Marketing
05 January
H&M's Roblox experience touts expression, recycling
Loooptopia demonstrates how the fast fashion brand is gearing up for the metaverse.
H&M arrives on Roblox. (Courtesy photo)
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H&M is ensuring that the retail push onto Roblox continues into 2023 with a new immersive experience.
The news: On Wednesday, the H&M Looptopia Experience launched on Roblox. Fast fashion retailer H&M partnered with metaverse studio Dubit to create space where players can experiment with new digital fashion materials and patterns for their avatar. In doing so, they can also learn about fashion and circularity.
What’s in it?H&M said the experience has “social interaction, engaging environments, mini-games, styling sessions, alternate worlds, events and more.” In the digital space, players can do the following:
- Visit a city square and enter alternate worlds such as Rainbooow Fields, Neon Studiooo and Fabric Fooorest.
- Style their avatar with digital clothes, and complement them with accessories, dance moves, music tracks and special effects.
- Meet friends to trade clothes and take selfies.
- Recycle old clothes to earn “super-rare elements” and star in a runway show.
Key quote: "People who shop and wear H&M garments and accessories are increasingly spending time in virtual spaces and digital worlds. The H&M Loooptopia Experience on Roblox is now allowing us to explore new ways to engage with our current and new customers in the places they love to be, both online and offline," said Linda Li, head of customer activation & marketing for H&M Americas, in a statement.
Into the metaverse
H&M is by no means the first retailer to enter virtual platforms like Roblox and Decentraland. Walmart, Albertsons and Build-a-Bear all recently made forays onto the popular gaming platform in the final months of 2022. If the last two years were prologue, more are likely to roll out, as well. But H&M happens to be the first activation of the new year, so let’s take this opportunity to break down a few keys to its approach:
Digital to physical: You can’t buy H&M clothes in Roblox. But having a presence can still help H&M influence sales. Engaging in activities on Roblox helps to build tastes and habits. Trying on clothes and meeting up with friends are the same activities one would engage in at a physical mall, so there’s potential that those activities will extend into the physical world, as well. "At H&M we want to encourage the emerging generation of digital natives to express themselves through fashion both off and on screen,” said Max Heirbaut, global head of brand experience for the metaverse at H&M.
Linking values: Sustainability is a primary concern for the younger Generations of Z and Alpha that make up the largest share of the audience on Roblox, and H&M is centering it here. Offering education and building incentives into the experience helps to put circularity alongside fashion in the virtual world, even if that record of doing so is less clear for fast fashion in the physical world. In effect, it is gamifying this environmental awareness, and building it in from the start of its presence in the digital space.
New styles coming soon? One reason retailers such as PacSun are seeing promise in Roblox and the metaverse is that it can offer a space to crowdsource new products as it observes the virtual clothes that are created. H&M didn’t say outright that it will look to the Roblox world for this purpose. But the fact that players can design their own styles would lend itself well to this function in the future. Fast fashion is known for sourcing from social media, so why wouldn't retailers look on Roblox for the latest creative styles, as well? After all, untethering physical parameters has the habit of unlocking creativity.
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Economy
30 May
Consumer confidence falls to 6-month low in May
Still, plans to buy big-ticket items ticked up.
“Deterioration.” “Gloomy.”
Those were a couple of the words used to describe consumer confidence in May. The Conference Board reported that the index fell to a six-month low amid debt ceiling anxiety and increasing concerns about employment.
“Consumer confidence declined in May as consumers’ view of current conditions became somewhat less upbeat while their expectations remained gloomy,” said Ataman Ozyildirim, senior director of economics at the Conference Board, in a statement. “...While consumer confidence has fallen across all age and income categories over the past three months, May’s decline reflects a particularly notable worsening in the outlook among consumers over 55 years of age.”
The dip among those over 55 came as Congress negotiated a deal over increasing the debt ceiling that included talk of cuts to programs such as social security and Medicare. While officials reached an agreement over Memorial Day weekend, the Conference Board’s survey was fielded prior to that date.
The job picture appears to be more anecdotally cloudy, as the number of consumers reporting jobs as “plentiful” fell to four percentage points to 43.5%. The job market has been consistently robust for nearly three years, as unemployment remains near historic lows. In April, the economy added 253,000 jobs, which remained a positive sign despite being below the gains of prior months. The confidence reading comes ahead of fresh data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.
Despite the declines, there were signs that consumers are not completely pulling back on big-ticket items. Plans to buy big-ticket items such as cars and appliances ticked up on a monthly basis. It’s worth watching whether this extends to providing resilience in other discretionary categories, which have seen a pullback in early 2023.
Nevertheless, the index offered another sign that the consumer mood is getting more pessimistic. It was the fourth time in five months that confidence fell. On Friday, the University of Michigan offered another with a consumer sentiment report that showed a 7% dip.
Brands and retailers must work to reach consumers that are increasingly in less of a buying mood than the month before.
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