Adriana Hoppenbrouwer-Pereira on Co-Creating the Metaverse Wardrobe | Unreleased NFTS.WTF Interview

Previously unreleased: this interview is published here for the first time.Adriana Hoppenbrouwer-Pereira, co-founder and chief commercial officer of The Fabricant, explains how The Fabricant Studio lets anyone co-create a digital fashion NFT and share in the royalties.Interviewed by David Cash. Book David to host, moderate, or speak: https://davidcash.ca

The Fabricant calls itself the digital fashion house, building what Adriana describes as the wardrobe of the metaverse. Recorded live in April 2022 at a digital fashion breakfast The Fabricant hosted during NFC Lisbon, she talks with David Cash about The Fabricant Studio, which launched in October 2021, and how it splits each look between garment designers, pattern designers, and the co-creators who style and mint them. She covers why the studio runs on the Flow blockchain, shared IP and royalties for life, new roles such as digital tailors, the idea that Web3 will one day just be called the web, and the team's plans for a token and a DAO.

Watch on YouTube

Chapters

1. 00:00 Intro from a digital fashion breakfast at NFC Lisbon
2. 0:44 The Fabricant and The Fabricant Studio
3. 1:53 How co-creation works
4. 2:34 Shared ownership and split royalties
5. 3:26 Why The Fabricant Studio runs on Flow
6. 4:15 Digital tailors and new roles in digital fashion
7. 4:50 A more creative, sustainable, and equal fashion industry
8. 5:29 Accessibility, Web2 habits, and Web3 values
9. 7:07 From text to images to video to immersive
10. 7:54 From a small Amsterdam team to a global community
11. 9:20 Plans for a token and a DAO
12. 10:41 Where to find The Fabricant Studio

Speakers

• David Cash, interviewer and editor-in-chief, NFTS.WTF
• Adriana, co-founder and chief commercial officer, The Fabricant

Key topics

• The Fabricant Studio and co-created digital fashion NFTs
• Garment designers, pattern designers, and co-creators as digital stylists
• Royalties split among everyone who contributed to a look
• Shared IP recorded on chain
• Choosing the Flow blockchain
• Digital tailors who adapt high-definition files for metaverse platforms
• Ownership and credit for creators online
• Web3 as an immersive, decentralized layer of the web
• Community events such as The Fabricant's digital fashion breakfast
• A token and DAO to support builders in the ecosystem

In their words

"We are building this wardrobe of the metaverse in a co-created way." Adriana, The Fabricant

"We need everybody to jump in and reinvent this industry together." Adriana, The Fabricant

How to cite

APA: Cash, D. (2022). Adriana of The Fabricant on co-creating the metaverse wardrobe [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/bsxFvxb7xuk

Chicago: Cash, David. "Adriana of The Fabricant on Co-Creating the Metaverse Wardrobe." Recorded April 2022, Lisbon. YouTube video, 11:19. https://youtu.be/bsxFvxb7xuk.

About NFTS.WTF

NFTS.WTF was a Web3 culture publication and interview series edited by David Cash. It covered artists, collectors, and builders during the 2021–2022 NFT boom. It ran for two years and closed after a board decision by the NFTS DAO, which left many of its interviews unpublished.

Recording details

Recorded April 2022 at NFC Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. Previously unreleased. Published 2026 with chapters and captions.

Transcript

Machine-transcribed and reviewed. Timestamps link to the moment in the video.

[0:05] Hello everybody. Welcome back to NFTS.WTF. My name is David Cash, your editor-in-chief, and we're joined here today live in Lisbon at a digital fashion breakfast with Adriana, one of the co-founders and the Chief Commercial Officer from The Fabricant, one of my favorite virtual fashion companies. Adriana, thanks so much for taking the time while you're hosting and doing so much here in Lisbon. Great to meet you as always. I think this is our first time actually doing something properly on camera, so it's lovely. We've gotten to work together in the past, and yeah, just for people who might not be familiar with you, I mean, I feel like most of our viewers are already familiar with The Fabricant, but if you want to just give people a little bit of background of you and maybe let people know what you're really excited about right now that you guys are working on. Yeah, sure. So we're The Fabricant, for those that don't know.

[0:48] We are the digital fashion house, and we are building this wardrobe of the metaverse in a co-created way, so we really believe in the decentralized form of ecosystem building. And what is exciting about what we are doing is we just launched our platform, The Fabricant Studio, in October last year, and in The Fabricant Studio, anybody can be a fashion designer. You can co-create your own digital fashion NFT and basically start your label through us. And in this way, we're basically growing the entire ecosystem of fashion, and that is our big mission. I really love the way that you guys structure it, because we've chatted in the past about this, about how you noticed that no one person can produce en masse at the scale that we need to move this industry forward. So I love the way that you've brought up and incubated so many designers now that's obviously turned into the studio.

[1:36] Maybe you want to speak a little bit about how you're making it more egalitarian, because for anybody who's interested, I mean, if you're an artist or a designer or anybody in the space, really, you can submit textiles, forms, and there's a whole bunch. So maybe if you want to break down just how you've, at The Fabricant, you've broken down this creation process. Yeah, amazing. So the co-creation happens in the following way. We have the garment designers, which designed the garments. The 3D models. The 3D models, we have the pattern designers who designed the graphics, and we have what we call the co-creators, people that don't have any design background like me, that can actually assemble, choosing, oh, I want this garment, I want this pattern, and I create a new combination with these colors, and that combination is unique. It's one-on-one. The style, it's tasteless. Exactly. We actually, you know, I call the co-creators the stylist, the digital stylist,

[2:23] because you're actually creating your own taste, and then you mint it, so it's your NFT. It's your look. It's your look, but it's also co-owned by everything, everybody involved, so when you sell that item, the rewards are equally split with the garment designer, the material designer, and yourself, which means for the garment designers that that garment can be used multiple times, and he or she can also kind of, you know, exponentially grow his own business and his own wealth by being part of this whole co-creation infrastructure. And that's so empowering for designers as well, because, I mean, if you look historically, somebody who comes up with, I don't know, Virgin Vial, or any of the classic forms, or like the wrap dress, or this, they're all commercialized, and they're all kind of taken after they become popular. Absolutely. So now, actually because of the blockchain, and the fact that you're

[3:13] all on chain, and maybe you want to talk about this a little bit, because I'm sure our audience would really appreciate that, the fact that you're all on chain allows you to really perpetuate those mechanisms, and allow that to work for everybody. So it's rewards for life, right? Indeed, we set our studio, the Fabrikan Studio, in Flow blockchain, and we had deliberately decided for Flow, because it is a sustainable chain, because it's secure, and because it's quite safe, and we were kind of quite interested in these three combinations, which, holy combinations, and because it's on chain, as you said, that contract is for life, so my rewards are secured for life, those transactions secured for life, and actually these three people own the IP together, so they can actually create also a little enterprise, and decide to reutilize this product in several different ways. And even, I'm sure even people who never met before could

[4:04] have this, and they see something successful, and then they come together through this. Absolutely, and if anything, that is kind of our big vision, is again, we're just enabling this decentralized ecosystem, where different players will set their trade. So we have, for example, now what we call digital tailors, which are people that are going from our very high definition files, and create the sandbox twins, or the Decentraland twins, and it's an expertise, right? To make it look good in those environments. Absolutely, it's manually done, and they have their own artistic rights to exist, and they are part of the ecosystem. But we have people, for example, that we are creating right now, that are actually creating shows in the metaverse. How cool is that? You are an event manager, a metaverse event manager. Exactly, exactly. So I think we just see this opportunity of recreating the fashion

[4:54] industry, in web3, in a more creative way, because there are no boundaries for creativity, right? In a more sustainable way, because we've proven that actually digital is more sustainable. But the last one, which kind of really speaks to my heart as well, it's in a more equalitarian way, where wealth can be distributed, and people can participate, and it doesn't matter if you are, we have in our manifesto the line that I love the most, a kid in Dakar has the same chance of being a designer as a kid in Paris. That is like what we're doing it for. Yeah, that's what we're doing it for. And I think that's exactly, that was the perfect segue, because I want to talk about the idea of accessibility, because when we're considering virtual fashion, where we stand right now, I like to consider the term CBFI, so like centralized, decentralized finance, because I feel like undisputably, Fabricant is a web3

[5:43] company because of your ethos and the way you guys have moved in the space for so long. At the same time, I feel like you exemplify a really nice mix of what do we keep from a web2 business, more a tech company I would say even, in terms of style, and then what do we bring into web3 that's completely different. So obviously you host all of your work on chain, you sell NFTs, I think exclusively if not almost exclusively, but then you also have an iPhone app, and you make things more accessible, so do you want to maybe speak about that intersection of like accessibility versus on chain, and kind of maybe where we're at? Yeah, no, absolutely. And if anything, like what we believe is, we need ultimately to make web3 just a term that we're never going to use anymore, right? The web. It's just the web, just like we don't talk about HTML, right? I think NFTs and web3... People were saying web2 for a while.

[6:31] Exactly. Like web3 and NFTs, like if we did well next year, maybe in two years, to be a bit more... Nobody's going to talk about it anymore, it's just the way we do things. It's tokenized. Correct. It's online. What is my creation is my creation, I own it, and you can use it, yes, you know, Instagram, you can use it, but I'm the owner, you need to give me minimum credit, or ideally even pay for that creation. So ultimately we are building a product and an ecosystem that is about to just be a normal transition from web2, as we know now, to web3, right? And I make that analogy that when web was started, it was all text, then it started adding photography, we are now in the video era, but we are getting into the immersive area, right? So for me, when I talk web3, it's immersive, and it's decentralized, that means what is mine is mine, and I own it, and I have the rights to sell it, to commercialize, to be credited for, right?

[7:29] And this is the big revolution, but it should be just a tech layer, and I think that digital fashion will really take off when the girls and guys that are now in Instagram and TikTok, you know, enjoying fashion, are actually going to start seeing that there is a new opportunity to move that same enjoyment, that same fun, but actually become active creators in the system, in the web3 revolution. I have one last question for you, that's a little bit specific, because obviously Fabrikim came around before, I think almost any other virtual fashion company, at least one is considering on-chain virtual fashion, and now we see so many people popping up in the space, the space has grown so exponentially, and I feel like your team has actually really harnessed that, and supported that, instead of being regarding this competition, which is very true to web3. And for me also, the element that I think is important is this tie-in between

[8:21] identity and commerce, and I feel like commerce used to be so segmented by countries, by regions, by borders, and now, due to all of this crypto world that we're all living in, we're able to track globally without these borders, so considering that, and considering where you came from, what's changed for you in terms of starting just Amsterdam, this small group of people, creating virtual fashion yourselves, to now this global ecosystem of designers, and what's next, is it going to just keep growing? It's so exciting, so exciting, and to your point, that's why we host things like the Fashion Breakfast, where if you're in the fashion business, if you're in the identity business, just come, we're going to create it all together. And think about it, fashion is $3 trillion annual, there is so much space, we need everybody to jump in and reinvent this industry together, so that's how we see it, and if anything, we just want to be enablers of

[9:18] this ecosystem growth, and for us in our journey, a big element of this ecosystem model is our token and ADAL, so we are now actually planning for the token launch, end of this year, hopefully, and then really moving into ADAL system, whereby again, we can help the ecosystem to grow, we'll have, the token is ultimately just a way for us to invest and support ecosystem players, to build on top of our tech infrastructure, and to together build that vision, right? And that's so true to web3, you're integrating commerce further into your infrastructure, and rewarding the players who support your ecosystem. Our infrastructure is about create, trade and wear, but we are not going to do it together. No, that's beautiful, that's super, and I'm so excited with everything that you guys are doing, I feel like the fashion industry needs these types of voices, and I think that that's why we've managed to come so far, is because of Fabric and

[10:16] because of DressX, because of these few companies that can be inclusive in an industry that has been so exclusive, I think, exclusive in every sense. So super excited, I can't wait to see what's next for the Fabricant studio, and for everybody watching, our DAO members and all of our readers, please, please check out the Fabricant and everything you're doing, if you're a creator, look into how you can be a co-creator within their ecosystem, and maybe just to wrap things up, anything you'd like to let people know, where can they find the studio? Yeah, I think that's a good one, so Discord for the entire community, and if you want to be on the studio, thefabricant.studio is the URL. You make it very easy for us. Thefabricant.studio will have a link below, thank you so much Adriana for taking the time. Thank you! This is a beautiful breakfast, we're going to get back to the crowd, but thank you all so much for taking the time, this is NFTS.WTF, my name is David Cash,

[11:07] signing off from Lisbon. Thanks so much.