Boohoo Group has announced its predictions for the future of NFTs and fashion retailers. The fashion company is no stranger to the technology, as recently as October last year the boohooMAN brand launched a competition for aspiring fashion designers where the winner received the opportunity to produce their own designs alongside boohoo’s team and €2,000 cash.
John Mckinney, head of Digital Marketing at boohoo Group speculated on the overall sales volume for Non-fungible tokens last year, which totalled $22 billion, up from $100 million in 2020. Mckinney stated, “This is just the beginning for boohooMAN and other brands in our space.” McKinney also noted how the search demand for NFTs has catapulted 9,900% over the past 12 months.
Despite the rapid growth, boohoo has noticed that the current space is not financially accessible for the company’s daily consumers, as the floor price of several branded NFT projects is considerably higher than the average monthly salary.
“That’s why we wanted our collection to echo our brand ethos by combining cutting-edge design with an affordable price tag, ensuring that we are pushing boundaries to bring consumers the latest trends for less,” says McKinney.
“We launched a competition, which received tens of thousands of entries. Being the first affordable fashion brand to release NFTs, we have cemented ourselves as a leader in the future of digital fashion. But not only that, we have made the ownership of a limited edition NFT more accessible to a wider audience.”
We’ve seen some fashion companies, including the likes of Adidas, Prada and Balmain, incorporating digital fashion into their businesses over the past year and we can expect NFTs to see a significantly increased prominence within the fashion industry beyond 2022.
McKinney stated, “Digital fashion is a key area of interest for fashion retailers. In the near future we expect to see more physical garments available in digital form.”
“If fashion brands can smoothly integrate digital fashion pieces onto social media through custom filters and lenses, we will see an even greater uptake of the technology.”
“As we already know that Instagram and Twitter are developing new features to facilitate the use of NFTs, this is definitely a trend worth keeping an eye on.”
As the world gradually makes its way to becoming fully digitalised, it’s clear that fashion is determined to not be left out in these new frontiers. Between Julien Fournié’s fashion making its way to PUBG: Mobile and Aiva receiving new investments, the era of virtual space is already looking good for fashion.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
