Fashion comes in many layers. There’s high-end fashion, consisting of storied brands like Gucci, Prada and Armani. There’s athletic fashion consisting of Nike, Adidas and Reebok.

And now, there’s The Voice.

The television show? As a fashion brand?

Not just any fashion brand. The Voice already exists in 150 territories as the most distributed TV show worldwide, and because of 3-D worlds like Roblox, Decentraland, and now HiberWorld, The Voice has become an omnichannel retail brand that reaches almost 300 million consumers.

But how is it that a television show has been able to expand its reach by becoming an entertainment brand that utilizes platforms powered by blockchain technology at a time when skepticism swirls around the future of the technology itself?

“Retailers want to be where people already are,” Justin Hochberg, chief executive officer (CEO) of Virtual Brand Group (VBG), said to me in a recent conversation. “The less friction there is, the easier it is to buy. Sitting at home is less friction than having to go to the mall.”

VBG uses a combination of marketing, advertising, games, fashion and engaging with communities and new products to help brands take advantage of the metaverse. Its partners include Forever 21, Barbie/Mattel, and The Voice. Hochberg and his team have been credited with developing the world’s first physical fashion line that was incubated as virtual merchandise, where items can be sold simultaneously in the metaverse and in real life.

“I believe virtual spaces and virtual products will become a ‘must have’ this year,” Hochberg said. “If you have a brand that wants to connect with a certain demographic and you want a certain [return on investment], you will be creating virtual products, virtual services and virtual experiences. Like many of my colleagues, I am working on ways in which to merge the worlds of physical items and virtual items, both feeding into each other and combining as one.”

For Hochberg and VBG, virtual 3-D worlds presented an opportunity to help brands like The Voice expand by utilizing the metaverse’s low cost of entry and fast innovation on a global scale.

“The strategy that VBG laid out was very simple,” Hochberg said. “The Voice is owned by ITV, which is a global format company that also owns TV channels in the UK. As a TV broadcaster, you have very little connection to your actual consumer. In every single country, ITV has a different production company and a different broadcaster, meaning it has no control over those broadcasters—outside of the licensing deals. If the world is made up of 180 territories, but the metaverse is only made up of one—you can create an experience in the metaverse and have all fans globally funnel into one thing. Then, as an ITV rightsholder, you start to have actual connections to your consumers.”

By creating The Voice activations in Decentraland, Roblox, and now HiberWorld, the brand has more power and flexibility to deliver value directly to consumers.

“We also work with XOMG POP!—a music group founded by JoJo Siwa— who are natively digital tweens who grew up playing in 3-D spaces,” Hochberg said. “They don’t think about Roblox as something novel—it just ‘is’ like using the Internet—and they’re integrating their podcast, tour and everything else as part of it.”

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By virtue of growing up with the tech, using or being on Roblox isn’t really seen as innovative to kids like XOMG POP!.

“These kids have more tools, more connectivity, and we are leaning into them and giving them experiences that they just naturally expect,” Hochberg said. “So the way we’re building business is from them up, not from corporations down.”

For folks like XOMG POP!, growing up with a normalized metaverse allows them to use 3-D technology like oxygen. VBG has realized—for certain people—existing in those spaces is the norm. If it’s normal for a growing number of people, then brands like The Voice can genuinely reach more people by existing in the space as well.

“XOMG POP! has a podcast that’s devoted to them being on Roblox,” Hochberg said. “That’s what they care about. In one episode, they started talking about things they were thinking about doing on Roblox. I was listening thinking, ‘Okay, if that’s what they want,’ and within a day, we started building out what they said they wanted on this podcast from scratch.”

In this way, VBG is using the metaverse to close the gap between desire and manifestation. The company is able to take swift action to iterate using the current technology, which wasn’t possible before.

“The key here is the old model was top down,” Hochberg said. “There was someone in an organization who would say, ‘This is what we think we want to make,’ and then they’d get alignment from the talent. But talent driven creation is always going to be more impactful because they are driving what matters to them and what they think the audience will most resonate with.”

Not only has a new wave of talent-driven creation emerged when it comes to marketing goods and fashion in the virtual space, there’s also a new and different formula executives can follow to achieve better results as well.

“When I can create a pair of jeans as quickly as I can create a racecar in the metaverse, the ability to take risks is totally different,” Hochberg said. “I don’t really have to get it right. If you’re creating an album, play, or book, you kind of have to get the best one answer there can be. Now, I don’t need the one answer and it’s okay for talent to say, ‘We want to make this,’ me to make it, for it to either succeed or fail, and to just move on to the next thing the next day.”

Meaning the metaverse can be a great R&D tool for brands to iterate on what physical products might resonate best with their audience through the creation and deployment of digital products.

Take Forever 21. VBG helped Forever 21 launch a collection of digital items on Roblox and used the feedback data from their users to see what they should produce in the physical world. They created a physical black beanie to match the digital black beanie, which ended up selling out.

James Ashton, founder and CEO of Vegas City and Decentraland University, a virtual land management outfit and content production team within Decentraland, knows a thing or two about what resonates in the digital space.

Ashton and his team helped build the metaverse stadium for Spanish soccer league La Liga, a metaverse nightclub for DJ Dillon Francis, and has worked with the U.S. Open, major alcohol brands and The Voice.

“We met Justin and Virtual Brand Group at the Metaverse Festival in 2022, where we produced a pop-up stage for The Voice,” Ashton said to me in a recent conversation. “Within that, we developed a game with some interactivity and brought the NBC content to life.”

Following the pop-up, Ashton partnered with The Voice Studios on a multi-activity venue that consisted of multiple games, multiple areas, and included real life digital wearables.

“In the TV series, each coach brings in an item of clothing, which they give to the contestants on the show,” Ashton said. “We replicated those in the metaverse as NFT giveaways, so you could get—for example— the Blake Shelton t-shirt.”

The clothing items corresponding to all four of the show’s judges were displayed alongside a special line of metaverse clothing that Ashton’s team created, which ended up being the in-game reward items that players received for interacting in the digital space.

The Voice example is complex because it contains IP owned by ITV in the UK and is executed by different networks all around the world. But The Voice activations in the metaverse are showing that being open to how a digital world can further the brand might actually benefit the underlying IP more than it could harm it.

“Everything related to The Voice coaches is NBC,” Ashton said. “Everything related to The Voice brand is ITV. We had to work in reverse and get the coaches approval and the network approval to have the digital versions of the merchandise in Decentraland. We’re just mirroring the physical with the digital.”

Ashton and his team are building off the already existing physical line of The Voice merchandise by creating a digital line, without needing to create another distribution channel for physical items. However, they could also do it the other way around.

“You could originate a The Voice TV shirt in Decentraland and give it away in Decentraland, and then the people who receive the digital could claim the physical,” Ashton said. “We haven’t done it with The Voice, but it has happened in Decentraland a number of times.”

But it might happen for The Voice in HiberWorld, The Voice’s third virtual retail platform that’s launching a new Hype Gear virtual fashion line to coincide with the launch of its new Voice fashion game.

About 5.5 million worlds have been built on HiberWorld utilizing a no-code toolset for the general consumer where they can build a 3-D space for free.

“We work with Ready Player Me for our avatars as well as commerce and bringing out some of these brands like The Voice,” Sean Kauppinen, chief marketing officer at HiberWorld said to me in a recent conversation. “We’re still testing out where monetization comes from and who’s really engaged with our user generated content creation platform, but our consumers are excited about this right now. Who knows if it’s an instant overnight success or something that’s going to build over time. If you’re a superfan, you’re going to be able to go in there and have a lot of fun and interact on another level.”

HiberWorld is also employing real life fashion trends by potentially making some of its initial digital items unavailable in years down the line.

“If you’re early to the game, you’re going to have the opportunity to participate in things—if they take off later—that give you credibility for being someone who called it first,” Kauppinen said. “That’s one of the things with web3, Virtual Brand Group, and Ready Player Me where it all comes together because you can kind of prove that with the early digital ownership.”

Hiber is also connecting to e-commerce through phygital offerings. Users can buy the digital item and it shows up instantly for your avatar, while the corresponding physical item arrives at your door later on.

“I think marketers need to stop looking at how they can go gain an audience by going to a different place—i.e,, trying to reach someone in Roblox who’s there to play games and be part of a community—versus giving high value people something they can interact with,” Kauppinen said. “Once they start thinking on that level, they’ll finally get what 3-D worlds can offer.”