Coach’s SVP of global visual experience Giovanni Zaccariello, says he heard multiple attendees excitedly exclaim: “Finally.” As it seems, the American brand’s first step into the gaming world has been long-awaited. “We haven’t talked to the gaming community yet,” he says. “Hopefully, through this experiment, we’re going to learn from them.” Yesterday, the brand announced its partnership with Roblox and ZEPETO, bringing their “Find Your Courage” campaign (following virtual human imma as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and ultimately finds the courage to be real) into the digital world. You can now choose the themed digital wearables from Coach’s Spring 2024 collection on Fashion Famous 2 and Fashion Klossette on Roblox and ZEPETO.

Coach enters the gaming space hoping to meet their Gen Z customers where they are, using their digital Tabby bag as a standout feature. “Gen Z is telling us that our Tabby bag is the icon bag right now,” says Kimberly Wallengren, Coach’s vice president of marketing for North America. “So we’re listening to them and we’ve now iterated it over and over again from a design and animation perspective.” This includes different patterns and styles for the new digital it-bag. Their listen-first-act-after approach to the new space expands across their overall Metaverse strategy. “We worked with a lot of developers and experts and were very excited but humble about it,” says Wallengren. “We didn’t build the worlds themselves, we went to the worlds because we don’t want to throw our brand at customers, we want to make sure it’s integrated into what they're already doing.

One of the brains (developers) behind the logistics of bringing Coach onto the Metaverse was Elisha Trice, studio director at Sandbox Studios. Trice says one of the major challenges of nailing Coach’s metaverse launch was making the brand’s luxury leather item look and feel real to players. “We used Roblox’s new future lighting technology to make these items look similar to their real-life counterparts,” he says. And, according to Trice, the fashion industry is only witnessing the “tip of the iceberg” of what the metaverse can deliver. “I believe the metaverse is going to introduce a different sense of fashion and a different expression of that fashion,” he says. “That in itself is going to make a whole new world.” Coach joins the ranks of other big-name brands like Burberry and Gucci in the metaverse but is the first-ever luxury brand to integrate into Fashion Famous 2, offering Floral World and Summer World themes.

While people continue to debate whether the Metaverse will reshape the future of fashion, it’s easy to discount the potential pull of digital clothing. Research from Roblox suggests that 84 per cent of Gen Z say their avatar style influences their real-world fashion choices, and over 50 per cent prioritise their avatars' style over their physical appearance. I may or may not have also spent about 30 minutes perfecting my own digital avatar at Coach’s launch event, proving what Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson (AKA the very guy who coined the word “metaverse”) told Dazed in 2022 to be true: “Even in extremely simple systems, where your ‘avatar’ might just be a thumbnail, a square static image, a few pixels, even then people pay a lot of attention to what those avatars look like.” And Fashion Famous 2 is no mere few pixels: you can customize the body shape of your avatar, dress them according to themes, and battle it out on the virtual catwalk – now with a new Coach Tabby bag hanging over your digital shoulder.

The Fashion Famous 2 and Fashion Klossette takeovers will be available until August 19 on all Roblox-compatible devices.