Arianee x The Sandbox: About Luxury Goods In The Metaverse

Arianee is quickly positioning itself as the go-to partner for luxury goods companies that want to transition to Web3. Its recent collaboration with the metaverse giant, The Sandbox, continues to prove how important it is for luxury goods companies to work with partners that can help them adapt to this new space.

The French company created an end-to-end Web3 ingenious solution that is taking the luxury goods industry by storm. With their recently-announced collaboration with The Sandbox, Arianee is quickly expanding its influence both in the metaverse and offline.

NFTevening sat down with Arianee’s Chief Executive Officer Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel and The Sandbox Co-Founder Sebastien Borget for a discussion about how their collaboration will help luxury goods companies expand their client experience.

Quotes are condensed and edited for clarity.

Founding Arianee

Arianee came about after a group of experienced entrepreneurs from different backgrounds joined forces to build a business at the intersection of luxury and technology.

“We all got together to build this business at the time when NFTs were not something you could talk about, even if we’ve been using the ERC-721 standard from day one,” said Hurstel.

But how exactly did they realize that there was a market gap that desperately needed blockchain technology? According to Hurstel, it was “the anticipation of a new relational architecture in the digital world based on wallets and tokens based on scarcity and ownership.” It was the vision that in this new Internet, relationships between communities and brands, designers and creators are based on ownership of digital assets.

Hurstel and the Arianee team believe in a socio-economic system made of tokens and wallets and a relational infrastructure built on top of that pool. This ambitious vision is embedded in the company’s name, which relates to the Cretan mythological princess of mazes and labyrinths.

Luxury goods and the metaverse

Unquestionably, Arianee is a luxury goods expert. Last year, the company helped Paris Fashion Week become the first fashion week in the world to implement NFTs. With Breitling, Arianne created a blockchain-based digital passport for a limited-edition watch. Additionally, Richemont has been a supporter of the Arianee Blockchain since 2018.

According to Hurstel, “The metaverse is another thing on top of an extremely complex distribution schema, and also the marketing infrastructure. Fashion houses are excited, as they see the opportunity to engage with their communities in a different way to offer more exciting, immersive experiences.”

Additionally, luxury goods companies are working hard to understand what true ownership means in the metaverse. This is because, as Hurstel states, “They are used to designing, creating, manufacturing beautiful goods, with the craftsmanship and a sense of scarcity.”

However, the most forward-looking companies see the potential to replicate this in the digital world. At the same time, they want to ensure that they have a certain level of control over the digital product, as they do over the physical.

“So for them, it’s really trying to understand where they can hand out to their community, and what they need and must continue to control,” Hurstel explains.

Decentralization in the physical world vs the metaverse

According to Hurstel, the aspects of decentralization that come up in conversations around today’s metaverses are no problem for the luxury goods sector. That’s because their physical business already operates on a decentralized network, so to speak.

“They use suppliers, they sometimes use independent retailers. They’ve seen that with the emergence of the Internet and with online retailers, marketplaces and social media. So in a way that their world is already decentralized.”

For luxury goods companies, it is, therefore, not so much about concerns with decentralization as it is about figuring out how to best use digital assets in conjunction with their physical products.

“What’s hard for them to understand is: what does that mean when I produce a digital good? What is this? What’s going to be the life of the thing?” he says. “And so it’s not that they have a hard time. It’s just that it’s a learning curve that is normal.”

Arianee x The Sandbox

For Arianee, partnering with The Sandbox to expand its metaverse ambitions was a no-brainer. This is because, according to The Sandbox’s Sebastien Borget, the luxury goods sector is an integral part of the future of the community-driven metaverse.

Thanks to this partnership, owners of luxury goods NFTs can get a corresponding product for their avatar in The Sandbox. Therefore, brands can mix the physical and digital, creating an immersive experience that takes their products to new heights.

In addition to opening The Sandbox to a whole new audience; this collaboration will enable users to express their identity and represent their favourite brand through their avatar.

Borget explains why this collaboration felt natural for the two fast-growing companies:

“Fashion, lifestyle and luxury are definitely three major themes that we want users to access. We already have two hundred brands in The Sandbox, and we’ve been talking to thousands of them.”

Furthermore, Borget insists that companies should not replicate what they are doing in the physical world in the virtual world. Instead, they must opt for forward-looking, creative possibilities that will shape their brand’s web3 image. This is where Arianee comes in.

Onboarding new consumers into web3

Undoubtedly, luxury goods brands are facing one primary difficulty: “For many of the brands we work with, their client base is not crypto,” says Hurstel. “They don’t necessarily have a crypto wallet, they’re not necessarily comfortable with this new world yet. They need a simple way in, and that’s what brands are offering them.”

What this collaboration gives those brands’ clients is an easy way into the metaverse. After all, according to Hurstel, it’s all about extending the customer experience.

What both The Sandbox as well as Arianee care about is not replacing physical goods. Rather, it’s complementing the physical with the digital. It’s giving utility and enabling consumers to get access to more experiences via their physical goods.

Both companies are therefore solving a common dilemma for brands seeking to enter the metaverse. By marrying renowned physical goods with digital ones, more people will get first-hand experience of what the metaverse is about.

Thanks to this collaboration, brands are now offering a way for customers to gain an understanding of the metaverse; and how the physical and digital can interact in a complementary way. Collaborations such as these continue to debunk the myth that the metaverse will wipe out physical brands. On the contrary, such partnerships continue to show how brands will use the metaverse to enhance the customer journey in the years to come.