James and James Fulfilment is considering how it can work with metaverse platforms such as Decentraland in providing a virtual delivery and unboxing experience to rival the physical experience of receiving luxury and fashion products.

Last week (24 March) Decentraland hosted the first Metaverse Fashion Week, in an area where luxury fashion brands such as Gucci, Burberry and Louis Vuitton are beginning to experiment with virtual product sales. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and blockchain have enabled digital products to be sold with an indelible guarantee of authenticity.

With interest in this space also growing from high street retailers (H&M, Adidas and Nike have recently joined a long line of stores experimenting with NFT collections, often in collaboration with online gaming platforms), one area which has been ignored is the delivery experience.

YouTube and TikTok are awash with unboxing videos – customers sharing footage of them opening their latest purchases and reviewing how products arrive and are presented in the box – and it’s not just luxury brands which invest heavily in the physical customer experience.

Founder James Hyde says “James and James Fulfilment was one of the first companies to provide a specific eCommerce delivery solution to online retailers, and we’re now investigating how we can bring the best of the physical customer delivery experience into the metaverse”.

“The metaverse provides an opportunity for people to re-invent themselves and allows fast fashion to reduce its wasteful physical production, but it also creates an exciting collaboration between digital and physical incarnations of the same product” referring to a number of brands which have created physical manifestations of virtual designs that gamers can buy in the real world.

“We’re looking at ways to provide metaverse retailers with a complementary set of virtual delivery and unboxing solutions to mirror their real world customer experience programmes”.