If you missed today’s Friday Nooner, you also missed the live world premiere of the already classic holiday song “Walking in a GrepBeat Wonderland”—but don’t worry, you can watch below. Added bonus: next week we will release another festive soon-to-be-classic GrepBeat holiday song on our social media channels. That will have to tide you over until Friday, Jan. 6, because this is the last Friday Nooner episode of 2022.
After the “GrepBeat Wonderland” viewing and debrief, Joe talked about the AI-art platform Lensa, which among other functions allows users to create AI-enhanced avatars of themselves (not to be confused with Avatar 2, which Joe saw in theaters last night). Again, this is an episode better watched than listened to or read about, because we reveal five avatars each for Joe and Pete. But we’re providing a sneak peek of two of them.
The avatar display was in part to set the stage for this week’s guest, House of Blueberry COO Katherine Manuel. The Triangle-based startup House of Blueberry describes itself as “The Fashion House for the Metaverse,” and creates high-fashion outfits for virtual avatars. House of Blueberry “clothes” are available on (among others) Second Life, Roblox and Sims, and the startup is about to launch on Zepeto, another online game.
Here are three key takeaways from this episode:
- Many fashion brands are bringing digital representations of their physical clothes into the metaverse to showcase their designs, and House of Blueberry works both with these retailers to sell their designs and also sells its own designs within the games. Meta itself, apparently, is a hard market to crack and tends to work with larger retailers, but this doesn’t dissuade House of Blueberry from conquering their unique markets.
- How does conversion from, for example, Robux (Roblox’s in-game currency) to USD work? It’s complicated, Manuel said. An interested gamer would buy a product from House of Blueberry in their game using their game’s unique currency, and House of Blueberry takes those virtual currencies and converts them back to U.S. dollars—each currency has its unique “conversion rate.” House of Blueberry has to take on fees when converting between currencies.
- A plus of metaverse fashion is the ability to “fight physics.” House of Blueberry and the designs they promote can be wildly innovative online, which is a huge plus for designers looking to expand their creativity and for users looking for unique designs.
You can watch the full episode on LinkedIn here, or on Facebook here.
Or on YouTube:
Auditory learners can listen (or subscribe!) to our podcast version.
