ByteDance Enters Digital Fashion Industry
Tech Planet reported on Monday that ByteDance’s short video sharing platform Douyin has entered the digital fashion industry and plans to launch a business called “Pheagee,” which is affiliated with Shanghai Pheagee Technology Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of ByteDance.
“Pheagee” is a brand-new digital fashion community, which mainly integrates science and humanity into fashion and builds a new market for the industry. According to informed sources, “Pheagee” may involve virtual clothing, virtual humans, virtual fashion, and other features, and it will be linked with Douyin e-commerce, PICO and other businesses to become a platform for continuous digital fashion output. At present, the project team is located in Shanghai and Beijing.
The relevant responsible Douyin employee said that “Pheagee” is a creative online fashion platform for fashion designers, and it is still in the early exploration stages.
ByteDance has already made moves in various technologies and application scenarios related to digital fashion. Last year, the Bejing-based firm made a huge investment to acquire metaverse technology merchant PICO, which provided support for ByteDance regarding digital fashion technology. ByteDance is still ramping up research on XR and MR, and has recruited technical talent from AI enterprises like Megvii.
Digital fashion is an emerging industry that revolves around fashion design, wearing and collection culture in the digital field. The rise of digital fashion benefits from the transformation of the physical fashion industry aided by virtual technology under the pandemic, creating online products for sale and display.
The digital fashion market has vast space for development. According to the 2021 Digital Fashion Report released by Lyst, a British fashion shopping platform, partnered with digital fashion house The Fabricant, “digital fashion customers number around 3.5 billion individuals globally, with more than 55% of the total purchasing power.” Analysts believe that in China, the market will reach 100 billion ($15.3 billion) yuan in the future.
In addition to ByteDance, other leading Chinese enterprises such as Huawei, Tencent and Xiaohongshu are also intensively deploying digital fashion businesses.
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On April 18, Xiaohongshu joined hands with nine well-known designers to launch a new virtual fashion product in Xiaohongshu’s R-SPACE. Tencent‘s layout in digital fashion is mainly based on the Super QQ Show, during which users can dress up virtual characters by buying virtual clothes that express their personality. This January, Huawei signed a cooperation agreement with a company in Zhejiang on a joint innovation project for AI digital fashion to provide overall digital solutions for traditional industries.
