Marketing & Communications Circular Economy

H&M’s 'Loooptopia' Metaverse Experience Rewards Players for Creating Circular Fashion

The new H&M Loooptopia Experience on Roblox allows users to experiment with their digital identity and learn about fashion and circularity in a fun, creative and playful environment.

Published 1 year ago | About a 3 minute read

Image: H&M

This week, H&M launched the H&M Loooptopia Experience on Roblox. A collaboration with metaverse studio Dubit, the immersive game lets players experiment with materials and patterns to create their own clothing ranges — with key messages around recycling materials and garments for a circular fashion future.

"People who shop and wear H&M garments and accessories are increasingly spending time in virtual spaces and digital worlds. The H&M Loooptopia Experience on Roblox is now allowing us to explore new ways to engage with our current and new customers in the places they love to be, both online and offline," says Linda Li, Head of Customer Activation & Marketing at H&M Americas. "In the coming years, H&M will continue to explore this fast-growing expanse of virtual and augmented realities."

The H&M Loooptopia Experience is an immersive, 3D experience filled with social interaction, engaging environments, mini-games, styling sessions, alternate worlds, events and more. It allows users to experiment with their digital identity and learn about fashion and circularity in a fun, creative and playful environment on the Roblox platform that's connecting millions of people through immersive shared experiences, all while encouraging creativity and self-expression.

While H&M has hit a few snags on its journey to become a sustainable and circular business, the apparel giant continues to innovate around its use of materials and processes, and is aiming to instill that sensibility into inhabits of its virtual world. At the heart of the Loooptopia world is a vibrant city square that sets the stage for visitors to embark on play sessions in alternate worlds including Rainbooow Fields, Neon Studiooo and Fabric Fooorest. In these environments, users can gather a variety of fashion ingredients for over 40,000 individual clothing items by engaging in mini-games, styling sessions, live events and more; then, style their avatar with the newly created clothes and compliment them with accessories, dance moves, music tracks and special effects to create a unique runway performance. They can also catch up with friends to trade clothes, take selfies or just admire each other's latest creations. When it's time to change up a style, they can recycle old clothes to earn super-rare elements and become the star of the runway show.

“As Dubit’s Metaverse Global Fashion Director and the first metaverse fashion stylist, I'm hugely excited by the creation of this phenomenal fashion world, which has been built with a very tight focus on the importance of sustainability in the fashion industry,” says Gemma Sheppard, Global Fashion Director at Dubit. “By drawing knowledge from experience, this world is safe-proofing fashion for future generations. I applaud that.”

H&M’s Loooptopia is the latest in a growing number of brand activations in the metaverse designed to engage players in sustainability themes in fun, entertaining and educational ways. In October, McCain Foods, the world’s largest manufacturer of prepared potato products, entered the metaverse with its “Farms of the Future” game on Roblox, featuring Regen Fries — made with potatoes that are grown using regenerative farming methods which build soil health, improve biodiversity and enhance on-farm resilience to climate change. McCain, which has committed to implement regenerative ag practices across 100 percent of its potato acreage worldwide by the end of 2030, said at the time of launch that it recognizes the education potential that lies with younger consumers as part of a holistic effort to transform the food system for the betterment of people and planet; hence, its #SaveOurSoil initiative — of which “Farms of the Future” and Regen Fries are a part.