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Next Top Meta Model at Decentraland Fashion Week

An experiment in design, engagement and traffic in the metaverse

I run this campaign as an experiment in metaverse marketing, branding and activation to learn more about how things work in metaverse platform Decentraland. Together with a team of collaborators from the Decentraland Lab we created a fresh event for the first ever MetaVerse Fashion Week at Decentraland: the #NextTopMetaModel runway competition.

We worked in a collaborative, self-organized, decentralized way and took ownership of different aspects of the project.
I took lead in the following roles:
– Project approach and organization (as a sprint-based ‘tiny-thon’)
– Campaign concept, framework and mechanics (a catwalk during fashion week, getting everyone to get a selfie to participate), traffic and brand activation
– Branding (logo, naming, NFT creation, etc)
– Architecture (from paper-napkin sketches to concept art in photoshop and very basic Blender), and
– Art Direction (theme, colours, interior design/decor, etc).

The other members in the team lead the building of assets and deployment in Decentraland sites, managed the partners (wearables), communications (twitter), participants and prize-awards, and organized the actual event (final prize parade).

 

Even though we only started advertising the event two weeks in advance, the response was great. We had more than 50 artists collaborating and donating wearables as prizes, more than 200 participants (who took 4 photos+) and 41k visitors to the Twitter page. 

The Metaverse Fashion Week was first held at Decentraland on March 24-26, 2022. Wearable collections were showcased with brands including Estée Lauder, Tommy Hilfiger, and Selfridges taking part in the four-day long schedule for the first time ever. During this milestone week, we created a runway composed of four official ‘fashion photo booths’ and an extra location across DCL, allowing anyone to take a snapshot of their very best looks and submit their selfies to win the Next Top Meta Model 2022 prize, plus many participation prizes in the form of wearables.

2D Concept art of the runway.

Concept, architecture and art direction

Defining the concept, art direction and architecture at the very beginning made everything much easier and smoother for the builder, while still providing a lot of room for playful innovation and changes. It was also good to have this defined early so the Event page, Twitter account and marketing could start in parallel to the asset build. We finished the campaign with a big award event with cool wearables as prizes and live DJ. To commemorate this first ever event, we made an NFT badge available for 24 hours to all those who participated, and to commemorate a historic week in metaverse fashion.

 

The results

Even though we only started advertising the event two weeks in advance, the response was great. We had more than 50 artists collaborating and donating wearables as prizes, more than 200 participants (who took 4 photos+) and 41k visitors to the Twitter page. 

 

Above: Surveying one of the building sites before the event.

Learnings

We sketched and created the style first, then the builder created the 3D assets (Blender) and run the campaign on Twitter while collecting collaborators.

Things to improve in future iterations:

– Automated flow to collect the participants’ submissions, details and status 

– Polygon count has a massive impact in the translation of architectural design to built structure

– Planning NFTs ahead of time with free and paid options, and perhaps ‘unlocking’ features for the future

– Better communication within the team, since we were spread across several timezones and real time alignment was not always possible

– Better workflow management, as there was no common platform to track tasks or activities 

Links

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