Gucci has launched a new Gucci Town in Roblox. The “persistent digital space” will serve as an interactive hub with mini-games, a virtual store, and a café. The initiative comes on the heels of several other metaverse experiences from the brand, including a Gucci Garden which it launched last year.
Gucci Town features a slew of activities that will evolve through time. Visitors walking from the central piazza to Mini Game Heights will find a portal transporting them to an arena of Gucci-inspired competitions, such as Tile Takeover or Flashlight Tag.
Heading into Creative Corner, they can discover the works of a visiting artist and be inspired to create compositions of their own.
Within the virtual Vault Plaza, community members will find an exhibition space inspired by the conversations started within Vault, the house’s experimental concept store. Conceived as its virtual counterpart on Roblox, it will showcase some of Gucci’s latest product drops and collaborations.
Around the bend is the Gucci Shop, a boutique where visitors can purchase digital Gucci items to collect or to outfit Roblox avatars, including the new archive-inspired Gucci Blondie bags designed by Michele and limited-edition collectibles.
The digital fashion items make the most of the recently launched Roblox “Layered Clothing” technology for hyper-realistic 3D garments that fit any avatar body type.
“We’ve been experimenting with Roblox for years now and in May, 2021, we unveiled the first Gucci-themed immersive experience: Gucci Garden. For two weeks only, visitors had the chance to wander in a virtual counterpart of the Archetypes exhibition in Florence.
Part of the success of that experience — which gained 20 million visitors and was recently awarded with a Webby Award — was its ability to build a sense of community around the brand on Roblox, thanks to our partnership with up-and-coming content creators and Gucci’s virtual goods instantly becoming signifiers of belonging to a group of users with shared values,” said Nicolas Oudinot, executive vice president, new businesses at Gucci and Gucci Vault chief executive officer.
According to Christina Wootton, vice president of global partnerships at Roblox, the “Layered Clothing” technology closely mimics the way apparel fits and drapes in the real world.
Shirts, dresses, sweaters, jackets, pants and shoes created with Layered Clothing can now also be worn in layers that affect and interact with each other in lifelike ways and are crafted with the precision of Hollywood CGI (computer-generated imagery).
“The clothing instantaneously responds to infinite combination of body parts, movements and virtual worlds on Roblox. This technology was created to empower digital fashion designers to take their creative expression to the next level and enable limitless self-expression for people within the metaverse,” said Wootton.
The last piece is Power-up Place, a café where community members can take a break and come together with friends to meet and interact with others.
As visitors immerse themselves in the various activities within Gucci Town, they are rewarded with the GG Gems, the in-experience currency they can use to purchase power-ups (an object in a video game that instantly adds to the life, armour, strength or score of a player), as well as virtual Gucci items.
Each space within Gucci Town will be updated regularly with new content in conversation with the house’s trajectory into the future.
