Barely a year after launching Hypewear, a shop for digital fashion, Hamburg-based e-commerce specialist About You has put its Metaverse ambitions on hold for the time being.
Hypwear is on pause for the time being and the associated website has been taken offline, About You confirmed to FashionUnited. The industry magazine Textilwirtschaft had previously reported on a possible end to the Metaverse project.
Originally, About You’s Metaverse project was intended to make fashion NFTs accessible to the general public – even without any crypto knowledge. “The Metaverse has opened up a new, exciting world for companies and fashion, which we at About You also want to help shape,” said Tarek Müller, co-founder and co-CEO of About You in a statement in April 2022. “Our vision is that all physical fashion pieces can also be used as digital assets in the future. We want to become the destination for digital fashion and the mainstream wardrobe of the Metaverse.”
This vision now seems to be a thing of the past for the time being, as it is no longer the focus of the company. Rather, AboutYou now wants to concentrate on individual NFTs, according to Hamburg. It is also conceivable that the topic will be taken up again in the future, but further development of the platform for digital fashion has been stopped for the time being.