The metaverse first made headlines in October when Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer, Facebook (now Meta) announced that the social media platform would invest money into expanding its technology to have a metaverse within it. When Microsoft invested $68.7 billion in acquiring Activision Blizzard, the company cited the metaverse as a huge contributing factor.  

Morgan Stanley predicts that the metaverse could present a more than $50 billion opportunity for luxury brands in the next decade. A report from Grayscale concluded that people have already spent more than $200 million on metaverse items as of June 2021, a spike of more than four times than reported in December 2020. Influencer Marketing Hub reported the global augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality market will reach roughly $300 billion by 2024, and the metaverse is set to be worth $800 billion that same year.  

Justin Hochberg, chief executive officer, founder, Virtual Brand Group, a metaverse creation company, shared this analogy with License Global for those who want to better understand the metaverse’s impact on businesses: 

“If I told you today to not have an e-commerce or social media strategy, you would think I was about to go out of business,” says Hochberg. “But when Marc Andreessen invented Netscape 28 years ago, you would’ve said, why do I need the internet? What does it do? Now replace the word ‘internet’ with ‘metaverse.’”  

There are myriad possibilities within the metaverse, from networking and business to digital music festivals, art installations and more. But the metaverse is not an entirely new concept in the fashion world. 

Want to learn more? Check out the May issue of License Global now!