Category: Industry Insights

Whether brands are creating virtualized versions of their IRL storefronts or building completely new virtual flagships on their e-commerce sites, immersive retail spaces have been shown to generate greater engagement and foster deeper connections with consumers. By default, virtual stores provide a more immersive and contextual online shopping experience for new and returning customers. And when virtual stores include one or more custom features, brands are able to create even stickier consumer experiences. Explore the top 5 immersive retail engagement features on the Obsess platform.

1. Custom Gamification

Adding branded mini-games and other gamified elements such as memory games, scavenger hunts, and quizzes promotes increased interaction and incentivizes product discovery. Brands that have invested in branded gamification reported shoppers that play games in immersive environments such as virtual stores are 10X more likely to click add to cart.

2. Branded Avatars

Walking, talking, fully customizable avatars enable consumers to personalize their characters and feel even more connected to a brand. This 3D avatar technology allows brands to bring the metaverse straight to their website, increasing checkouts by 183%.

3. Shop with Friends

Shopping in real-life is inherently social, and introducing live group shopping brings that aspect into the virtual space. The shop with friends feature promotes community engagement and establishes social proof, increasing time spent by 104%.

4. Welcome Tutorials

Welcome tutorials educate virtual store visitors on how to navigate the immersive space, empowering new visitors and non-gaming-native consumers to confidently explore. These guided tutorials encourage consumers to explore a wider variety of virtual rooms, increasing pages viewed per session by 72%.

5. Store Maps

Detailed store maps facilitate more intuitive navigation and increase consumers’ likelihood to travel through a full virtual store, leading to 3.8X higher store completion rates. For single-room virtual experiences, clear navigation arrows can lead visitors throughout the store for a comprehensive view.

To learn more about the Obsess virtual store platform features, and how they can be included in your e-commerce selling strategy—contact our virtual store specialists at contact@obsessvr.com and book a demo today.

The beauty industry is consistently leaning into innovation by adopting new technologies. From VR/AR technology, such as virtual try-ons, to gamified experiences—modern beauty selling is customer-centric and focused on engagement. 

Obsess is home to the largest portfolio of virtual stores amongst beauty brands. These forward-thinking brands are changing virtual reality retail shopping in the beauty industry with interactive features in their virtual stores. Here are the top 3 features proven to drive engagement in beauty virtual stores.

Branded Gamification

Custom gamification flows such as seek-and-find games are primed for driving exploration and product discovery. On average, pages per session increase by 513% for our Beauty partners when they include a scavenger hunt game in their virtual stores.

Several beauty brands also opt to include discounts or gifts with purchase upon game completion—incentivizing shoppers to complete their transactions. For one brand, winning the scavenger hunt led to an exclusive gift, which had a 100% claim rate within the first week of launch.

Custom Quizzes

Custom quizzes allow brands to collect first-party data, which prompt shoppers to fill in their skin types, color preferences, and more. Shoppers are presented with personalized product recommendations in their results, similarly to how a sales associate would recommend products in a physical retail store. Quizzes can also encourage exploration by providing recommendations of rooms to visit in the virtual experience. 

Quizzes encourage upsells by enabling shoppers to effortlessly add all recommended products to their bag. One brand utilized the quiz feature to present its shoppers with a custom skincare routine, based on each shopper’s individual skin concerns and goals.

Branded Avatars

Branded Avatar technology brings the best of gaming and the metaverse directly to your E-commerce website.

3D Branded Avatars enable brands and retailers to create their own metaverse directly on their websites and provide shoppers with an immersive, social, and branded virtual environment. One brand partner created glamorous avatars based on their campaign ambassadors—their shoppers could customize their personal avatars with full makeup looks and runway-ready outfits. 

Consumers that customize these walking, talking, bespoke brand characters spend more time in stores and have a higher propensity to proceed to checkout. This innovative new functionality further personalizes the virtual store experience and deepens customer relationships with the brand.

Up-level your virtual store engagement with interactive features that have proven their impact in beauty, such as gamification, quizzes, and Branded Avatars. Email us at contact@obsessvr.com to meet with the Obsess team and learn more about increasing consumer engagement through virtual stores.

Brick and mortar retail displays are updated regularly to mirror new collection drops, holidays and seasonal changes, and special promotions in an effort to increase sales and keep in-store experiences relevant. Just like in retail, it’s important to frequently refresh your virtual stores so that your shoppers have access to your most up-to-date content. Virtual stores serve as both an incremental brand engagement touchpoint, and an additional distribution point for your promotional campaigns. Updating your virtual displays permits ongoing optimizations based on consumer data from previous store iterations, and keeps your customers coming back time and time again. 

Refreshing your virtual store allows for long-term evolution, along with your growing brand and business needs. Plus, compared to traditional retail—virtual store refreshes are fast (no heavy-lifting or employee training required), cost-efficient (store refreshes come standard when working with Obsess), and sustainable (no more continuously buying and throwing out fixtures).

Roll out new products and collections.

It’s important to continuously adjust and improve product placements to increase sales and optimize customer experience. Switch out your inventory and exhibit your latest collections by creating new eye-catching virtual displays. Showcase your most recent collections by expanding your virtual store, creating new rooms, swapping out shelves, or moving new products to the front. 

For example, American Girl updates their virtual museum experience each time they launch a new doll. With every product launch comes a new exhibit spotlighting the doll’s story in an environment that perfectly fits her personality.

The American Girl Museum’s most recent addition is a room dedicated to Claudie Wells, a doll from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, who dreams of being an artist. You can meet Claudie in the interactive bakery where her dad works and learn more about her background.

Decorate to reflect different holidays and seasons.

Deck out your store for the holidays and other seasonal campaign events. Leverage visual merchandising to increase sales by matching the store’s ambience to different collections and seasons. 

Without the added manual labor of redecorating and deconstructing, it’s easier to take on a virtual design refresh than a physical one. Another bonus? It’s cheaper and more sustainable than having to buy decorations every few months, throw them out, and then buy them again for the next year. 

For the 2022 holiday season, Crocs chose to do a total revamp of their virtual store with added glitz and glam to showcase their texture-inspired holiday collection. Meanwhile, The Honest Company added subtle design tweaks to their virtual store, including snow-frosted trees and bow-wrapped wreaths for a festive touch. 

Expand your virtual real estate over time.

Don’t just revamp your virtual store, grow it.

Create value for your customers by aligning your IRL and e-commerce activations with their virtual counterparts. Virtual stores can be tweaked throughout the year to highlight your marketing calendar events and dynamically reflect your business priorities. 

To align with the growth of their annual live fan event, Bravocon, Bravo significantly expanded the size of their virtual Bravo Bazaar over the course of one year. The brand added several rooms throughout the year to continue engaging Bravoholics with the latest “Real Housewives’” swag, “Top Chef” recipes, and “Below Deck” destinations. Bravo continues to regularly update the design of each of its rooms seasonally.

Rethink your virtual store refresh strategy.

An Obsess subscription allows you to create different iterations of your virtual store throughout the year.

Whether you want to change the décor, include a new game, add in Branded Avatars, or build a new room—there are several different ways to make your virtual store more dynamic. And the best part? The initial lift of creating a virtual store wraps just as soon as the store launches, so it takes minimal effort to refresh your virtual vision as the year progresses.

Email us at contact@obsessVR.com to learn more about our subscription plans and how you can continuously engage your customers through your virtual store.   

Virtual stores serve as a new commerce channel for your brand. And as with any new selling channel, more promotion leads to more awareness—which is why it’s so important to promote your virtual store as part of your regular marketing mix. Based on data from 350+ virtual stores, we’ve compiled a list of the top marketing channels to promote your virtual store in order to increase traffic and drive up ROI. 

Generally, visual channels outperform text-based channels when it comes to virtual store promotion. Visual channels provide an opportunity to insert a video or an image of a store and set user expectations from the onset. Between social media, press, email marketing, offline marketing, and more—there are a number of visual marketing channels that Obsess customers have used to market their virtual stores.

1. Social Media Marketing

Social media is a great platform to introduce new users to your virtual store. There is a lot of potential to reach new and existing shoppers, as content is constantly created and shared. With so many different platforms, brands have plenty of creative freedom to decide how to promote their stores—from organic Posts and Stories, to Paid Ads and Influencers.

Obsess partner Stephanie Gottlieb used Instagram Reels to promote her Gem Palace virtual store, driving awareness at mass scale. She continuously engaged her impressive IG following via Stories and Reels—providing intel into new games, special promotional codes, and guaranteed early sale access.

In her Reels, she used the Instagram Green Screen feature—which allowed her to input photos and videos of her brand’s virtual store into her social background. While Stephanie included a series of images that emulated the look and feel of her virtual store, other brands have opted to provide their viewers with a tour of the full virtual experience using the Green Screen feature. 

Disney Music Group was another brand that utilized the Green Screen feature, with posts featuring content creators that walked viewers through a video demo of their virtual experience. The brand housed all of their virtual experience posts on their Disney Music Emporium social account, which linked out to their experience directly from their account bio.

Social content creators allow for credible commentary and opinions on store usability, feature functionalities, and detailed in-store highlights that others can refer to before entering the store.

2. Promote on Your E-Commerce Site

Promote your virtual store on a platform your customers already visit with the intent to buy or browse: your existing e-commerce site.

From a dedicated landing page to promotional banners that span the length of your site, there are many different ways to utilize your e-commerce site to promote your virtual store. 

Using an auto-play video or a GIF on your website homepage will catch your audiences’ eyes and entice them to enter your virtual store. These visuals also help to shape your shoppers’ expectations of a virtual store and give them a better sense of how and why to navigate the space. 

You can also promote your virtual store in your site’s navigation bar for easy consumer access. On the American Girl website, the brand lists their virtual store alongside their physical store locations—so shoppers can easily find virtual experiences when searching for boutiques. Even when consumers are not physically close to a retail store, the AG virtual store is always readily available.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing tends to perform well for virtual stores because the target audience is already familiar with your brand and they are more likely to be loyal shoppers—making it easier to convince them to engage with new content on a new channel.

Many Obsess customers send dedicated email blasts about their virtual stores—typically around store and new feature launches. Some brands also include always-on promotional callouts for their virtual stores in their regularly scheduled emails. 

Maybelline sent their mailing list an email dedicated to the virtual experience, complete with GIFs that showed the interior of the store, and links to specific rooms within the store. In the banner section, they strategically placed a GIF of the store’s entrance and highlighted the game directly below.

Emails are a great way to engage your most dedicated audience, showcase your virtual store through imagery and video, and guide potential customers to the experience. Email marketing can also increase the longevity of your virtual store by reinforcing messaging to revisit different sections of the store.

4. In-Store Promotions

One of the best assets to promote your virtual presence? Your IRL retail locations.

As part of their virtual store marketing strategy, Ralph Lauren used physical stores to help drive digital traffic. With brick-and-mortar stores in prime shopping locations such as SoHo in New York City, Ralph Lauren was able to use their existing IRL footprint to capture online shoppers. 

Ralph Lauren included a QR code on their retail displays, which led to the virtual twin versions of their retail stores. The QR codes allowed Ralph Lauren to retarget customers through virtual after they left the IRL experiences—prolonging customer communications and relationship management.

5. Offline Marketing

Offline marketing can drive buzz at scale for virtual stores.

Prada Beauty expanded beyond digital with the addition of billboards to their virtual store marketing stack. The billboards were a way for the brand to generate mass awareness and interest around the virtual store and products.

From IRL to URL, potential customers could find billboards and posters plastered around the world—each containing a QR code that led shoppers to the Prada Beauty virtual experience.

Ralph Lauren also opted to include some offline channels in their virtual store marketing mix, such as print ads, to raise awareness around their various virtual stores. The ad introduced readers to the virtual experience through vivid imagery of the interiors of each store.

6. Press & PR

Many brands use press as a way to market their virtual stores. Press is used to generate interest surrounding an initial store launch, or launches of new products and features. Press articles efficiently summarize the benefits and core features of a virtual store—plus, they serve as a backlink to improve SEO. Quality backlinks can increase virtual store ranks on search engines by building credibility.

For example, when WWD covered Crocs’ holiday store launch, Crocs effectively introduced their virtual store to WWD’s reader base while increasing their own online credibility and authority with a reputable backlink. 

The more regularly you promote your virtual store, the more familiar your potential customers will be with the concept. There are many ways to take advantage of marketing to raise awareness around your virtual store, set user expectations, and increase traffic. It’s critical to test a variety of channels, and then optimize toward the channels that your audience responds to best. 

Our advice to you: test and learn, show lots of visuals, and take advantage of storytelling to set the tone of your virtual store.

If you’re interested in learning more about raising awareness and improving the traffic of your virtual store, contact the Obsess customer success team at contact@obsessVR.com.

Follow along the Obsess blog as we build the future of experiential e-commerce and metaverse shopping. Read more on industry insights and trends.

The National Retail Federation reports November and December to be the most lucrative time of year for retailers, averaging approximately 19% of their annual retail sales. Brands and retailers have to stay competitive and at the forefront of the consumer’s mind at all times – especially online, where the majority of consumers plan to make their purchases. But how do you increase holiday marketing ROI?

1. Start early.

With Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas, the last two months are some of the busiest for the retail industry. For the high spending seasons like the end-of-year holidays, brands and retailers start their prep early; many start planning their holiday marketing campaigns in August or September so that they can kick off the campaigns in early October, or even late September. Over the past decade, over 50% of consumers start shopping around for presents in early November, with approximately 40% of consumers starting in late October – it’s in your best interest to kick off your annual holiday campaigns sooner rather than later to capture the early birds’ attention while simultaneously giving your campaigns time to optimize. 

2. Stand out.

With the plethora of marketing campaigns around this time of year, it pays to stand out. 

Branding is an important aspect of holiday e-commerce marketing because of the consumer’s openness to discovering new brands/products; it’s important to increase awareness and buzz for when consumers are finally ready to buy something. One way to do this is to create a memorable experience for your customers. Physically, this typically translates into over-the-top holiday decorations for your retail stores, themed pop-ups, or even having special guests make an appearance. Digitally, this is typically more difficult but virtual stores provide brands with an easy opportunity. 

Virtual holiday stores can be a valuable addition to your digital marketing campaigns because they enable brands and retailers to create unique, custom, and memorable experiences that increase ROI. Combining fantastical elements with practical functionality, you are able to either digitally recreate a physical experience or get creative with something completely out of the box – you’re not bound by physical constraints, so the options are endless. The Obsess team will work with your creative team to create the store of your dreams and help your holiday campaign stand out from others using innovative retail technology.

3. Thoroughly engage.

Brands and retailers will also want their campaigns to be engaging, to keep them relevant and at the top of the consumer’s mind throughout the season. Using AR and VR technology in the retail industry helps increase engagement rates across the board. Proprietary data from 4+ years of creating virtual stores and experiences has shown that the Obsess virtual store platform increases engagement both with individual products and the brand. 

Virtual stores are interactive, immersive, discovery-driven, and filled with fun content for users to engage with. Between games, quizzes, gift guides, videos and other interactive elements, there are a lot of ways to get your audience to engage with your brand. The rich array of relevant content for individuals to interact with also increases the average time spent within the store and prompts users to explore the experience in its entirety, driving them to discover more products.

For example, many Obsess partners use gamification as a means to provide their customers with special promo codes – think scavenger hunt that unlocks a code upon completion. Within the virtual experience, brands and retailers can prompt users to complete a task to obtain a special discount or gift. When introducing the task, you have the opportunity to prompt action and create urgency by highlighting scarcity (i.e. first x amount of people get a gift with purchase) or a time limit/countdown (i.e. must complete before x date).  

Bringing online shopping to life with compelling, creative content in a highly contextual environment will help increase your holiday marketing campaign’s ROI. 

4. Be personal.

The traditional e-commerce shopping experience is dry – it’s thumbnail after thumbnail on a plain, white grid, making personalization difficult. As convenient as the typical online experience is, many people still crave the personal touch of shopping in-person. So how do you make the online shopping experience personal?

Virtual stores make online shopping personal by appealing to the user’s human nature through social features that help mimic the in-person experience. With innovative capabilities such as selfie booths with AR filters, one-on-one service consultations, the ability to shop with your friends, live streaming with influencers and other features, there’s no shortage of ways to make your user’s shopping experience unique to them. Obsess has even created a feature where the user can add their own touch to the room itself! 

5. Keep data.

Keeping data is important to better understand your customer and therefore optimize your e-commerce marketing campaigns. You have to know what your customers are interacting with, where they are interacting, etc. to sell to them.

Virtual stores serve as another (unique) sales channel for you to obtain data to utilize in order to boost sales and can be a valuable addition to your e-commerce marketing strategy. You control the e-commerce transaction in virtual stores and therefore are able to own the data associated with it. Get direct consumer data and see where your customers are clicking – which products they are interacting with, which pieces of content they find most appealing, etc. – to determine how you want to move forward in your retail strategy. 

Increase ROI of your digital holiday marketing campaigns this year and boost your sales with virtual stores that increase awareness and engagement throughout the busy season. Learn how Obsess can help you build your own virtual store by emailing us at contact@obsessVR.com.

As budgeting season approaches, brands and retailers have to figure out the most optimal way to allocate their funds – especially with the current state of the economy. There are a wide variety of marketing solutions at a retailers’ disposal but some are more cost-efficient than others, such as virtual stores when compared to physical stores. 

Virtual stores offer an immersive and discovery-driven experience that can provide high engagement at a lower cost compared to traditional brick-and-mortar stores; they’re able to mimic the experience of in-store shopping without the full costs of operating a storefront. In this blog, we will highlight the top 4 reasons virtual stores offer a more cost-effective retail strategy compared to retail stores.

1.) Lower Opening Costs

Physical retail stores are high cost and high effort. The average cost of opening a retail store in a prime location such as New York City can be over $2M. This is, on average, 6X the amount it would cost to open a virtual store. The $2M price tag includes typical costs such as necessary permits and operating licenses, security deposits, interior designer fees, furniture and store fixtures, and the marketing expenses associated with launch. Virtual stores don’t have the same expenses and can therefore launch at a fraction of the cost. 

The calculated cost of a physical store also only represents the opening cost for a single location. For major retail brands it is necessary to open multiple brick-and-mortar locations around the world, but this is extremely costly. The internationalization of virtual stores allows a single store rendition to be translated and used anywhere around the world, complete with different currencies.

2.) Shorter Go-To-Market Time

Perfectly conceptualizing, curating, and establishing a brick-and-mortar store for launch is a time-consuming and tedious endeavor. Between finding a retail space, developing the aesthetic, constructing a store layout, sourcing materials, hiring staff, and coordinating the store launch, a lot needs to happen before doors open. Virtual stores take a quarter of the time to launch than physical retail stores. The Obsess team works with your creative team to conceptualize and design a custom virtual store. You will have a dedicated team to collaborate with your internal team on 3D designing/photographing, UI designing, implementing content, engineering, and UX testing to bring your vision to life in a timely manner. Rather than taking 12 months for a retail store, virtual stores typically take 2-3 months from start to finish.  

When it comes to launching pop-up stores, a quick turnaround time is extremely important. Obsess, the leading Virtual Store Platform, has worked with a wide variety of brands that have launched virtual pop-up stores in a short time frame. For example, Crocs launched a fully 3D-rendered experience complete with a unique variety of content extras and an avatar of the rap superstar Saweetie to promote their new line of shoe charms. The metaverse store experience “has driven double-digit engagement rates across social media platforms, outperforming digital benchmarks” according to Crocs’ CMO Heidi Cooley. 

3.) Lower Operating Costs

The average price per square foot to rent a retail space in New York City is around $2,775. For a 2,000 square foot store, this ends up being around $5,550,000. When taking into account all operating costs such as salaries for labor, utilities, maintenance, and insurance, operating a physical retail store in NYC can cost around $6M annually. 

Virtual stores provide a highly engaging, discovery-driven shopping experience at a fraction of the cost of a brick-and-mortar store. Retailers are able to satisfy consumer demand for experience without having to pay the additional operating costs associated with maintaining physical retail stores – there is no need to pay utilities, maintenance, or insurance, driving operating costs for a virtual store down to your Obsess subscription. This typically ends up being around $250,000 per year.  

4.) Higher Audience Reach

Virtual stores are not limited by store hours and are accessible worldwide at any time; consumers are able to experience a store without having to go to the physical location. The increased accessibility enables retailers to reach a significantly larger audience than the foot traffic a singular brick-and-mortar store would allow. Brands are able to capitalize on the wide reach of virtual stores, capturing and engaging new consumers across the globe without having to establish a physical presence in international markets. 

For example, Armani Beauty launched a virtual store in tandem with their pop-up concept in the UK’s Piccadilly Circus to promote various products such as makeup and the brand’s Sì fragrance. Without having to fly to London, users can experience a virtual rendition of the pop-up complete with interactive entertainment options, the ability to book appointments with beauty consultants, a billboard display of Cate Blanchett (the fragrance’s spokesperson), AR technology that allows users to try on products, and a 360-degree virtual exterior of Piccadilly Circus.

Not only are virtual stores a more innovative, immersive, and discovery-driven form of e-commerce, they are also a low-cost, high performing platform. This platform performs especially well with the younger generations. These younger audiences are more familiar with the interface, via gaming, and are less likely to shop in physical locations; adhering to their behaviors and preferences is necessary to stay relevant. Virtual stores are the perfect solution to cutting costs in your retail strategy, while staying relevant in an evolving retail market. Get more details of the comparison in the infographic “How Virtual Stores Can Reduce Cost Compared to Retail Stores” here.

Obsess has partnered with the biggest brands in a wide variety of industries to create over 150 virtual stores. To learn more about how Obsess can help you build your virtual flagship store, send us an email at contact@obsessVR.com.  

The newest trend in e-commerce is virtual selling technology. Virtual stores are one of the many innovations that have come out of this new trend that brands are capitalizing on as a way to build unique engagement and differentiate their digital offerings. Virtual stores are 3D, 360 full-page visual experiences that live on a brand’s e-commerce site and on metaverse platforms. These digital experiences allow consumers to browse an online e-commerce store in a more immersive and discovery-driven fashion. Virtual stores merge the best of online and offline shopping, allowing leading brands to enhance their brand engagement and extend their revenue potential. 

The top 6 ways brands are using virtual stores include:

1. Virtual flagship stores
2. Virtualizing retail stores
3. Virtual stores for seasonal and holiday campaigns
4. Introducing new product launches and collections
5. Virtual pop-ups
6. Digital showrooms for wholesale and merchandising

1.) Virtual Flagship Stores

The dot.com is the new flagship store. From setting up retail flagship stores, brands are now transitioning to opening virtual flagship stores. A virtual flagship store is a 3D digital destination for a brand, where you can explore the brand’s world, learn about the brand story, discover the latest products, and shop for them. It is a permanent immersive virtual presence that becomes a go-to location for customers to visit and leaves a much more lasting and memorable impression than a flat e-commerce website.

Brands update their virtual flagship stores with the latest collections throughout the year and can change the merchandising and decorations seasonally. A brand’s virtual flagship store can be available in all their markets and is localized to the local language, currency, and product assortment. Brands are seeing higher engagement, interaction rates, and conversion rates with their virtual flagships.

Key benefits of a virtual flagship store: 

• A highly customized, interactive, and fully branded virtual experience    
• Enables brands to showcase products in a discovery-driven format to consumers globally 
• Allows brands to update their products throughout the year and make their dot.com the new flagship store

Retailers can use the Obsess Experiential E-commerce Platform to create custom virtual flagship stores that are photorealistic and highly interactive.

NARS Cosmetics launched a virtual flagship store powered by Obsess that according to Beauty Magazine “answers the need for a new way to shop for cosmetics, and adapts the brick-and-mortar feel to the current retail landscape.” In the virtual flagship, shoppers can book one-on-one artistry sessions, utilize virtual try-on technology, view artistry tutorials, and get matched using Matchmaker, an AR and AI-powered foundation shade finder. The virtual store windows and the visual merchandising was updated through the year and new collections were added.

Mary Kay Inc. has created its virtual flagship store named Suite 13. Once inside the pink door, this 3D environment leads consumers through a fun, easy-to-use escape from traditional online shopping. Users can discover global fan-favorite products, skincare collection features, and highlights of Mary Kay heritage in a trendy loft setting. “Suite 13 will provide Mary Kay Independent Beauty Consultants with the flexibility of a digital business by being able to introduce our Mary Kay brand everywhere at any time and to elevate the way they build relationships with their customers by sharing an immersive beauty experience,” says Mary Kay Chief Marketing Officer Sheryl Adkins-Green. Customers can order their favorite products or connect with their Independent Beauty Consultant for a personalized tour.

2.) Virtualizing Retail Stores

Brands are creating virtual versions of their retail stores for flagships, new store openings and more. Virtualizing a retail store means creating a photorealistic 3D virtual tour of it on your e-commerce website, that is fully shoppable. This increases the reach of the physical retail store to a much wider audience beyond those who can come there in person, hence increasing the ROI on the retail real estate investment. Virtualized retail stores can connect to both in-store and online inventory. They bring the full creative scope of the brand’s visual merchandising into online shopping, turning e-commerce into an experience. 

Benefits of virtualizing retail stores:

• Store becomes accessible to a wider audience 
• Remote shopping enabled 
• Makes in-store inventory digitally accessible 

Retailers can use the Obsess Experiential E-commerce Platform to virtualize their retail stores at a high resolution and with a fast turnaround time. 

Ralph Lauren’s series of virtualized retail stores is a relevant example of brands that have successfully transformed physical locations into 3D, immersive digital experiences. Ralph Lauren (RL) has virtual versions of their Bal Harbour store, The Watches & Fine Jewelry Showroom, The Accessories Showroom, and the Polo Factory Store in Gloucester. By visiting the Ralph Lauren website and by clicking on the “RL Virtual Experience” page, a visitor can virtually travel around the world with Ralph Lauren and be immersed in their renowned and unique flagship stores in various locations. Customers can click on any product in the virtual store and order it online or call the store. The “RL Virtual Experience” serves as a new sales channel in addition to Ralph Lauren’s retail stores and e-commerce website. 

3.) Virtual Stores for Seasonal and Holiday Campaigns

Brands and retailers are continually searching for engaging, exciting, and entertaining campaigns to capitalize on seasonal and holiday sales pushes. A 3D-rendered virtual experience offers a new experiential shopping format and a viable new sales channel. With a virtual experience, you can create an environment that is a 3D model of your retail store, a creative concept store, or a completely fantastical location.

Key benefits of seasonal and holiday virtual experiences: 

• Gaining a new engaging virtual sales channel to drive sales pushes
• Providing consumers with a creative, interactive, and discovery-driven shopping experience 
• Lower production costs with CGI than doing on-location shoots

Virtual stores can change seasonally without the reconstruction costs associated with a brick-and-mortar location. Seasonal experiences are often temporary spanning typically no more than three months. A digital space offers a quicker turnaround and lower maintenance and costs when it comes to either creating a purely seasonal experience from scratch or touching up a few elements to make it more holiday-like. 

Tommy Hilfiger launched a holiday virtual store for the winter season. Upon entering the 3D immersive space, the user navigates through a holiday setting with candy canes, presents, and shining stars. There are a handful of interactive experiences to enhance user engagement such as the “All of Our Favorite Scents” where the user can click on a scent and receive instructions for creating a Tommy DIY Diffuser. The “Tommy Hilfiger Hot Chocolate Bar” experience gives recipes for a Caramel Spice, CoolHaus’ Dirty Mint Hot Chocolate, or Fatty Sundays Mint Hot Chocolate. The “Get All Wrapped Up” section is an educational experience where users can watch a short video on sustainable gift wrapping with activist GreenGirlLeah. The Tommy Hilfiger virtual store offers consumers holiday cheer through a highly engaging and interactive virtual sales channel.

4.) Introducing New Product Launches and Collections

Brands are leveraging virtual stores to showcase new product launches and collections in an innovative way and to enter the metaverse. Virtual stores offer brands the opportunity to have a completely unique, branded, visual digital experience to immerse consumers in their brand world while leaving a lasting impression. The highly interactive and contextual environments of virtual stores help consumers envision how they would personally use the product.

Key benefits of virtual experiences for new product launches: 

• Create innovative, engaging experiences to immerse consumers in new products and collections 
• Provide consumers with 3D product interactions to enable custom actions to better understand the product  
• Facilitate virtual social shopping experiences with the Obsess Shop with Friends feature, which allows video streaming with up to 10 friends

Charlotte Tilbury’s “Pillow Talk Party” virtual experience powered by Obsess unveils the latest products in the Pillow Talk collection. The social experience invites customers to shop with their friends and watch live masterclasses together. Upon entering the Virtual Wonderland, users can join live shopping excursions with their friends and receive a complimentary 15-minute virtual consultation to create a “Pillow Talk Party” look. The experience offers immersive 3D product interactions where users can unbox products, open them, and perform custom actions such as twisting a lipstick or refilling a reusable bottle. Visitors are welcomed into a boudoir with makeup tutorials for (directly shoppable) base, cheek, and lip products. The “gem game” lets users collect points for every tutorial video they watch and unlock free products.

5.) Virtual Pop-up Stores

Pop-up stores have been a hugely successful retail strategy and revenue driver for brands. However, they can only drive a finite amount of sales depending on the time span of operation and foot traffic in the area. Virtual stores are a solution to the restrictive nature of pop-ups as they maximize the potential of a pop-up store, making it accessible and shoppable from anywhere at any time.

Key benefits of a virtual version of a pop-up store:

• Significantly widens the audience for the pop-up store
• Virtual versions can stay open longer than physical versions, driving sellthrough
• Provides deeper insight into consumers’ interests and interactions with key data 

A relevant example of this is the multi-brand retailer MyTheresa creating an immersive, 3D pop-up shopping experience for Moncler. When a user enters the virtual experience they are immersed in sky-high rocky mountains covered with moss and soaring clouds, a location that is as cinematic as the collection itself. The virtual reality experience is set in North Tyrol, a northern Austrian state in the Alps that’s renowned for its ski resorts and historic locations.

6.) Digital Showrooms for Wholesale and Merchandising

Many companies are now using virtual stores internally as educational tools and resources for their merchandising teams and virtual showrooms for their buyers. Virtual stores can educate merchandising teams on the layout of collections in retail stores. Virtual showrooms allow for both a detailed and bird’s eye view of the collection for wholesale buyers without having to physically visit showrooms, hence reducing the carbon footprint and speeding up the buying process.

Key benefits of virtual showrooms for wholesale and merchandising:

• Serves as a virtual educational tool and resource for merchandising teams, buyers, and vendors
• Enables buyers and vendors to see new products and collections virtually, reducing the carbon footprint and speeding up the buying process
• Minimizes the number of samples created to go on display in showrooms, allowing brands to further their sustainability initiatives

Virtual showrooms can be leveraged as an experiential e-commerce tool to facilitate orders with buyers. Obsess digital showrooms are highly interactive and engaging experiences for buyers replete with garments and accessories rendered in a 360-degree space, video fits of each style, and detailed 2D images with product descriptions. In the digital showrooms, high-quality rendered images replace the touch and feel of physical products. Brands can significantly reduce the number of samples created to go on display in their showrooms, as well as minimize the need to travel to view new collections.

To learn more about how your brand can leverage Obsess for these use cases, write to us at contact@obsessVR.com. 

The pandemic fundamentally changed how e-commerce brands build their channel mix and operate their businesses. Companies previously accustomed to in-person selling, by way of brick-and-mortar storefronts and in-store sales associates, were forced to re-evaluate their selling strategies. Forbes noted that “81% of growth leaders [used] the pandemic as an opportunity to redefine the customer experience in digital and virtual channels.” This gave way to a variety of new technologies that helped businesses sell virtually despite the challenges brought on by the pandemic. Virtual stores, live stream shopping platforms, and 3D product models are some of the unique innovations that arose from this gap in capabilities. 

While these solutions may have initially been viewed as interim, many companies have found virtual selling to be even more effective. In a 2021 survey, Bain & Company and Dynata found that “92% of B2B buyers prefer virtual sales interactions, up 17 percentage points from our survey in May 2020. More sellers also realize its effectiveness, now at 79% compared with 54% last May.” Companies are integrating a variety of virtual selling technologies into their e-commerce channel mix not just as an interim solution, but as a way to sell better than ever before.

Virtual Stores and Virtual Selling

Virtual stores play a vital role in creating a robust virtual selling strategy. Offering an experiential online shopping experience, virtual stores emulate the interactive, engaging, and personalized nature of brick-and-mortar stores. Virtual stores enable brands to serve photorealistic 3D stores with full e-commerce integration.

With the help of the Obsess virtual store platform, Ralph Lauren has released several virtual stores as part of its RL Virtual Experience. Each virtual store is a photographic rendering of a real Ralph Lauren flagship store that users can visit to browse a wide range of Ralph Lauren products as they appear IRL. Not only do users get the convenience of shopping online for their favorite products, but they also get to experience stunning Ralph Lauren stores from around the world they otherwise would not have easy access to.

Augmented and Virtual Reality Selling Technologies

Many brands that understand the potential of VR and AR, are heavily investing in these technologies as their relevance continues to climb. Dyson, for example, released a VR app available through the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset. In the app, users can browse through a virtual store containing various Dyson products with the ability to interact with them as if they were browsing physical products in a real store.  

Obsess has partnered with several brands in a variety of industries to design fully immersive virtual stores that combine elements of VR and AR. A great example is the beauty brand NARS’ virtual store. The store’s interior, while inspired by one of the brand’s physical flagship stores, is entirely 3D-rendered and virtually browsable. With the help of Perfect Corp’s AR technology, the store also contains AR try-on features that enhance the overall shopping experience. As users browse NARS’ vast collection of makeup products, they are given the option to use their device’s camera to virtually try on different NARS products. The technology can read users’ faces and superimpose makeup, in real-time onto their self-view, mimicking what products would look like IRL. The exciting virtual technology again helps users with their purchase decisions by giving them an idea of how the product will appear on them and can lead to a more likely purchase and a less likely return. For fashion and beauty brands, virtual try-on AR technology is especially important: how products fit each individual is vital to each product’s offering.

Livestream Shopping Platforms

According to McKinsey, “​​Live commerce combines instant purchasing of a featured product and audience participation through a chat function or reaction buttons.” This idea had already revolutionized e-commerce in China with shopping platforms such as Alibaba’s Taobao, while other parts of the world are now adopting similar technologies.

Many online shoppers are likely already familiar with now commonplace technologies such as website chatbots that automate customer support. However, a closer manifestation of the idea of live commerce platforms is live stream shopping platforms. These platforms allow vendors to live-stream themselves to the platform’s e-commerce shoppers to give deeper insights about the products. The shopping platform allows users to shop on an e-commerce site while viewing commentary from a live streamer that mimics the experience of an in-store sales associate. Several brands such as Rebecca Minkoff, Marni, and Anna Sui have adopted this platform to improve their e-commerce conversion. 

Another example of a live commerce application can be found in Charlotte Tilbury’s newest Pillow Talk Party virtual store. This store, created with the Obsess virtual store platform, features some of the most advanced virtual selling features available today. In addition to being an immersive and virtual e-commerce experience, the store features a brand new “shop with friends” feature. The Obsess functionality allows users to shop with their friends within the virtual store via a live video chat. The store allows users to invite up to 10 other shoppers as they browse the store and its products, creating an enriching social experience. This innovation comes as a greater number of retailers begin to push into the metaverse, aiming to capture the convenience of online retail with the social experience of in-store shopping. Live commerce technologies such as “shop with friends” allow organizations to further immerse consumers in their stores and provide their consumers with the best of both online and offline worlds.

3D Digital Products

Several brands are also leveraging 3D digital product models as another tool in their virtual selling arsenal, through various channels like gaming platforms and their own branded virtual stores. Roblox and Fortnite are popular channels through which many brands have promoted a real-world clothing item by translating it into a digital in-game item. For brands investing in this strategy such as Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, and Balenciaga, this strategy has served the dual purpose of achieving sales for their digital merchandise while promoting their physical clothing collection and brand to the future generation of shoppers. 

Similarly, brands that have built virtual experiences with Obsess have showcased some of their product line-ups through realistic 3D product models. Charlotte Tilbury, within its Pillow Talk Party virtual store, capitalizes on this virtual selling technology, allowing users browsing the store to view and rotate products in 3D space. With these immersive 3D product interactions, users can unbox products, open them, and do custom actions such as twisting a lipstick or refilling a reusable bottle. While being an immersive and exciting feature that engages users, the 3D product models also solve e-commerce stores’ biggest problem: what do the products purchased online actually look and feel like. 3D product models enable consumers to envision how the physical product will look before it’s shipped to them and can provide extra incentive to make a purchase. In the near future, virtual stores with features like these will become even more immersive as virtual reality (VR) headsets become more mainstream.

Virtual Selling for Your Brand

Since the pandemic, virtual selling tools have shown effectiveness when compared to standalone e-commerce solutions. As the landscape of e-commerce continues to evolve, use cases for virtual selling technologies will continue to grow in number. While these technologies began simply as a solution to navigate the pandemic economy, they now will set the foundation for the coming metaverse economy. By partnering with Obsess, you will gain a roadmap for your metaverse presence and strategy.

Learn more about how your brand can capitalize on conversion-increasing virtual selling technology to engage customers as part of interactive, immersive virtual experiences, using the Obsess Metaverse Shopping Platform.

What are Digital 3D Assets?

Digital 3D assets, also referred to as virtual fashion or digital fashion, are at the root of fashion in the metaverse. Vogue Business notes these assets are: “created using fashion-specific 3D design software, [they] can be photorealistic or stylized to suit specific environments. They can be used throughout a product’s supply chain, from design, sampling, and wholesale to AR experiences, digital fashion, and virtual worlds.” 

How Brands Are Employing Digital 3D Assets

Digital 3D assets have far more impact than just being used as clothing for digital avatars. Brands are using them in creative ways to drive conversions, sustainability, and a faster time-to-market. By using digital 3D assets as opposed to 2D clothing images on product pages, brands can make more life-like online images of products and provide additional context; users can twist, turn, and inspect photorealistic 3D images of the product. Additional use cases for digital 3D assets include visualizing how products will look on a display wall or virtually merchandising a retailer’s purchase order. 

Since digital 3D assets can be displayed and showroomed for marketing purposes before the production of the product, costs and time-to-market for physical products are reduced. The presence of digital 3D assets has shown early success with enhanced customer engagement and higher conversion rates. Rebecca Minkoff saw a 27% increase in conversions when it added 3D product imagery for their products to their e-commerce site. The brand also found that users who interacted with a 3D product image on their e-commerce site were up to 44% more likely to add a product to the cart and 27% more likely to convert an order. Consumers are starting to expect 3D models on e-commerce sites, and companies such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Shopify are already approving partners and rolling out plans to create 3D assets for brands’ products. 

Digital 3D assets also play a vital role in helping the fashion industry meet its sustainability goals, lessening the number of items produced and minimizing the number of resources needed to develop collections. Fashion brands are scaling back on the physical production of items before they are purchased or hit runways, leveraging 3D digital assets towards this effort. As an example of this shift in behavior, Tommy Hilfiger has altered their design process to move away from sketching on paper and iterating on physical samples before sending them to showrooms. According to Vogue Business, “The vast majority of Tommy Hilfiger clothing will not be physically produced until it appears on the runway or is sold.” Tommy Hilfiger, for example, now relies on 3D design for its entire design process. Digital 3D assets have decreased Tommy Hilfiger’s collection development process by two weeks. Daniel Grieder, former CEO of Tommy Hilfiger Global and its parent company PVH Europe, has said, “The potential of 3D design is limitless, allowing us to meet consumer needs faster and in a more sustainable way… [it] has become a fundamental tool in our collection design and has the potential to significantly accelerate our speed-to-market.” Digital 3D assets will equip the Tommy Hilfiger brand with the foundational, necessary marketing and retailing tools it needs to meet its sustainability endeavors and stay competitive in today’s marketplace. 

Diane von Furstenberg is also transitioning their design process from the production of two-dimensional sketches into three-dimensional renderings. This transition will enable the brand to visualize design changes before going into production, helping the brand’s sustainability efforts by eliminating waste. While the project was created in part to enhance the brand’s sustainability initiatives, it has the added benefit of an improved customer buying experience. The brand is working towards a platform in which users can personalize their own wrap dress, adjusting the length of the dress and alternating the colors. Instantly, the customer can view the personalization of the dress via a 3D model and purchase it. This method resolves the problem of unsold goods, as the dress is only produced after the personalized 3D model is created.   

On a similar note, Farfetch leveraged digital renders in partnership with digital fashion marketplace DressX to dress influencers before its pre-sale offerings. New, digital-only fashion brands and platforms like DressX and Fabricant are emerging as brands’ interest in digital fashion increases. “By going digital we were able to save 346,698 liters of water, that is enough for 20 people to drink for 24 years. We also saved 2,525 kg CO2 eq, which accounts for 97.86% of CO2 emissions produced by a similar campaign in the physical space and equals 29 years of using a smartphone for 10 hours a day,” Farfetch stated. The Farfetch and DressX pre-sale campaign was considered a success, as it was the “first carbon-neutral fashion campaign in the world” (RTIH). From helping reach sustainability efforts to providing a more engaging, interactive shopping experience, digital 3D assets are proving their value for brands.

Digital 3D Assets as the Backbone of the Metaverse

Digital assets are key to brands wanting to enter into the metaverse, as most metaverse environments only permit the selling of digital assets. Digital items are readily being purchased in metaverse environments; according to the Metaverse Mindset: Consumer Shopping Insights Survey nearly three-quarters (74%) of Gen Zers have purchased a digital item such as an accessory, skin, or garment for their avatar within an online video game. The metaverse is taking shape as the next generation of the internet, and retailers and brands will need to establish their presence in it to keep up with consumer adoption. Early movers experimenting with 3D digital assets will have a natural advantage. Obsess, a Metaverse Shopping platform, enables leading brands to enter the metaverse and start utilizing and selling 3D digital assets. Our highly customized, 3D virtual experiences live on brands’ websites and are currently the only metaverse environment where brands can sell both 3D digital assets and physical products. As your strategic partner, Obsess helps shape your metaverse strategy and assists with the execution of your metaverse plan. Learn more about how Obsess can help you establish your presence in the metaverse.