The forward-thinking agency is gearing up for one of the biggest events of the year with the hopes of onboarding the next billion people into web3.

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It’s nearing that time of year again. Spring you say? No, no. Metaverse Fashion Week.

For only the second time, David Cash, the managing director and founder of Cash Labs, will bring Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW) to Decentraland March 28-31. 

But what is Metaverse Fashion Week?

MVFW is essentially an opportunity for fashion brands to showcase their goods—both digital and physical—in Decentraland, and for attendees to purchase digital wearables and products for themselves and their avatars. To help guide fashion brands last year, Cash said they made an effort to tie the digital goods to something in the real world.

“A majority of the brands that launched last year during Metaverse Fashion Week had some kind of ‘phygital’ offering, whereby you buy something in the metaverse and [the purchase] was linked to an actual physical good,” Cash said in an interview.

Cash hopes the success of last year’s MVFW—which he said had over 1.4 billion unique impressions in the media—will help propel MVFW 2023 forward to break new ground.

“This very digital event was covered in over 470 major fashion, art, and luxury publications,” Cash said. “So we can see very physical brands come into the digital space, but what's almost more interesting is seeing the digital space go back into the physical space. We’re going to see a lot more of that this year. We’re going to see some physical events that are tied in with digital events.”

Cash elaborated on the merge between digital and physical by providing an interesting use case that Cash Labs helped pioneer with rapper French Montanta.

“When French Montana asked us to help him sell his shoes as NFTs, we took those shoes and made eight 3-D-model versions of them with a corresponding wearable version for Decentraland so you could ‘wear’ them at home while waiting for the physical shoes to arrive,” he said. 

Last year, the makeup giant Estee Lauder approached the firm a few weeks before the show without a product or plan in place, Cash said. That didn’t stop him.

“We brought in a virtually native 3-D beauty influencer who worked in traditional makeup with a bunch of different fashion brands and had her design a wearable with our 3-D team that we could share in Decentraland,” Cash said. “We gave them away for free. [Estée Lauder] wanted to do it around a serum they were promoting—a physical serum—but you can’t give away or wear a serum in the metaverse. So [the influencer] created this aura, this glow—which were these little glowing dots around your Decentraland avatar—and it was great because you could actually wear it over the clothes you were wearing during Metaverse Fashion Week.”

“We had over 10,000 people claim [this aura] in three days—they were completely claimed out. It just goes to show how a brand can legitimately make some kind of impact and really see value from it,” Cash said.

Cash formed Cash Labs after his master’s thesis about web3 gained over 100,000 views after he posted it online. An influx of inquiries ensued and led to Cash working with firms ranging from Outlier Ventures to Unit London—an art gallery in the UK that was working with NFT artists like Krista Kim and Anthony Tudicso. 

“It was the convergence of these three things: Getting all of these big crypto people through the Outlier Ventures work, getting all of these big artists through the art galleries I was working with, and the inbound people reaching out to me because of the thesis I’d written,” Cash said.

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There was a lot of education to be done with his consulting clients at first, he said. “Our first session would literally be, ‘What’s an NFT?’ That then evolved into us doing strategy sessions with incredible artists and devising projects,” he said. 

Cash led the first NFT project for the NBA with artist Krista Kim, who designed a virtual locker room, and for which Cash helped explain what NFTs were to the mass market. “It started with the artists and then the artists would be like, ‘Hey, David, help me do this.’ Then it changed to, ‘Hey Cash Labs, help me do this,’ because I started building a team.”

Now, the Cash Lab team is upwards of 100 people, running full sectors of web3 for some of the biggest companies in the world—a top five Fortune 500 company and many other Fortune 500s. 

“The big focus for us now is on educating companies and decision makers in terms of what makes sense for them in web3 and giving them the tools they need to understand how web3, the metaverse, and NFTs can actually do something for them and their businesses,” he said. “Ultimately though, we do a lot more than that and we want to help onboard the next billion people into web3.”

While such a vision sounds lofty, Cash would disagree. “In the next year or two, approximately one billion or 500 to 700 million people are going to have to enter this space in some way shape or form if they’re going to keep up with consumer technology and the things that are about to be launched—some of which we know, some of which we don’t know,” he said. “We really want to help build this literacy.”

The 2023 Metaverse Fashion Week will be “the first ever fashion week that will be interoperable. Last year during Metaverse Fashion Week, you were not able to go between different metaverse spaces. If I was a brand and I did an activation in Spacial—last year fashion week was pretty much in Decentraland—there would have been no way for me to go between the activation in Spacial and an activation in Decentraland. That’s luckily changed, and this year, Metaverse Fashion Week is actually a triad effort between—principally Decentraland—Spacial, and the AR metaverse solution OVER.”

These three metaverse worlds are exploring what it looks like to have a cross-metaverse event, which is helping move the ecosystem forward. “You have to think about it like going between Call Of Duty and Fortnite, versus going between two different worlds in one video game,” Cash said. “These are two completely different entities and we’re finding ways to bridge between them.”

“It will be exciting to see brands take advantage of the really cool gamification of Decentraland that maybe Spacial can’t do, and then go into Spacial and experience things that Decentraland can’t do,” Cash said.” It will be cool to see how brands play within that.”