An engineer by training, Nico Fara has spent the majority of her career within the retailtech world. After founding multiple tech startups in the beauty and fashion industries, Nico’s focus has shifted towards digital fashion and the metaverse.
She’s now one of the top retail web3 consultants, working with a handful of retailers and brands to create their virtual presence in the metaverse. Unlike most virtual environments available today, Nico’s metaverse creations are hyper-realistic and aesthetically pleasing. Most importantly, they are accessible directly from users’ browsers and don’t require additional hardware or crypto wallets.
Nico founded The Fashion DAO as part of her goal to bring together stakeholders within the digital fashion community and lower the barriers to mass adoption. The Fashion DAO is a consortium of Web3 fashion experts looking to support the responsible adoption of the metaverse and NFTs in the fashion industry.
What is responsible metaverse adoption?
Currently, many retailers and luxury brands are jumping into the metaverse as a marketing ploy or as a way to stay on-trend. Few have put emphasis on the potential of its underlying technology for enhanced customer experiences or supply chain circularity. Educating consumers on these solutions aims to solve the long-standing challenges of the retail industry (such as sustainability and supply chain transparency) can facilitate and accelerate the mass adoption of web3 technologies.
Most retailers currently have an experimental strategy around web3 adoption. Some are targeting gaming or NFT communities that are already familiar with web3 and pose less risk. But to reach full adoption, digital fashion brands should place emphasis on educating traditional fashion consumers on the benefits of Web3. For brands taking a phygital approach, you also want to make sure that you are targeting potential and current customers who have already interacted with your brand in the physical world.
For now, a brand’s entrance into the metaverse ultimately depends on a retailer’s risk tolerance and whether they are looking at a short-term or long-term strategy. Some companies see the benefit of having a long-term vision and invest in high-quality digital environments that can be accessed via their e-commerce stores. This gives the brand full control over the customer experience and is what Nico’s business Cheif Metaverse Officer™ provides. Other retailers are comfortable jumping into existing metaverse platforms like Decentraland and Sandbox (despite being poor quality products controlled by third parties) because they are the most well-known, but not necessarily the best or cheapest available. Ultimately, only time will tell which approach works.
To learn more about Nico and her work, you can follow her on Twitter.