Quick take:
- Users can buy digital wearables from The Warehouse to dress their digital avatars.
- Genies has selected a group of creators to design the first batch of collections on the platform.
- Users can also personalise their purchases with in-app tools.
Digital avatar startup, Genies, has officially launched its NFT marketplace for digital wearables, The Warehouse. Previously only accessible by a group of invite-only beta users in December last year, The Warehouse is now available to the public.
Users can now access the marketplace via the Genies Studio app to create their avatars and purchase digital wearables.
Genies has selected a group of creators to design the first batch of collections on the platform, which will be sold as NFTs. One of the company’s first collaborators is photographer and influencer Tati Bruening, who has 327,000 followers on Instagram.
Creators will retain the intellectual property rights to their designs and each time the item is resold, the creator will get a cut of the revenue while Genies takes a 5% cut from each sale.
Users can also personalise the digital wearables they have purchased from The Warehouse with the in-app tools.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Genies CEO Akash Nigam explained: “Creators will be selling their own avatar fashion, and the ones that they’ve customized over the past couple of months. And when they do sell out — let’s say someone sells like 100 items, and let’s say that if a fan or follower or anybody within the community decides to buy it for their own avatar, they also now have the rights to be able to edit it or DIY it within the studio platform, so they can use the tools and create a derivative collection, and then sell the derivative fashion line in The Warehouse.”
While Genies is not the only platform helping people create their digital identity with avatars, it has made a name for itself with a string of celebrity partnerships including Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Shawn Mendes and Migos via Universal Music Group.
Former Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger personally invested in Genies and took a board seat at the company in March. The following month, the company reached unicorn status with $150 million funding led by Silver Lake.
In the beginning stages of The Warehouse’s launch, only approved creators will be able to launch and sell collections, although Genies wants to eventually allow all its users to create 1/1 fashion items for sale on the marketplace.
While the Web3 space is going through a bear market, Nigam is confident in the longevity of digital avatars as “everybody wants to exist in a 3D spatial world.” He also added that avatars give people a sense of ownership and individuality in the virtual world.
While NFTs are core to Genies’ business model, the company is targeting the Gen Z “cool kids of the internet” who just want to create rather than crypto-native users who view NFTs as a financial investment. Nigam envisions Genies expanding into a full-fledged social media network in the future.
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