Farfetch, the leader in luxury e-commerce, and Outlier Ventures – the world’s leading Web3 gas pedal and investor – unveil the second class of startups in their Dream Assembly Base Camp gas pedal program. These seven companies, selected from 260 applications worldwide, share a common goal of shaping the future of luxury e-commerce on Web3.
Decommerce, Me Protocol, Nettle, Solaire, SPIN by Lablaco, Wovn, and Numbers Protocol will join this new 12-week remote incubation program.
Sustainability, rewards, and loyalty are at the heart of this new cohort of start-ups.
A new class mixing Web3 and Web2
The first edition of the Dream Assembly Base Camp incubation program, launched last year, revealed a clear attraction to web3.
In a statement released earlier this year, Blake Lezenski, program manager at Outlier Ventures, said, “Web3 can have a tremendous impact on the fashion industry and luxury retail, creating a new form of identity expression that helps redefine a deeper experience for consumers.”
He added, “Blockchain-based digital solutions also have the potential to positively address the industry’s biggest problems, such as counterfeit luxury goods, pollution from fast fashion consumption, or waste created by design prototyping.”
However, the class of 2023 is taking an unexpected turn in favor of solutions offering web2 use cases.
According to Vogue Business, this decision can be explained by a change in perception about web3. Indeed, in Meta’s opinion – which had contributed to an unprecedented craze for the metaverse – this model could wait 5 to 10 years before maturity. Even if web3 still offers very promising use cases for the sector.
Carol Hilsum, general manager of product innovation at Farfetch, told Vogue Business, “Rather than a pure Web3 strategy – focused on independent Nft strategies – companies are now looking to build a community around Web3 principles and technologies while integrating them with their Web2 technology block.”
As a reminder: Web 2 is characterized by the possibility for the user to consult content (web1) and publish it himself on a blog or social network. Web 3 adds an ownership brick with monetization via blockchain technology (NFT, avatar…). Thus, in Web3, the user can not only produce his content but also prove the authorship of his works and receive the related royalties.
In this context, Carol Hilsum identifies four trends within this second cohort: substantial infrastructures and tools, data infrastructures, community tools (such as Discord for luxury), and the maturity of the tokenization use case focused on loyalty programs.
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Featured photo : © Farfetch
