The Future Of Physical Stores Is Coming: To Establish The Combination Of Things And Virtual To Realize The Integration Of Online And Offline

In 2017, some media analysts believed that the physical stores were about to rise. Among the 25 "signals" of the rise of "display" physical stores, one signal was that physical stores accelerated the use of black technology.

As an example given by the media, Adidas and Intel have jointly launched digital shelves, or virtual shoe walls.

This "wall" is actually a device with a touch screen and 3D rendering effect. With it, Adidas can display more than 2000 shoes in Limited store space. Customers can choose from the touch screen and place orders directly.

Five years later, Adidas virtual shoe wall has not been widely promoted, and physical stores are under unprecedented pressure. Outside the physical stores, the virtual world is surging, and there is no lack of new stories - bitcoin, metauniverse, NFT (refers to heterogeneous token, is used to represent digital assets of cryptocurrency token) one after another, the recent hot is NFT many products of virtual shoes.

In the field of virtual shoes, stepn has attracted a lot of attention because, within a few months, stepn sold millions of virtual shoes. These shoes can't be worn in the real world. They are NFT products, most of which are between 5000 and 40000 yuan. After being sought after, stepn's monthly income once exceeded 100 million US dollars.

At the same time, Adidas, Nike, Arthur, Tebu and other Chinese and foreign shoe enterprises have set foot in the virtual shoe market. Among them, Nike played its "cash ability" and acquired rtfkt, a virtual shoe brand established in 2020. In March last year, the latter sold out 621 pairs of limited virtual shoes in seven minutes, and gained more than 3.1 million US dollars. The average price of each virtual shoe reached 4992 US dollars, about 33000 Yuan RMB.

It's easy to sell tens of thousands, which looks "attractive". But is virtual shoes really a good business?

Quick life, quick death

Whether virtual shoes is a good business or not depends on the value judgment of virtual shoes. Everyone has his own opinion on this.

Among them, Bernard Arnott, the helmsman of LVMH, a luxury goods giant, gave a negative answer.

In response to a reporter's question in January this year, he said frankly that the meta universe may become a business opportunity, but "we must be alert to bubbles". Maybe he is not interested in selling shoes.

Some people care about "watch out for bubbles", others pay more attention to "business opportunities", and ignore the word "possible".

According to the new retail business review, most of the participants in the "Carnival" of stepn virtual shoes are coming for business opportunities. In other words, in the "move to earn" track, the most concerned is ARN, that is, how to make money.

The "charm" of stepn is that users can make money by "running", which greatly reduces the threshold for people to make money.

In short, stepn was founded in Australia by a graduate of Zhejiang University in October 2021. The company's app with the same name has various virtual shoes. After you buy a pair of virtual shoes for $900, you can run for a limited time every day to earn 10gst in-game token, and you can get back the cost by running for 30 days.

This is the most superficial "money making logic" and the most important "selling point" to attract users into the game. Zhu Xiaohu, a well-known investor, also bought a pair of virtual shoes from stepn before. After testing himself, he said in the "circle of friends" that "the first day of running earned $30, and the energy will soon disappear. It seems that it will take three months for the money of shoes to recover."

Running every day can earn hundreds of yuan, naturally attracted a large number of users. According to the official disclosure of stepn, there are 2-3 million active users all over the world, and tens of thousands of new users join in every day.

It is worth noting that stepn attracts users to enter and purchase its virtual shoes by running, which itself cannot generate economic benefits. With the continuous influx of users, the fund disk expands.

Moreover, when users run, the virtual shoes will be "worn" and need to be repaired with in-game tokens; Upgrade shoe box, also need in-game token; Upgrade shoes, more need in-game token. If users have more advanced "governance coins" than in-game tokens, they can also make two pairs of shoes "give birth to" a pair of small shoes ".

This series of operation and the whole mode make stepn deeply involved in the "Ponzi scheme" question.

Recently, Liu run, a business consultant, wrote that if many people who buy virtual shoes do not continue to spend money on repairing shoes, upgrading shoes and making two pairs of shoes produce small shoes, stepn will become a "pyramid selling" company with "Ponzi model 2.0", just like the "martyr" fun step, which claims "you can make money by walking".

There is no authoritative conclusion on whether stepn is a "Ponzi scheme". However, on May 27, it announced on foreign social networks that it would check users in mainland China, and it is expected to stop its services to mainland users on July 15.

News spread, in-game token and governance currency have plummeted, virtual shoe prices have also rapidly depreciated, most people in the industry believe that stepn will go to "failure" and "extinction".

Perhaps, stepn is what Bernard Arnott called "foam", but from a certain point of view, its emergence has made many shoe companies appreciate the "magic" of virtual shoes.

Competition between shoe enterprises

For the virtual shoe business, among shoe enterprises, Nike runs the fastest.

For its strategic transformation, Nike should focus on a certain field of digital transformation.

In 2017, Nike began to make efforts to comprehensively carry out digital transformation. Then CEO Mark Parker put forward the strategic goal of "doubling innovation, speed and direct connection with consumers".

After strategic focus, Nike either acquired new companies or announced digital technology.

As for the latter, as early as 2019, Nike announced a technology called "cryptokicks", which can virtualize shoes: when users buy a pair of Nike shoes, they will get a pair of digital shoes, and the relevant encrypted digital assets will also be transferred to users to achieve "absolute security".

It is not difficult to see that at that time, Nike just combined encrypted digital assets with physical shoes, not to create virtual shoes, but to prevent counterfeiting.

By 2020, rtfkt, which is developing virtual shoes, will use a p-chart of Elon Musk's "wearing" shoes similar to cybertruck's electric pickup, and ignite the topic of virtual shoes. Then, in March 2021, rtfkt launched a co branded virtual shoe, setting a new record of 7-minute sales of $3.1 million.

The popularity of rtfkt quickly attracted the attention of Nike. In December 2021, Nike successfully put rtfkt into its pocket. In April this year, the two sides launched virtual shoes with prices ranging from $9000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In an official tweet, rtfkt called the sneaker "the future of sports shoes.".

Unlike stepn, which uses various ways to mine the financial attributes of virtual shoes, which leads to the question of "Ponzi scheme", Nike creates virtual shoes, which not only greatly reduces the financial attributes, but also combines virtual and physical, so that virtual shoe holders can also obtain physical Nike sports shoes.

In addition to creating virtual shoes, Nike has also opened a virtual sports park called nikeland on roblox, an online game with 50 million visitors a day, where users can buy and wear shoes and other clothing that Nike also sells in the real world.

Interestingly, most of the users on roblox are only in their teens and do not have much intersection with the mainstream consumer market of Nike. However, teenagers always grow up, and Nike's move is considered to increase the brand's exposure in the meta universe, "expanding the relationship with future customers.".

Why is Nike so eager to promote the virtual shoe business? The answer is simple: it wants to gain brand influence similar to or stronger than that in the real world in the meta universe.

As senior analyst Irene Murphy has analyzed, "scarcity" has always been an important selling point of Nike in the real world. The company publicizes its uniqueness by selling limited products, while in the world of meta universe, Nike "as always" in order to stabilize its own advantages.

In addition to Nike, many shoe companies have also taken a fancy to the profitability and brand development capabilities of virtual shoes, accelerating their entry into the board.

For example, Arthur and the application stepn launched limited edition virtual shoes; The digital collection "160x metaverse" was released; Adidas launched NFT series of clothing, which is also a combination of virtual and physical. Buyers can obtain NFT products, as well as sportswear, sanitary clothes, shoes and other physical objects.

When the shoe enterprises move forward and continue to dig, the greater value of virtual shoes may also fall.

Value landing

The company has launched a number of cooperation platforms, such as Guchi and Yuanlai, to join in the virtual game platforms of LVZ and Yuanlai.

In the process of entering the meta universe, luxury brands have made gold by releasing NFT products, which is a "super rich mine".

According to Morgan Stanley, the global NFT market will grow to US $300 billion by 2030. Among them, luxury goods groups may make a profit of 10-15 billion euros from NFT sales, equivalent to 10% of the global luxury market.

Luxury brands can make money through NFT products, and shoe giants with high brand influence are also big players in NFT products. It can be said that the two will be the two "main forces" in the global NFT market.

　　 Not only commercial value, participation in NFT business such as virtual shoes can help shoe enterprises get in touch with new and younger customer groups In particular, it can improve the consumption stickiness and enhance the brand value through the social currency function of virtual shoes.

This is not difficult to understand. As an Internet aborigine, generation Z is more likely to be close to digital goods and more receptive to digital assets such as NFT.

Besides, Generation Z is keen on sharing on social platforms. Virtual shoes and virtual clothes with a strong sense of technology and future just fit in with this demand.

In short, real-time group photos and other services can be used to generate images that combine the virtual and the real. In the words of Da Liu, an investor in digital assets, "in the eyes of young people, it's a very personal thing to share such pictures on social platforms.".

From this point of view, Nike's opening virtual sports park on the game platform where teenage players gather is the cultivation of consumer groups, which is not as "radical" as it seems.

Besides commercial value and brand value, the development of meta universe and virtual shoes will also promote the promotion of product value.

Last month, a professional media in the field of footwear held a salon on "meta universe". At the event site, the participants put forward: "shoes design will enter the meta universe more and more and change in all aspects."; "In the era of meta universe and NFT, virtual, conceptual and futuristic design methods open the door to imagination." ； "Conceptual and futuristic shoe design can be better presented with the help of more and more mature 3D digital technology"... All kinds of viewpoints come in a stream and collide with each other.

In the view of the media, "the meta universe will eventually have a profound impact on the shoe industry". Shoe enterprise owners, R & D personnel, brand buyers and so on discuss together to deeply consider how the entire shoe industry chain can seize the opportunity for rapid development and realize innovation and upgrading.

On the contrary, shoe companies can get inspiration from virtual shoe design and materialize virtual shoes through 3D and 4D printing technology, forming a positive cycle and continuously improving product value.

Obviously, after the financial attribute is diluted, virtual shoes can be called a business worthy of investment. However, the transaction prices of NFT products such as virtual shoes also fluctuate greatly. There are many uncertainties in its development. While reducing the financial attribute, can we constantly break through the real business and strive for improvement, so as to provide more brand value and product value for the virtual business, Testing every shoe enterprise entering the Bureau.