When we started building ASTRA about 4 years ago now, the value proposition was figuring out a multiplayer shopping experience using VR from home.
Our core thesis was that one day, the younger generations spending hours on platforms like Roblox would want to go shopping from home and experience the in-store experience with friends as though they were in the store in real life.
Back in 2020, VR was far from mass adoption so we had to build and iterate 4 versions ranging from browser-based 3D shopping, to "play-to-wear" web games, to in-store arcade machines, until last year we demoed an in-store VR at Fashion District - London festival and got our best feedback so far.
Based on the feedback received from that demo, here's our latest iteration of Astra, an in-store VR experience that allows customers to discover future fashion collections in virtual reality before they exist in real life and for brands to get data on customer preferences before manufacturing.
Why now? research by Lone Design Club shows that IRL retail is becoming more important that URL retail. 61% of Gen Z shoppers are more likely to shop in store and in 2021 brick and mortar sales grew faster than e-commerce sales for the first time.
With the in store experience becoming more interesting and exciting, and competition on the high street increasing, our latest iteration presents a new way to gamify the in-store experience while getting data that leads to less waste.
We'd like to thank our friends, advisors and investors over the years.
Please check out the Astra demo, let us know what you think.
Next up is partnering with a physical store for an IRL case study and then getting this on the Apple Vision Pro as one of its first enterprise VR solutions for retail.
#virtualreality #virtual #digitalfashion #applevisonpro #spatialcomputing #apple #meta #metaverse #virtualfashion #augmentedreality
We had a blast showcasing our latest demo at #NFTLondon2022 by @nft_nyc
The mission was clear for us, to put our most recent version in a building filled with web3 enthusiasts and incentivise them to give us feedback after trying our demo out.
In the two days, we had over 100 demo testers and back to back conversations with a lot of people from some of the brightest minds in the space like Nikita Sachdev Aiban Allya Cedrick Ofori David Shifke Ramkumar Subramaniam Magnus Lundin Nick Rotola Laura Maat Benjamin Gellie Selah Abrams, MBA Sagi Maman Vendela Lönnroth Henrik (Investor and web3 advisor) Hildebrandt David Mokos Paul Arriyavat who were very impressed with what we’ve built so far and how it all works🚀
Based on all the feedback we got, we’re now tweaking again with a more refined user experience that merges gaming and retail as we work towards our launch next year!
Next year will be a big year for fashion + gaming + retail in the metaverse. Currently, there isn’t a freemium business model for fashion e-commerce and adding mini games as the free base is what will disrupt the current version of e-commerce which hasn’t changed much in looks since Amazon came online in ‘92, and is in desperate need for a more sustainable and exciting refresh.
We’re in talks to launch Astra in one of the biggest malls in the UK next year and we’ve also opened up our seed round raise. We’ll be speaking to web3 investors at Token2049, Abu Dhabi Fintech Week & Slush 2022. Please get in touch if you’d like to speak on getting an allocation in the Astraverse seed round.
As always, big shout out to the Astra team:
Luke Jeffers, NIYI OKEOWO, Adekunbi Ajai, Olaseni Oremodu, femi falade, charles Egbejule, Levon Ijeh and Priscilla Alao, doing really great work bringing diverse product thinking web3/ metaverse product development, for a real life use case.
Astra to the world!
#NFT #NFTLondon #London #NFTNYC #Metaverse #UnrealEngine #Fashion #Gaming #Web3Gaming #Crypto #Web3 #DigitalFashion #Arcade #Algorand #Astra #Astraverse2050 #Startup
Welcome to Astra 🚀
A first of its kind digital fashion game, set in a virtual world where you could play to win luxury fashion in real life!
RT & tag a friend you think would love to experience Astra 🖤
#Metaverse #UnrealEngine #virtualreality #virtualworld #playtoearn #nft #nfts #avatar #digitalfashion
✨👾
We’re pleased to have demo’d one of the world’s first IRL Virtual Retail experiences in Lagos, Nigeria at the Creation Africa Forum, supported by @lagosxparis@maisonmondesafricains 💫
It’s taken us about 5 years to get to a version that people enjoyed, wanted to try again, was very easy for first time VR users to get the hang of and actually solves a problem in the fashion industry.
A big thank you to Mathilde of Lagos x Paris for curating the selection of brands featured in our virtual store and working with our Digital Fashion lead to turn the outfits in digital twins.
It was alot of work getting this over the line and s/o to our CTO for getting the new features to work and also our on ground team including our CEO for figuring out the right connectivity stack to make this work with Nigerian WiFi which means it can work anywhere 🌍
Our vision is a world where unsold stock doesn’t burden the fashion industry. This is based on our thesis that Virtual Retail can be the technology that unlocks Mass Customisation, and we got a lot of great feedback and are really proud of the progress with Astra.
Next we’ll be adding some payment features so after discovering clothes in virtual reality, customers pay with measurements and delivery address and then the brand makes and ships to the customers in the right size.
We’d love to work with your brand so if you want to feature in Astra, or work with us for your physical store, mall or fashion tech event please drop a message.
The metaverse might be over but at Astra, we’re just getting started ❤️🔥
#virtualretail #virtualreality #metaverse #digitalfashion
Looking to build something great this summer?
We’re hiring 3 interns in Nigeria (₦100K/mo) to help us launch the future of fashion, built with AI & blockchain
🧠 Web3 & AI Backend Dev
🎨 Web3 & AI Frontend Dev
📈 Sales & Business Dev
Apply here 💫 https://forms.gle/zigB7fMhZUnGv3Kj6
One million pivots later…. There’s a new Astra in town.
Using AI and the blockchain, we solve an age old problem for aspiring fashion creators which is how do I bring an idea to life after I’ve designed it when I have limited capital to make and hold stock.
Well…you can design and launch it with Astra, and anyone can pre order knowing fully well you only get paid when you make it and ship it to them.
Ai lets you create new ideas and also speak to customers who have paid for your new idea, with stablecoins on the blockchain we can hold the money in a vault until you share images and also delivery proof to the customer.
Share this with a fashion creator who you think would use Astra, and like the link in our bio to support us on the base batches buildathon 💫
It’s been a week since we showcased our latest iteration of ASTRA at @fd_ldn ’s Festival!
It’s been a very long road figuring out product market fit as a “metaverse” startup. Games take large budgets and talent to build, and VR is so far away from mass adoption so we had to solve the product puzzle by building, measuring, learning and iterating.
Thanks to the amazing folk at Fashion District we got the chance to showcase v1 of our instore VR fashion discovery experience as well as the backend platform for brands at Spitalfields to a little under a hundred users over 5 days.
We’re pleased to say that since we started building our product experience 3 years ago, the feedback received at the demo was the best and a clear indicator that VR is the best platform to build our experience for.
We received a lot of great feedback from our experience and we’re now working towards a VR pop up store for Q4, our thesis being that an immersive in store experience gives us the opportunity to launch a VR experience and continue to improve before the Apple vision pro is launched next year.
Next up we’ll be designing a vr store experience that is futuristic, yet ituitive and familiar to users intros to retail strategists would be very much appreciated!
#vrcommerce #virtualretail #gamifiedretail #web3 #metaverse
We’re glad to share that we’ll be showcasing the latest iteration of our virtual commerce experience at @fd_ldn next week!
We’ll be featuring five designers, and a new user experience which makes the process of creating an avatar, discovering fashion and receiving details of the outfit later very seamless. We’re really excited to get feedback so we can improve our experience for a launch with the Apple vision headset next year.
We’ve been working hard on our pivot to enable creators sell fashion products in virtual reality before it exists in real life, creating a more sustainable and futuristic fashion experience.
See the link in bio to learn more, and another cool thing is that giving our demo feedback means you also get a free Astranaut pfp collectible which gives you membership to a community of forward thinking creators, developers, designers and hustlers contributing to building a new system of virtual commerce, Astra.
See you there ⚡️🤿
#fashiondistrict #futureoffashion #vrcommerce #phygital #metaverse #virtualreality
Happy #wwdc2023 day!
We've been working on a new way to discover new fashion products in virtual reality before they exist physically and are excited about Apple's announcement later today.
We have an announcement coming shortly after so please watch this space 👀 ⚡
#wwdc23 #realitypro #virtualworlds #codenewworlds #apple #virtualreality
Congrats to Buszokk ✨
Winner of the Astra Mystery Box Challenge Season 1 in collaboration with @aamilclothing .
Over the past weeks, we’ve had 205 sessions with 8 people finding the mystery box and one person in the fastest time!
We’ve now taken in all suggestions from players and will be evolving the experience into a version thats more fun and focuses on discovering fashion from designers all around the world before it exists.
Thank you to everyone that gave our demo a try and also gave feedback on how we can improve our experience.
Our next version is really exciting, so watch this space for a demo video of how this will work and congrats once again to Buszokk, we’ll be in touch and get your prize to you 🚀
#astramysteryboxchallenge #metaverse #nft #fashionnft #fashiongame
Catch us at the @blackgirlsintech_ fest today, we’re very happy to speak with budding techies about roles we’re looking for and how we work together to bring Astra to life.
We’ll be showing what we’re building and our roadmap at our booth so please come and say hi 👋🏽
