Foresight 03: The luxury NFT opportunity + retail in 2030
A bi-weekly newsletter diving into the concepts, people and brands who are shaping the future of fashion, beauty and retail.
Welcome back to Foresight!
We really couldn’t go much longer without addressing NFTs, could we? It wasn’t until I was in a Clubhouse chat last week that questioned if NFTs are a trend or something that will change the future that the concept really caught my attention. A speaker argued that people who collect items from baseball cards to art aren’t going anywhere—there will always be a market for collectibles. What happens when artists start releasing never-before-heard songs or artwork exclusively as NFTs? What will collectors do when the first Banksy is available as an NFT? Just last week, the likes of Mick Jagger and Kate Moss jumped on the NFT wagon selling unreleased content for charity. There’s a lot to learn and many unknowns around these digital assets and I can’t wait to see how the market evolves.
We’re also diving into the future of retail with a McKinsey interview that gives a solid prediction—one of the best I’ve read yet. The retailers who completely flip the switch are the ones who are going to make it to the end of this decade. To put it simply, do we want to shop now how we shopped in 2010? I certainly don’t and there’s a good chance consumers in 2030 won’t want to shop the way they did in 2020.
I’ve started linking less familiar terminology, I hope you find this helpful!
IDEAS, INSIGHTS & FORWARD THINKING PERSPECTIVES
The NFT opportunity for luxury.
NFTs are everywhere. Although I’m sure there is surface level knowledge of what an NFT is, if not, here is a quick refresher. A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable. Now in English, “non-fungible” means the asset is unique and can’t be replaced with something else. “For example, bitcoin in fungible—trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different.”
Speaking of one-of-a-kind trading cards, let’s bring this back to the luxury sector. Luxury items can be seen as collectible art and NFTs have the ability to completely disrupt the collectibles industry. The unique characteristics of NFTs guarantee full transparency, tracked provenance, security, and exclusive ownership with the data being recorded on a blockchain. This welcomes a new dimension for collectors who can now not only use the NFT digital content—in a virtual reality environment for example—they can also monetize the same asset online. I predict we will begin to see luxury fashion houses selling NFTs with the purchase of a physical piece to offer the customer a unique digital version to be used in digital realities like games and virtual gatherings.
The NFT market remains in its very early stages and will need to mature before it can be fully understood. We also can’t talk about NFTs without addressing the massive amount of carbon emissions created upon creation. I’m keeping a close eye on this topic!
Successful retailers in the future will employ experts in video-game design and spacial computing.
“Only if retailers stop thinking like retailers will they truly innovate.” In this interview with Brian Solis, a “digital anthropologist and futurist,” he outlines two scenarios for retailers in 2030. One is where retailers continue to iterate with new technology and become stuck on iterative investments that build on the past, which limit the possibilities of true innovation. The other is where businesses reimagine what shopping looks like in the future—in a way that consumers either already want or don’t know they want yet. Solis’s work focuses on the latter and explains that “the biggest problem today is when we imagine the future of retail, we tend to think about it as retailers.” And this is where it really gets good.
There are many possibilities of what retail may look like, but what I specifically loved about this interview is the comparison to amusement parks and how this experience could be translated to the inside of a store. Think about the artistry and science that go into theme parks like Disney World, creating a customer experience that the company owns and makes a part of its brand. How can that wow factor be re-created in retail? How can the world of AI, AR, immersive and spatial computing come together to create an unforgettable retail experience where customers continue to come back? It will take a new type of discipline and expertise which is where the experts in video-game and spatial computing design come in. “Great retailers in the future will make you feel like you’re in a special place, designed especially for you, so that you take time out of your life to go to that place because it feels like the right place to be. It’s aspirational.”
WHAT I’M READING
TikTok is changing the way we buy beauty
Has Snap laid the foundations for AR to be taken seriously?
Nike launches a second-hand footwear programme
Nearly two-thirds of Gen Z will shop mostly online—but only if the digital experience is great
IKEA’s fancy new AR app let’s you design entire rooms
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