Billionaire businesswoman and singer Rihanna may be taking her cosmetic line Fenty beauty to the metaverse after filing for a trademark to sell her Fenty brand as virtual cosmetics.
By taking the Fenty brand to the virtual world, Rihanna joins a number of key brand owners who have filed patents for their brands within the metaverse. And as the virtual space grows, designers and artists are rushing to form part of the nascent virtual industry.
Fenty Beauty was established in 2017, the brainchild of the Barbadian singer, who created the brand after struggling to find a wide range of skin tones represented in the beauty industry. The brand was named one of Time magazine’s best inventions of 2017 and in August last year the company was valued at $2.8 billion, of which 50% belongs to its CEO, Rihanna.
Last year metaverse gaming exploded, with pay to play gaming taking off in a way that had not been seen prior to the development of the metaverse. This year retail brands are following big fashion houses, and luxury brands that have made the leap from the physical to the digital, in the form of NFTs and digitizing their products.
Several major retail brands including Gucci, Chanel, Ralph Lauren, Nike, and Adidas, have entered the metaverse, to see the future opportunities, selling their products as NFT skins in virtual lands such as Decentraland.
Andrew Kiguel, CEO of Trust.com, recently bought the 116 parcel estate in the fashion district of Decentraland - a virtual world platform that launched to the public in 2020.
“If you can imagine the metaverse as a monopoly board, and rather than have just 28 parcels of land and 8 players, there are many more parcels of land that you can develop, and potentially millions and millions of users that you can collect rent from, and create immersive experiences for.” Kiguel stated in an interview with CNBC.
He added:
“the next iteration of social media, the next iteration of computing, education, advertising, and shopping, and so when you put all this together it’s really going to change the way the internet is used.”
