Is Web3 still "in Fashion?" | European Blockchain Convention

[Music] thank you thank you very much um hello everyone welcome for this second day of the European blockchain convention uh I'm really happy to be with you uh this this morning just so let me introduce myself briefly I'm Rafael blo I'm a journalist I've been in this space now for eight years uh first at Reuters the Press agency and two years ago I co-funded the big whale which is one of the lead crypto media in Europe um so yeah I'm very pleased to to be with you on stage because uh I think that yeah our panel is um re important in the way that we used to work yeah and talk about web 3 for now a while uh I think that both you guys are in this space Also for for a while and um I spent the last three weeks in Asia and I felt like like uh there is more traction for web 3 maybe in Asia rather than in Europe even if we are whole here in Barcelona um so can you just before we we start the panel introduce yourself and after I have of course many questions for you maybe uh yeah okay it's working uh thank you for the introductions and thank you everybody for being here and making it uh managed to wake up on the second day of this conference early morning uh my name is Julian I'm the head of course and web TR that DRX uh with a leading leading fashion company in web tree and digital fashion we've been uh launching technology and collaboration across multiple uh digital platforms uh with various fashion brands from luxury fashion brands like ja and balona to retailers like H&M uh and bka but also like tech companies uh and metaverse and video games uh we Distributing digital assets across all platforms enabling people to maintain their digital identities true fashion uh across uh digital spaces uh and we also Bridge so we like web two and web three at the same time it really depends of use cases and needs for the brand so I'll be able to tell you more during the panel okay thanks and Blake all right hello everybody and thanks for having us um and I want to Second julan by thanking you to show up here because I know you might have stayed out late last night my name is Blake lenski I'm the head of corporate Innovation at outlier Ventures we are the biggest web free accelerator and investor globally and I've also had the honor of having LED two editions of the farfetch dream assembly accelerator which was fully focused on using web free technology in fashion and luxury that Julian was uh a mentor on as well yep so um guys let's go straight to the to the points with would you say that I mean web 3 is still fashion and after we will talk about of course fashion and and web 3 but do you think that this is still a main Trend uh especially in Europe so I think it it's it would be smart to maybe start on the definition of web free because even though we're all in the space that definition is ever shifting and I find that some terms that used to be defined as web free might now have their own definitions so I'm thinking about terms like immersive Commerce an essentially new paradigm of interacting with customers through 3D helping them visualize products helping them try on products um that used to be called the metaverse along with what is now called spatial Computing so I would say two years ago if we would be talking about web fre those two bubbles would fall underneath but currently they kind of created their own names so in that way some of the web free Technologies are still very relevant for example if we're talking about digital product passports and circular business models it creates the fact that it can reward loyalties royalties to brands has serious implications because rather than compete over the number of products sold BRS could also compete on the life cycle of the product Shifting the focus away from customer lifetime value to product lifetime value making the whole industry more sustainable and coming back to the roots of luxury which is you know high quality materials durability surviving for Generations now anytime it kind of passes on a generation that product actually becomes more valuable and of course there is a huge role um that blockchain Technologies play in engagement and loyalty uh even though engagement and loyalty programs have been a while for quite some time and um especially Community interactions tracking those Community interactions U verification of provenance of uh brand IP protection and finally digit fashion interoperability so on the surface you might not think fashion immediately but if you go deeper into technology actually it's still crazy relevant okay yeah actually I would like to to come back to this point after but just I would like also Julian to have your point on this I mean the thing is like when when you're sitting on a panel next to Blake you have less to do and less to say because he knows he knows everything on the topic already uh but uh yeah I would just say like working with luxury fashion BL like the the core of our business is to work with luxury and fashion brands and when you talk with these Brands you understand that the values like the core values of luxury are extremely similar to the cor values of web Tre uh which is what Blake just mentioned which like sustainability trackability uh scarcity um all of these values are similar to The Tech of web tree and to the core values of a company working in luxu and fashion so there's a lot of alignment uh they used to have uh some first trials in web Tre for brands with like you know the traditional nft models or the pfps that were not uh always successful and I think brands are aiming for longevity and long-term Solutions okay and so um once again uh my last three weeks in Asia showed me that uh for the moment uh it's mostly about I mean Finance so it's about payments uh remittances uh it's I mean it's we're talking about real use cases uh do you have I mean real use cases in fashion luxury uh because once again for the last years we heard about a lot of project for example in France we have a lacost in Germany we have also Adidas I mean there are many brands in the space but still we don't see exactly uh what they are doing and what they expect from the web three I can take this one because I work a lot with lacost and Adidas both of them um so like like us had their experience with web Tre launching underwater and the collection of pfps and nfts and this was also P of this like big like Brands mix web tree experiences where everybody just wanted to launch and drop stuff and because there was a few successful use case you know we we all heard about those big like apes punks X's clone x's and all these big pfp companies that managed to raise a lot of money at the time but this fell true as we can like uh witness right now and these Brands like Laos and Adidas had the same experience they were like let's just you know pick up on the wave try to get in launch collections but this collections had only short-term value and no long-term value so after a while it just disappeared and lost its value so uh from that lesson learned brands have shifted into more like long-term web threee strategies and web tree values and they are turning and shifting down more into rewarding customers with loyalty programs for example so I has just announced yesterday actually that they are launching nft collection on Solana with a company called step and go and this is not just going to be like a drop of a digital asset that you collection as a pfp it's a it's a digital asset that is linked to a loyalty program that enables you to earns credits to then exchange for like products so as long as you manage to bring the web tree technology into something that is resourceful uh but also rewarding for the consumers uh with tangible value then it can work on the long term so I think like it just does this not just for fashion brands but for everybody in web tree it's just like shifting from let's try to stop aiming for this short-term money grab into something that actually builds long-term value and build infrastructure around the brand and in that sense cases work and so Blake um you talked about um trustability things like this um so what's the right balance uh between trustability loyalty program uh what's the best use cases um according to you so you know I I think we already covered some use cases but I encourage you to take a step back and think about it from first principles so why do we even say fashion or digital fashion started with blockchain in the end it was because of the nft format but I truly believe that this is also the place where adoption of n nft technology jumped to the next stage of maturity what I mean by that is Is that real adoption is not flashy it's not putting the name of the technology first and using it as the only differentiator I always use the example of websites if I wanted to show you a website on my phone I'm not saying hey look at this HTTP website nobody cares that it's HTTP even though it's kind of obvious so to me the real adoption is not when we focus around nft mechanics first but actually if we think about the deeper implications of technology in context of digital fashion and luxury it's effect of nft being able to create digital scarcity essentially giving uh digital object properties that you know from physical objects and that whole technology kind of pushed to reinvention of what it actually means digital luxury because if you cannot touch it and there is no materials like how do you actually Define what is luxury and following those technology ology Trends I really came to believe that the new paradigm of luxury is all about two pillars one is about Community it's no longer just about what you own or what you can afford to own it's about what communities you have access to how your values align with the brand and how you shift your self-expression to kind of match the brands also how the brand can communicate directly with their Community using web- free Technologies rather than go for marketing the second pillar is immersive experience so nowadays a consumer that is interacting with a luxury fashion brand they don't want this interaction to be about the transaction if I wanted to conduct a transaction I can just sit in my bathtub go to an e-commerce website and just buy something if I don't like it I would send it back but if I actually have an interaction with a luxury brand whether it's digital world or physical world I expect it to be an immersive experience preferably one that can be shared in Social context to show that alignment of values with the brand and still continue with the idea that fashion is primarily about self expression okay and are we still at the stage where brands are just testing web 3 or can you maybe um tell tell us more about uh live projects that are very relevant on the community side and also um I mean more on the uh business side I mean I can just jump back on what you should just said about the community uh we had this example last year we we worked with Tommy El figer and they wanted to do uh they came to us for a campaign that had to use nft uh and we were like no it's it's what Blake mentioned it's like it's not about saying you doing nfts it doesn't make you cool or Innovative because you're doing it or you're doing web tree and it was the tendency that Brands would be like web Tre is cool like can we be part of it and we're like okay but why do you want be part of it and we ended up switching this into let's not just do web or nft launch together let's turn this into a community opportunity so we we open a Discord and we ask communities if they wanted to be a Tommy head figure designer and to be a fashion designer you need to actually have fashion skills design skills 3D skills like it's it's it's a it's an expertise but what we've done is that we gave them access to our AI um generation tool and they all had some pre-prom to respect for the brand codes they all generated thousands and thousands of designs based on Tommy hillfiger brand codes and we had like 10,000 generation or something like this and what we've done is that then we we launch a community vot so we pumped Tomy Hill figure soci and Community by doing a community activation and engaging with that and at the end of the day Tommy figure in person like fing CEO of Tommy figure selected 10 items of that that we produced as like digital asset we about 3D elements that we Minted as nfts and distributed over 10,000 copies and we made sure that the community was rewarded in royalties throughout lifetime in transactions uh fees so basically just through this technology activation any Community member became a designer of the brand with compensation uh on transaction fees from this digital asset so it just give new opportunities for people to engage Eng with the brand at a totally different level uh and this is one of case I I like to mention because it was a really successful use case in term of like engaging with the community and bringing web 3 as a value and not just as the short okay but I mean it's interesting because every time we talk about web 3 and luuy it's always about engagement uh for example yeah the example of Tom figure is interesting because you mentioned that I mean people will be able to create with the brand but do you think that everyone want to create with the brand maybe they just want to uh to be I mean yeah to follow the brand but maybe this is the problem between web 3 and luxury it's we always think that people want to work with the brand to to create with the brand uh instead of just following the brand do we have other examples of uh I I I agree not not everyone wants to create but I think it's like every time you're supporting a brand by like even just like liking their post or like engaging with them socially you should be rewarded as being part of the community and pushing up the brand as a fan and there's a lot of like web tree and loyalty like this is why loyalty and rewarding programs are like top in like web Tre right now especially for fashion brands is because there is a way for the community to be rewarded for their engagements as fans and Brands now engaging in these programs where you can monitor with Twitter apis for example and some like web tree tools you can monitor your social engagement actions and world name on loyalty brand points that can be exchanged for like discounts or products or private events or fashion shows okay and this is how you can turn your community into a real fan base that is rewarded by rewarding you and the cycle is complete okay and a question for you Julian after be curious to to to know your your point of view on this Blake um for for the moment it's I mean still uh something dri by crypto startups like Dr six or it's also inhouse uh I mean in uh for example lacost I know that they have a team but do you think that maybe the next stage is just to have um team in house for those big corporates maybe it will change things yeah 100% they all have one I mean when we started four years ago they will have like marketing Innovation sometimes technology departments coming to us and we will be like the web tree team for them uh but within a year everything shifted now we have like web tree managers head of web tree uh Chief web tree officer like this kind of new titles popping up uh but I've seen in like almost every single brand I've work with and it really like there's like C 100 that we work with in the last four years there's now a web Tre department or there will be like a a metaverse department that has the web three component involved and they have to assimilate this internally like they can't just rely on external parties and I think it's just the curve of innovation when something is new you ask for experts around you to like you know do poc's and tests and once you've learned enough you hire the right people or you build the team internally and you let them do the work and that's that's the way you scale the technology as well and we've seen a lot of like big companies taking shapes like we mentioned dpps before like we have AA blockchain in France that you probably know as well that is like a consensus of the big luxury fashion group together compor and a the competitor as well which is a french-based company I mean Aurora blockchain distributed already 40 million unique dpps and they have like Brands like margela Brands like remova and a lot of luxuary fashion houses so in Europe this is going to be a regulation right so we're going to have in Europe to put dpps in every single product so that's why every single brand is going to have to internally assimilate the skills the knowledge and understanding of how to implement it correctly and how to bring value to your consumers like dpps are great because digital product passport enabl sustainability and trackability but how do you make this also a consumer experience how do you enhance the DPP into not just a chip but also something that that doesn't just give you a certificate of metadata but probably enhance the product with some 3D elements wearable with ar like interoperable item that you can bring into games or metaverses this is the future of like how you will Implement those gpps for Consumer experiences and on this Blake so you are investing in a lot of crypto startups um so yeah do you think that the future is uh I mean around those startups or more maybe in house for for corporates so so I I want to go back to what you asked so to highlight some projects that I think are quite relevant and Julian is too humble to BR but not only in your portfolio no actually only I think I wish more of those examples were in my portfolio I'm just going to say that so Julian is a bit Jillian is a bit too humble to brag so I'm going to brag on his behalf but I think dress X is one of those amazing examples and I'm going to tell you why because it's also a good learning case so if you filter like the fundraising grounds for web pre fashion projects there is only a few projects that managed to raise larger funds and I think arguably dressex is one of the most successful ones and why is that well DRX has always been in my eyes about scalability starting with the business model you asked about the distinction uh being a essentially a technology startup or being a fashion brand well if if you're a fashion brand you're what you're doing is more about storytelling and then again there is only so many hours in the day you can design whether it's digital clothes or physical clothes with dress XS because of the Marketplace model that essentially works for them even when the team is asleep and now recently they also added AI to the mix helping with the scalability of digital design so in that way that has all the Hallmarks of a great technology startup rather than going in the Avenue of a fashion brand some other examples that I want to highlight that one is actually in our portfolio uh and Julian also didn't tell you that he's part of the web free French Mafia uh because that EOS system is very good at working together so another example is power XYZ uh previously known as met. RS very smart guys very good technology Builders they're all about uh creating High Fidelity assets and providing modular components to Brands and believe me the IP of a luxury brand is the most precious asset they have so they're very touchy about how we go about that IP and power XY Z made a really good job of like keeping the brand calm and making them feel in control about that asset representation jump in do not hesitate um another example that I want to highlight is DC Commerce DC Commerce is from our second farfetch program and essentially DC Commerce uh realize that when a brand interacts with their community on social media platforms essentially all the Data Insights belong to the social media platform and they have to pay for engaging their most active supporters so they just created a very simple solution that enables Brands to spin off a community space directly from their website where they can interact with their community they know who is the most loal supporter they can engage them for free and they get all the Data Insights and analytics that would typically belong to the platform and I think finally another good example to use even though maybe it's not strictly fashion but I think it also shows a lot of Hallmarks of a good project especially in the current time is Kiki world so Kiki world is a beauty brand on the surface that recently closed around of I think like 9 million including a16z so very Min investors and if you just went to the website of Kiki World it just looks like a beauty brand it doesn't position itself as a blockchain startup because what I call it is web to in the front end consumer consumer facing but in the back end they're actually obsessed about sourcing product ideas and uh engaging their community and bringing them into product development and tracking all of that input on chain so in the back end it's actually a web free blockchain Power technology and I truly believe that's where kind of the the the secret source is how can you ensure the brand that consumers don't have to learn brand new technologies but at the same time you leverage the advantages of brand new technologies while keeping it in the back end okay interesting and so we have I mean all nice uh pair of shoes um do you think that uh in the future it will be all about digital Goods or also I mean the tokenization of you see real world asset set like shoes and stuff stuff like this do you think that it will be a mix or uh what's your point of this I I don't see how it can only be about digital Goods as we we need physical Goods to dress at some point uh no I think what we we believe in as well add address X and uh I think that's no and thanks thanks Blake for the shout out but like what made our kind of scale and grow uh possible is uh is merging all um so there's no like one like one F all solution it's like people are trying to like make it in the metaverse OR in 3D assets or ar or VR uh or like just web tree or just nfts or just gaming I it just has to be a all because at the end of the day it's your identity so if I go play fortnite web to game or if I go into sandbox metaverse web tree game or if I open my wallet I want my identity to be maintained across all platforms and uh I want my digital Goods to be interoperable across all platform and the only way to do it is with like platform like us that has integration everywhere so we really a bridge because we integrate with all the platforms and we can bring Web Two to web 3 web three back to web two gaming to metaverse metaverse to AR and VR and uh that's I think that's the ultimate solution is that you buy something at a store you go to Louis vitton you buy a jacket and it's a big piece of fashion it's a big piece of luxury and you can wear it outside but you're not going to wear it every day and you want this piece to be accessible when you enter a game or you enter um meta or any platforms digitally because you own it why would you not be able to wear it there as well it's you you're the same person that it's your identity Julia we have the technology but still something is missing it's more the users it's more the the the the right program uh uh a lot of things it's costly to develop in term of production how much is it uh I mean for example I don't I know that you can't reveal on about specific program but how much is it to uh I mean to launch an nft collection when you are a corporate so I it depends of the asset but I said like a like AR and VR assets are costing a few thousands you know like 3D assets also in the few thousands as soon as you go down to like more like basic polygon level platforms assets like a Sandbox or decentral and all of this Webers you go into few hundreds so it it has a cost to develop it's not so scalable at the moment so you just say oh we're going to put like all like Zara website e-commerce of like 10,000 SKS updating every two weeks uh on chain and uh in digital assets like it requires more computing power and lower cost of production which is happening right now with AI we have tools right now with AI that we can prom text to create 3D files we can snap images turn them into 3D files so it's happening right now I think the technology like advancement is going to be good enough within the next year or two thanks to Ai and will be be able to like scale those assets across multiple skills of e-commerce which is what we're doing right now for some of our partners but we're doing it like as PC's so collection by collection like give me 100 products I convert them all in a few days and you know we have a flat fee for that and we do it we do it pretty well thank you very much final words uh Blake yeah I just want to build on what uh J juliia said so I encourage you dear audience not to really think about it in context whether it's physical or digital because we're essentially talking about goods and experiences and we kind of Envision a future where you as the user you get a physical good and you have a digital representation of that physical good and the same way you could take a designer dress into your bag and travel to a different country you could travel across what I call the reality Spectrum which means every type of platform and context starting with physical then moving through argumented real it virtual reality mixed reality virtual Commerce gaming all the way to IRL where you as the user have the goods kind of linked to you rather than to the platform and you can seamlessly move with them across different digital context and within different digital representations and they really believe that is the future um those goods moving from the physical world across digital experiences rather than primarily thinking of them as or rather physical or digital okay thank you very much guys big round of applause for them and uh if you have any questions feel free to thank so much for us thank you very much and thank you