Pacsun promotes holiday across metaverse, social channels

Metaverse pioneer Pacsun is keeping an immersive focus with its new holiday promotional campaign.

The teen apparel retailer’s 2022 season campaign, known as “PacVerse,” offers augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR), 3D, and metaverse experiences across multiple digital platforms as well as the physical world.

The promotion stretches across all Pacsun's digital and social channels, with exclusive content rolling out throughout the season on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, and YouTube, as well as across its over 300 brick-and-mortar locations. Pacsun also plans to create NFTs that will signify different PacVerse environments in the campaign.

Pacsun brand ambassadors featured in the campaign will create special content throughout the season, including social media promotions. The retailer has been involved in the content co-creation process with brand ambassadors and influencers, and this holiday promotion marks the first time multiple digital ambassadors will get involved with a single campaign.

In addition, Pacsun will be activating in the metaverse by extending virtual experiences on its existing fantasy interactive mall experience on the Roblox interactive gaming platform called Pacworld, including new layered clothing for customer avatars and a dedicated virtual holiday gift shop based on Pacsun's seasonal collection.

Consumers can also interact with the seasonal collection in the metaverse through virtual styling guides. Pacsun will also host a variety of “real life” events and activations, including themed in-store initiatives and a holiday rooftop screening in Los Angeles, where the campaign video, “Welcome to the PacVerse,” will be screened in front of a live audience for the first time.

"PacVerse serves as a full funnel medium across our virtual and physical worlds that helps to enhance brand value and consumer experience. Our audience is the first generation to blend their digital and physical identities as a natural part of their lives, and the PacVerse theme is a celebration of their self-expression, reflecting those identities and the unique sense of shared community they find in both," said Brieane (Brie) Olson, president at Pacsun. "Virtual brand worlds are an important part of the future, and part of what is so exciting about these immersive virtual concepts is that the discovery for our consumer is both fluid and the creativity has no boundaries."

Pacsun stakes metaverse turf
Pacsun has been an early leader in metaverse commerce, going back to its June 2021 decision to make select clothing items available in the Avatar Marketplace of the popular immersive online gaming platform Roblox. The retailer followed that effort by including digital gaming and NFT features in its 2021 holiday promotional campaign.

And in addition to opening Pacworld, the company has extended its gender-fluid assortment, the “Pacsun Etoile Monogram Capsule Collection,” into the metaverse. At the May 2022 ComplexLand 3.0 metaverse event, Pacsun operated a multifaceted digital commerce effort which included a three-level virtual store where attendees could shop exclusive products.

Furthermore, Pacsun has announced on its social media channels that it has purchased digital “land” in The Sandbox, a virtual platform where players can build, own, and monetize their gaming experiences and assets inside an immersive virtual world.