VLGE makes it easier to build and shop globally on Roblox | TechCrunch

In Evelyn Mora’s early career, she realized that fashion designers, while often deeply focused on sustainability, could not organize environmentally friendly large-scale fashion shows.

In 2021, she launched VLGEa gaming and immersive world-building platform that specializes in working with brands. It allows brands to build their own worlds, fill them with interactive content and games, and export these worlds to other platforms like Roblox. The product revolutionizes what shopping could be in the future: a world where brands can create interactive worlds to connect with Gen Z instead of staging fashion shows and movie campaigns.

VLGE has worked with names such as Lancome, Charlotte Tilbury and Vogue Scandinavia, and has raised a total of $5 million in capital from investors such as Lammont J. du Pont of the du Pont family, L’Oréal Group and the British Fashion Council.

It made headlines for launching the world’s first 3D and gamified fashion week. On Thursday, the company announced plans to go one step further. It said that 50 fashion brands would launch their shoppable worlds World Fashion Weekall made possible by VLGE. World Fashion Week is an initiative of VLGE and should serve as a bridge for creators to launch shoppable games on other platforms, such as Roblox.

Mora said this is the brand’s first large-scale activation, showcasing how the platform can let users build in real time across browsers and, first, on Roblox. She decided to focus on making Roblox easier to use for brands because of its market potential, she said. VLGE is also compatible with Unreal Engine and is working on compatibility with Meta Horizon World.

“This is important because Roblox has become fashion’s most powerful youth frontier, but so far world building there has been costly, technical and complex,” Mora told TechCrunch. “We make it instant, affordable, scalable and interoperable, bridging the gap between e-commerce, gaming and cultural creation.”

In other words, anyone who builds on VLGE can start on Roblox immediately, without having to know Roblox’s coding language or have any substantive background in technology. “They also don’t have to pay tens of thousands and wait months before launching.” (It can cost a brand between $10,000 and $100,000 to pay an agency to build a world of it on Roblox.)

VLGE offers four payment tiers: Freemium and three paid tiers for creators, small businesses, and enterprises, respectively.

Mora is banking on gamified commerce to be the next frontier in fashion and said VLGE plans to launch an online store, an e-tail store, that will sell physical items from emerging brands as well as 3D items that can be exported to Roblox. The technology shows how the fashion world is looking to leverage the increasing prominence of games and immersive worlds when it comes to connecting with the next generation.

“This moment isn’t just about fashion, it’s about the infrastructure that will power the next generation of commerce for the new generation,” Mora said.