Gucci Reveals Metaverse Tie-Up With Bored Ape Creator Yuga Labs

By Liam J. Kelly and Andrew Hayward

Luxury fashion house Gucci is diving deeper into Web3 and the metaverse—and it's doing so in collaboration with Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs.

Gucci today teased out an alliance on Twitter, using an image (above) that shows Gucci and Yuga Labs branding on a bottle that was previously seen in the trailer for Otherside, Yuga's upcoming Bored Ape-themed metaverse game.

"Continuing to explore the Metaverse, the House comes together with Yuga Labs," tweeted Gucci. "Stay tuned as a new narrative takes shape, blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital."

Details of the deal are relatively scarce, with the CEO of Gucci Vault and metaverse ventures Robert Triefus telling The Business of Fashion that the tie-up will give the fashion label "an active role in Otherside and 10KTF's continuing narrative."

A Yuga Labs representative told Decrypt that it's a "multi-year partnership designed to extend the engagement between their respective communities, by exploring the intersection between fashion and entertainment in the metaverse."

The Yuga rep also confirmed that the "first chapter" of the tie-up begins this week.

Gucci has already made a number of moves around the metaverse, including a previous collaboration with 10KTF, a digital fashion startup that Yuga Labs acquired last fall. 10KTF and the fashion giant created Gucci-branded digital apparel that owners of certain NFT collections could overlay onto their avatars.

Gucci also bought virtual land plots last year to develop in another Web3 metaverse game, The Sandbox, and enabled in-store payments with ApeCoin—an Ethereum-based crypto token tied to the Bored Ape ecosystem.

The Otherside metaverse game opened its doors for a "first trip" demo in July 2022 to users who held digital plots of land called Otherdeeds. This past weekend, the firm took users on a "second trip" to explore the Otherside digital world, with over 7,200 users playing together in the same game world.

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