A few years into its inception, the metaverse continues to generate a healthy buzz. From Metaverse Beauty Week launching in June 2023, to an audience of 1.8 billion to a projected value of $800 billion by next year, there is still plenty of potential to tap into. How this activation is harnessed depends entirely on the product format. Lipstick can be virtually tried on, skincare science explained through gamification elements, and fragrance, in essence an invisible product, embodied and interpreted. Recent examples including Creed x RobbiArt, Gucci, and Mugler have tapped the platform employing virtual avatars and digital fragrances.
London-founded scent brand Gabar is diving deep into metaverse opportunity with a digital beauty store experience, sponsored by the British Beauty Council, ONEWAYX, and The Red Tree as the winner of the Get Versed in the Metaverse competition. The resulting space is a floating circular chrome steel structure built in the middle of the desert amidst a gloriously colorful sunset.
“We wanted the store to represent the values, feeling, and ethos that we'd want someone to experience as they approach our brand. They see this expansive landscape to convey that bigger storytelling, representing these feelings of mindfulness and conscious living,” co-founder and Creative Director of Gabar Phway Su Aye tells BeautyMatter. The shop echoes the minimalist and modern design of the brand, colored in silver, white, and black, providing the perfect serene backdrop to experience Gabar’s products: a tightly edited collection of three fragrances (also available in 100% soy wax candle form), plus a face and body oil.
01 Float Eau de Parfum is inspired by the Inle Lake in Myanmar, resulting in a fresh floral scent with notes of orange blossom, neroli, jasmine, violet leaf, amber, and white musk. 02 Ground Eau de Parfum pays homage to the country capital of Bagan, making a nod to its ancient history with a deep blend of saffron, pink pepper, sandalwood, oud, cedarwood, and vetiver. 03 Swim Eau de Parfum brings the jungles of Hpa-An to the forefront with an aquatic green mix of blackcurrant bud, fig, green tea, and cedarwood. (TOUCH) Face Oil contains a blend of lotus, orchid, rosehip oil, arnica oil, and vegan squalene to hydrate and heal the skin while offering an intoxicating scent of mango, pomegranate, and palmarosa. (TOUCH) Body Oil contains passion fruit and lotus extract to support cell rejuvenation while robing the skin in the grounding fragrance of green leaves, cedarwood, coconut, and cypress.
With holistic roots grounded in Myanmar, the brand’s name is derived from the Burmese word for “world.” This world isn’t just one of olfactory pleasures, but creating a unified cosmos by helping individuals tap into themselves through tools of presence and moments of calm enabled through scent. For the company, the metaverse presents an exciting new chance to uplift the next generation of creativity and mark-making.
In terms of making its mark outside of the digital realm, Gabar is working with NGO partners to develop a foundation to work on economic development areas of the region including agricultural efforts. The brand is donating 10% of yearly profits to the rebuilding of its origin country, including a donation to Prospect Burma, which supports the country’s young people in gaining a higher education. It’s an effort that is more necessary than ever: as of November 2023, more than 1.95 million people have been displaced due to the ongoing civil war, and over 3,452 people have been killed according to the United Nations High Commissioner (another report by Peace Research Institute Oslo estimated the number was as high as 6,337).
In the face of this heartbreaking humanitarian crisis, Gabar hopes to be a positive new light to be chaneled on both an individual and philanthropic level. One of those means is digital innovation, with metaverse activations a key part of the brand's activations from the outset. Previous projects include an AI digital campaign, “Gabar New World” avatars, and a collaboration with digital fashion house Auroboros for Metaverse Fashion Week. But getting into the metaverse isn’t always an easy task.
Annie Siara, co-founder and Global Director of OneWayX, remarks, "The [metaverse] space has left out innovative brands because it's extremely expensive and resource intensive. The barrier to entry is very high. The reason why we chose Gabar as the winner of this competition is because they really understand who their customers are and what the next generation of consumers are looking for. This project is extremely interesting for us because we are working collectively with Gabar to create these immersive and interactive environments, but also from our side learning to build out our self-service platform.” The company’s mission is to provide brand owners like Aye with ways to affordably and effectively create metaverse experiences. That will include giving the brand the tools to build out the gamification and social shopping experience.
“For us, it’s about understanding who the end consumers are. If we are not adding value to our client, if their customers are not engaging with them in terms of meeting that goal and that metric, then we are not doing our job properly,” Siara reflects when asked about the key to a successful metaverse activation. “The biggest thing for us at this point in time is optimization. If the experience is lagging, you're going to lose that customer. Secondly, when you're in that experience, you walk around, you see the products, but how do you actually reach that deeper level of connection? Is it through gamification? Is it through avatars? It has to have that interactive experience, otherwise you are just looking at products in a 360 degree view.”
For Gabar, the metaverse is a marketing opportunity with stronger impact than traditional channels, enabling it to emit the core mission of the brand to visitors. “As a smaller brand, we're limited in resources and usually fighting the noise and larger companies with larger budgets, whereas in a newer space, we can make more noise with fewer resources and use it more effectively,” Aye explains. “Secondly, it's completely about the audience that we cater to; the people who want these out-of-the-box experiences. I did my master's on bodies in the metaverse, so it’s a running thread through our brand. When we came across this competition, it really hit the nail on the head in terms of what we thought would resonate with our community.”
Speaking about the brand’s audience, Aye notes them as “what we call the next generation of creatives and changemakers. They are very innovation minded and activist minded, looking to change the world through whatever projects they're doing. There's a bit of skewing on the younger side, but that's not to say our customers are all younger. There's another spirit of the audience, which is self-improvement and personal development minded, talking to that point of mindfulness and conscious living that the brand stands for on a values level. They look for innovation, self-expansion, experiences that push their own boundaries in different ways.”
When it comes to optimizing the user experience for metaverse spaces to become a substantial point of sell-through, Aye explains, “There is so much potential to push someone through that marketing funnel very effectively through an experience like this. It’s replicating a real-life experience and giving the user something emotional to latch on to.” Given the fact that visitors still have to purchase a discovery kit or smell the product in-store, Gabar is focusing its main efforts on building brand awareness and also educating consumers on the ingredients and story behind the product to shorten the time from awareness to purchase consideration. “Then there is a lot you can do once they've smelled the product; more you can teach them and bring them right to the end. For the second and third phases at the store, we will be focusing more on that conversion, whether it's a gamification piece that teaches people about the ingredients or a little discount that gets someone to buy,” she adds.
The level of customization and personalization that these digital storefronts have to offer, not to mention the fact that they can be accessed by anyone, anywhere across the world with a wifi connection, opens the channel up to a much larger audience than a single physical storefront could fit, let alone fathom. But with many brands eager to activate in the space, a key differentiator will be grounding the experience in a brand’s DNA. As Aye states, “Tapping into what the audience wants, and seeing what the metaverse can deliver versus delivering something on the metaverse and hoping it will land—that creates a lot more of an authentic touchpoint. It’s a matter of tying it to deeper roots and what the audience actually cares about.”
As interest and activation numbers continue to expand, that authenticity will be a key driver in the continuing proliferation and merging of the digital worlds. “We are at the cusp of the intersection between web2 and web3. The gamer population, which is expanding globally, is already immersed in this world. People are creating avatars of themselves for which they need to buy digital assets,” Siara explains, citing Roblox’s recent Q3 earnings that included $839.5 million in bookings. “These trends are telling us that this is where consumer behavior is shifting. Businesses need to understand how to get on the bandwagon, but what is their return on investment? We look at how brands can build a long-term sustainable business around these immersive and interactive experience stores.”
Undeniably, the (endless) sky is the limit when it comes to Gabar’s metaverse ambitions. “I get so excited in the fact that these are new worlds we’re creating in the spirit of Gabar, utterly nurturing a new world online, offline, through whatever avenues. The main thing to think about is still meeting the customers where they're at and meeting the technology where it's up to, knowing that the potential is growing and there's so much to be done,” Aye concludes. “My ideal is to create a whole new digital world with so many layers and communities. This metaverse store is a perfect first layer into that. It really pushes the boundary for different forms of identity, self-expression, and creativity.”
