think. So gamification can just as well be a way that you allow your consumer to be part of the design process. That’s where AI tools come in. So in B&V world, what we’ve offered people the opportunity to do is to do text-to-image prompt AI. So they can purchase a wearable, write a big red apple realistic, and then suddenly a big red apple appears on their T-shirt, and they can play around with the size and width and quantity of apples that appear on the T-shirt.
Suddenly, you have the opportunity to have your original blank canvas, if you will, be the basis for hundreds or thousands of new designs. And then the second layer of gamification is offering people the ability to vote within the community for their favorite design. And then you as a brand can create that design as a physical item. Suddenly, a community member who was just a passive consumer becomes a co-creator and a designer and has that value returned to him because he created it as an NFT or a digital asset, which is tokenized. And so on the blockchain, it is said that it is him and he will receive those dividends back, him or her, in an equal manner and a fair manner.
None of that stuff from the old world, if you will, where somebody creates something, a big brand takes that idea, makes lots of money of it, and then that amateur creator was forgotten and lost. This is the point of co-creation within the world of digital fashion. It allows you to empower your consumer. It allows you to show that your brand isn’t just here to collect a paycheck at the end of the day, but is here to actually affect and influence the cultural sphere around it. What you’re seeing here is the helmet, sorry, on top of the avatar’s head, is what we are sort of envisioning as an accessory that will be the next profile picture.
So within BNV World, we hope that people will showcase their NFTs that they bought, like a board ape or a CryptoPunk, or even an image of their grandma or dog, anything that they want. There will be the ability to have a webcam so you could essentially use it as a means to communicate with other people in a three-dimensional avatar way. The idea is that you don’t wanna put too many rules and structures for your consumer within the world of digital fashion. They are the ones who should show you what it is exactly that them as individuals and them as a community want from your product. And this is where it gets really exciting. So the wrap dress from Diane von Frostenberg, which was from the CFDA project, is obviously synonymous with the brand, one of the longest-standing products, and something that you don’t really want to mess around with the DNA.
It’s something that is unique and recognizable. So we didn’t mess around with it. We didn’t allow the consumer to modify it or shift it. But what we are allowing the consumer to do is to get closer to the brand and closer to the designer through backstage access paths and being able to bring that fan base, if you will, closer to a place where they become producers of the art that they adore. There’s, as you can see from everything that you’re sort of seeing on screen, we have an awesome content team. And this content team has got a very difficult job to understand alongside the marketing team and the community team sort of what it is that they’re trying to present as the definitive message of brand new vision or digital fashion.
And over the last few months, I think we’ve sort of decided that there’s two main pillars that B&V are sort of pushing ahead with. One is the B2B, which is bringing brands, traditional fashion brands into the metaverse, if you will, through unique activations, AR filters, virtual reality immersive experiences, games within platforms that exist already or ones that we’re building. And the second pillar is B2C, which is basically educating and co-creating with the consumer this new frontier of fashion, this new frontier of entertainment and culture, really, if you will.
And I think it would be silly of me to stand up here and say to you that we know what it is, what the definitive product is that digital fashion should be for the consumer today. Because come next year, and we all have a super portable VR headset, or come three years when holograms appear across all physical landscapes, that will modify and change what it means to interact with digital fashion. But what is very obvious is that when you explain to the consumer that digital fashion could bring a return on investment and earnings that are weekly from basically taking part in creative experiences and creating fashion, that you could get a financial reward from that instead of flipping for hours through web, to Instagram, Facebook, social media, then suddenly you have a spark in their mind.
When you allow the consumer to freely create and earn in a democratized manner, then you allow him and her to show you and explain to you what it is that your product should be. And so this vending machine is a beautiful way for us to interact with the consumer, for brands to place their products within a very simple and recognizable product and to see how the consumer interacts with it. That is the point of the interoperable open metaverse and these tokenized digital assets that you can see where the consumer goes with their digital assets. It’s almost like checkpoints. It’s like the leave home safe app. You understand without knowing their physical world identity where they go and what they do, which is a very powerful tool as we all know.
So before I move into questions and answers, I think the last thing I sort of want to leave you on, which I think is the most exciting thing from our side and Brand New Vision is, as I’ve discussed, the BNV world and the three main, if you will, tools that are coming out within the next few weeks and months. So BNV world, an independent web browser-based metaverse world, where brands will be able to showcase clothing, media, videos, do AMAs, Q&As, whatever you want, and where the consumer will be able to come, create their identity, and sort of give birth to their virtual selves.
This will be a space where brands and consumers together can come and interact and engage and sort of be there really at the forefront of the birth of what it is that they’re creating together. We believe that when you bring a designer who’s Hong Kong-based, let’s take Vivian Tam. Vivian Tam came to one of our Art Basel physical events a few weeks ago. She saw the design that she sketched out be basically displayed as a 3D object. She saw it as an AR filter as well, but she was more importantly there with a designer that co-created it with her, Rachel, as well as the whole team that she’s working with as well as the whole team of consumers and NFT buyers that are basically her fans.
Bringing that together in a physical space, we all know how to do, but there’s only so much that you can do before you need to scale it up. You can do the same thing in a virtual space to a million fans with the same designer, the designer on a plane going to LA and the consumers spread across the world and still have it be just as immersive and have the dress and the clothes and the dress and the clothing flow and move and the texture and everything be visible. So there’s a lot to do within digital fashion and it’s in no way gonna remove physical fashion, but it’s definitely gonna give a brand new depth and a new vision, no pun intended, for fashion as a whole and as an industry.
So thank you very much and I’m happy to take questions from you all. Yeah. Ah, do I need to look up? Okay. What has made the most progress in all different things that fashion offers. So I think the biggest progress from digital fashion is that it has become possible for somebody who has no idea how to sew, no idea how to put together fabrics, no idea how to even use digital programs, if you will, to create and mold like Blender and Clo and Unreal Engine and ZBrush. All this has become democratized because of companies like BNV and our friendly competitors who allow and offer you to come into the creation process.
Again, AI is huge. AI, whether it’s text to image, text to video, or even if it’s just, you know, chat GPT and offering you the understanding of what it is that you need to do, AI allows the everyday consumer to become an active producer within digital fashion. So I think that’s the biggest progress over the last three years since I think Richard came to speak last time here, is that digital fashion isn’t now a means by which to improve physical distribution and creation, but rather a way to empower consumers online to play around with creativity. The token name. So our token is called FASH, F-A-S-H, short for fashion.
It will be the token that we believe represents the open metaverse democratized fashion industry. And it will be available over the next few months through various different token sales. What we have at the minute, which is even more exciting, because you could be part of the, if you will, pretester is FASHcred. So if you go to BNV, go on Instagram, Twitter, find us wherever you want, but on Discord, if you join us on Discord as part of our community, you will be able to start earning FASHcred and take part in experiences and games and weekly activities and that will then be converted to FASH, which will be convertible to fiat, physical money, if you will, traditional money.
How do we put value on digital pieces? That’s a really good one. So value comes from two things. Value comes from its collectability and its utility. So utility means what do you jam-pack into this digital asset? Is it discounts, membership, access to events, access to designer or celebrities, to brands, access to media assets, or is it that the item is a super luxurious, one-of-one collectible art piece? So you either go the art route or you go the perks and benefits route. And I think that’s the main two value points from digital assets.
A lot has been written about the, oh, yeah, okay. So NFT, sustainability, and what are my thoughts? So NFTs, first of all, are a great technological tool to authenticate proof. So if you remove an NFT as a entertainment cultural product and take it back to the industry level, it’s a certificate. It’s something that in every factory and at every point down the creation and distribution of fabrics and clothing, you can basically authenticate with the NFT that it did come from the right place, that it was sustainably and ethically sourced, and not be lost, if you will, in fake documents.
In terms of the sustainability and energy consumption part, what we’re seeing at the minute, especially with the bigger blockchains like Ethereum and Polygon, and then moving to a system which I won’t get into now, but a more sustainable and efficient process, that basically the cost of creation and purchasing of NFTs is obviously going to exponentially go down as the time goes by. And there is, of course, the obvious physical item is physical, a digital item is not. You’re creating and connecting with your consumer in a way that doesn’t require you to create physical merch, which is a huge ecological consumption.
Can you elaborate a bit more on the co-creation aspects on digital assets? Yeah, so, and I think you and the crowd know better than me, but there’s a very long period between the design, where a designer creates a design for a product in the fashion industry, to the approval, to the factory moment distribution, and arrival to store, and actually worn onto a consumer’s back. This means that there is limited opportunities in that flow to interrupt it and be able to allow the consumer to influence what the design will be and look like. So really, you’re hoping that your design is brilliant and your brand’s sort of savviness leads you into the right space a year from now, and you don’t actually go the completely wrong route, depending on style and trends that may appear.
What happens with digital fashion is that not only can the gamification and entertainment part where you allow your community members to say to you and tell you what they like and want to appear, but also, they basically are there at the end of the process to again, purchase and modify and change around and do what they want with the asset. It’s a very malleable process. There’s little, you can just as well start with a digital product through a competition and community conversations, realize its popularity, and then produce the physical version of it later on, because you already have a community and the desire for that product.
So it’s almost, if you will, an upside-down focus group. Yeah, so how can you ensure that your digital cloth is compatible with different gaming platforms? That is the interoperability part of digital fashion and definitely the most difficult part. At the minute, BNV has a very, very sort of trained and technical team in-house that is able to manually modify from high resolution, retopologizing, if you will, from high resolution to low resolution, to voxelated forms, to various different aesthetics from different metaverse worlds. Each metaverse world has a different size and skeleton of an avatar that you have to re-rig, and that whole rigging process is very tedious.
This is where, again, having a trained and skilled team in-house is super important, but definitely being at the forefront of artificial intelligence and understanding how we can use AI tools to allow for scalability to be much more efficient. The idea should be, in the next three to five years, that an AI machine, you could basically prompt it to transition one type of wearable from a high-resolution aesthetics to a low-resolution voxelated format for something like the sandbox. What would you say the positive impact of digital fashion, I assume, in people’s life?
I think, personally, it’s returning playfulness to this world that we live in. I think it’s very obvious that, whether it’s conferences or industry events, but the idea of playfulness has returned to what people are trying to offer in the world. It’s returned to what people are trying to offer and provide. We went through three years, and I think Hong Kong more than anywhere else, but three years of a very transformative period through the pandemic and sort of saw the possibility of what it means to be reclused and alone in your house without connection to your friends and family or even strangers around you.
So I think that the biggest power of digital fashion is that it will allow people to freely express themselves, test out different versions of themselves that they don’t necessarily are comfortable with in the physical world, and more importantly, bring everybody closer together in a globalized yet efficient manner. Thank you very much.
