Today DressX announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by Greenfield Capital, with participation from Warner Music, Slow Ventures, The Artemis Fund and Red DAO. DressX is an e-commerce platform for digital wearables. It positions itself as your virtual closet, with the metaverse and NFT fashion being a major part of that. But it can also be virtual clothing for your social media profiles.
The company already has numerous big brand collaborations under its belt. This includes involvement in the NFT digital wearables launched by Adidas in November last year, a collaboration with Ready Player Me, the cross platform avatars. Other big brand partners include Bershka and Coca-Cola.
Late last year, Warner Music announced a collaboration to enable its artists to design their own virtual fashion lines. That includes the metaverse but is mainly for Instagram and SnapChat.
“The representation of our future digital selves will be as important and, if you’re measuring by sheer volume of interactions, maybe more important than how we represent ourselves physically,” said Oana Ruxandra, Chief Digital Officer & EVP, Business Development, WMG at the time.
The funds raised will be used to scale DressX, including interoperability of its digital fashion clothing, expanding the NFT marketplace and growing partnerships.
There’s a lot up for grabs in digital fashion, particularly at the luxury end of the market. Morgan Stanley estimated that by 2030 luxury goods in the metaverse could boast revenues of €50 billion ($60bn). And that revenue comes with a far higher profit margin because the items are digital.
Given that scope, plenty are eyeing the market beyond the big brands, each with a slightly different positioning. Last year digital fashion house The Fabricant raised a $14 million Series A. It too has an Adidas collaboration and initially created many of its own designs. However, it has now launched fashion creator tools to enable co-creation of digital fashion.
Another player is the Institute of Digital Fashion which recently worked with H&M on its Metaverse Design Story.
With DressX’s positioning as a digital closet, it also faces competition from avatar platforms such as Genies, which has launched an NFT fashion marketplace.
While there’s already plenty of activity, given the early stage of the metaverse, there’s much more to come.
