As an interactive gaming and styling experience for fashion enthusiasts, when Drest first debuted in 2019, it was ahead of its time. The concept of fashion brands leveraging the vast gaming community, and interacting virtually with consumers, was relatively under-explored, with only a few major players like Louis Vuitton, Burberry and Nike exploring the space. Today, however, a wealth of brands are looking for ways to insert themselves in these virtual realms in meaningful and beneficial ways.
Indeed the number of gamers worldwide is projected to reach 3.4 billion by 2030, according to Midia Research. By 2023, the industry generated $184 billion, according to gaming data platform Newzoo — making it bigger than the global film business, TV streaming business and North American Sports combined.
Drest is poised to capture this market. Following a £15 million ($19.1 million) investment, the fashion styling mobile app has relaunched with significant updates. The investment has seen the app move into a new back-end system, making it available on both iOS and Android devices, while also developing more in-depth narrative features within the game itself. The funding has also unlocked new talent, with a focus on diversifying skillsets in-house to the tech and gaming space. Drest has a new co-CEO, Daniel Svärd, previously general manager at global phenomenon Candy Crush, as well as a new CTO.
Drest captures highly-engaged users with specific fashion-related narratives, despite their user cohort being more niche than other gaming platforms like Roblox or Fortnite. The app has merged gaming with publishing, with all in-app scenarios inspired by or relating to real-life events on the fashion calendar. Users must style model avatars for a front row seat at Paris Fashion Week or the Oscars red carpet, for instance, using the latest trends, and with each look rated by fellow users.
These parallels to real-life events allow Drest to serve as a unique marketing tool, where users can interact with virtual renderings of real-life products from real-life luxury brands via the different in-game challenges — thus learning and developing product and brand affinities, as well as, in some cases, connecting them to a tangible goal.
For instance, the app relaunched with The Fashion Awards Presented by Pandora, a partnership which also resulted in some players being afforded the opportunity to attend the in-person event. Most recently, users had the chance to style a host of Manolo Blahnik shoes in a three-part quest, which saw over 3 million pairs of shoes tried on, and one real-life pair awarded to a player.
Drest’s latest release comes at a pertinent time for fashion brands: customer acquisition costs rose 60 percent for e-commerce from 2017 to 2022, according to BoF and McKinsey & Co.’s State of Fashion 2025 report, and are only expected to increase further this year.
Meanwhile, traditional advertising is losing relevance — partially due to split audience attention across different media formats, fragmenting online behaviours. Tech consultancy Activate Consulting reports individuals spend between 13 to 18+ hours on media each day, with concurrent activities across second or third screens.
Users’ active attention on platforms like Instagram or TikTok lasts mere seconds. Engagement data on gaming platforms like Fortnite and Roblox can see users spend an average of 180 minutes a day online, according to Geeiq.
With 260 brand partners now on the platform — the latest additions including Alaïa, Diesel and Self-Portrait — BoF sits down with Drest founder and co-CEO Lucy Yeomans to learn more about how the app is facilitating brand-consumer relationships.
What are the new key features of Drest and their strategic purpose?
Our new mission statement is: “exclusive for all” — we want to open up those worlds of luxury, fashion, beauty and lifestyle to everyone, everywhere. The two big features that we’re rolling out — the VIP event and the narrative quest — are inspired by experiences I had as an editor in chief, like going on press trips. We’re replicating elements of how it feels to be a VIP, top customer or editor. I found all of those trips educational and inspiring, and I felt closer to the brand as a result.
There is a huge emphasis at the moment on brands trying to create these kinds of experiences for their customers and a lot of the brands we talk to say they can only do this for a very small number of people. Drest allows for these experiences – and the thought that goes into the itineraries – to open up to a much larger audience, enhancing brand and product discovery.
Where does the opportunity lie for luxury brands tapping into the gaming community?
There are now over 3 billion people playing games or interacting with gamified experiences globally [according to Newzoo], and nearly 50 percent of those are women [according to Pocket Gamer], particularly in the mobile space — a seismic evolution in audience behaviour. So firstly, the opportunity is the access to this huge audience. More than 85 percent of Gen-Z and 85 percent of Millennials play games [according to Newzoo] — and that audience is only going to get bigger in this next generation, who are discovering the world through the games that they are playing.
Games are about journeys, progressions and purpose. For me, that was where the metaverse fell short. People were creating these amazing environments, but what do you do in them once you have been there once and you have seen how beautifully something could be replicated? At Drest, we have that fusion of publishing and fashion, which means that every day users engage with new stories, new products and real-time brand challenges.
We have some elements of community play that are the absolute focus for Q1 and Q2 — creating ways for people to come together. I want this to be the world’s biggest fashion discovery playground, where people can go and develop their brand affinities, like a finishing school for beauty and luxury, to really educate those customers.
What can Drest offer to brands who partner with the app?
Because we operate like a publishing vehicle, we are supporting these brands, whether they are paid partners or not. Every day, there is a designer spotlight, there is a hero piece, there is a red carpet dressing story about some of the latest trends on the catwalk — so our team are carefully making sure that we are covering the market, all the brands that are our partners, and supporting them with their storytelling, launches or new collections that they might want to communicate. Then there’s the opportunity to use our platform to heighten an event or product launch.
Allowing people to engage and discover and be inspired in this world before they’ve even touched the physical product helps to build desire.
When we do a partnership with a brand, we’ll create an aspect of their campaign, branding and packaging in-game. For Manolo Blahnik, we recreated three of their stores in London, Paris and New York, to be used as a location in the quest, so users could style their looks on the steps outside the windows of, say, the Madison Avenue store. We’re allowing users, through these activations, to feel like they have had a luxury in-store experience, with all those exclusive brand touch points.
How are users incentivised to remain on-platform?
You are taking someone on a journey, you are involving them and you are making it fun and highly creative, while giving them access to the latest fashion. And I think that’s why our engagement times are so impressive — our average usage rate on the new platform is between about 60-65 minutes per day and users spend about 13 minutes on average interacting with each challenge. For our branded narrative quests and VIP events, we see completion times of between 30 and 60 minutes for the former and between one and four hours for the latter.
It’s the participatory aspect which is special about Drest. You are asked to take part in it, be part of the content experience, and that’s why the product or brand messaging lands and really stays with you.
The concept of “real, virtual, real” lies at the core of Drest. In the app, everything comes from the real world. We spin it up in this beautiful virtual environment where we invite people to discover, experiment and create. But that final “real” is just as important, whether that’s a user discovering a product they love, developing brand affinity or perhaps even purchasing an item. Or for a lucky few, the chance to win something in the real world. It might be a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes, or an invitation to The Fashion Awards, where you get to walk the red carpet with Rihanna and A$AP Rocky.
We did a narrative quest with Versace, for example, coinciding with the launch of their Tag Bag. It was a requirement in each of the challenges in the quest for users to style the different coloured Tag Bags — every time you completed a challenge, you were given a new colour to experiment with. Then the player who created the best look was gifted a real Tag Bag.
How can Drest feed into brands’ product discovery journey and how is this translating into real-life returns for brand partners?
For a brand partner, Drest is very much about creating awareness. However, unlike a lot of collaborations in this space, when the user gets down to the next stage of the funnel, which is about consideration, there isn’t a sort of leap of faith that they have to make. They’ve seen the product as it is.
My dream is that one day we’re able to test products before they even go into production, to see how different colourways and styles are received in different territories.
When we do work with a brand, we focus on what it is that they wish to communicate. So in the case of the Versace Tag Bag, it was around product discovery. We surveyed those users thereafter and 77 percent of respondents said they plan to either go to a store, go online or go to a Versace social page and learn more. So at the moment, we are operating in that space of being a funnel that’s pushing people through to learn and discover more.
Allowing people to engage and discover and be inspired in this world before they’ve even touched the physical product helps to build desire, which is obviously critical in the luxury world. I think we’re very well placed to foster and drive that desire.
The other day a £10,000 Alaïa coat sold directly from the platform. A brand like Alaïa does so well on Drest because the products are so exquisite and dramatic — they render beautifully. The most important thing is that, if the user wishes to purchase the item that they are styling, that they experience the easiest and simplest path to purchase, from the app to the brand partner’s website. I think this conversion will increase as we grow and our audience evolves.
How do you share learnings about, and from, your community of users with your brand partners?
Every month, we send a survey out to users. Sometimes it’s about a brand, sometimes it’s about what the players want — and they are very vocal. So we listen to our players, and also to our partners’ needs. So a brand might want to know the average time that was spent by users on that particular quest and we always deliver a full campaign report featuring key numbers and findings, so we can break down those numbers to deliver powerful consumer insights.
For instance, for the Versace quest, we were able to report that more than 1.5 million items of Versace were tried on during the campaign period. And of those 1.5 million, just over a million were the new season items that they wanted them to try on, which included the Tag Bags, which were obviously the focus of the campaign. We were able to look at all the different colourways and inform Versace as to which performed best in which markets, among which cohorts. As we grow, that data is just going to get richer and richer.
My dream is that one day we’re able to test products before they even go into production, to see how different colourways and styles are received in different territories. The ability to test that would be incredible to address fashion’s overproduction issues and hopefully have a positive impact on brand P&Ls. To predict consumer behaviour before they’ve even physically touched a product, walked into a store or browsed an e-commerce site, would be a real super power.
This is a sponsored feature paid for by Drest as part of a BoF partnership.
