EXCLUSIVE: Tribute Brand Acquires Draup, to Launch New Digital Fashion Platform Fashion.Fun

PARIS — Digital fashion pioneers Tribute Brand and Draup will be joining forces in the real world and beyond.

On the one hand, Tribute has acquired Draup for an undisclosed sum, a move meant to strengthen Tribute as a leader in the space amid both the luxury business slide and cooling of metaverse hype.

On the other, Draup founder and chief executive officer Dani Loftus will join Tribute Brand as chief commercial officer, overseeing strategy, sales and marketing, effective immediately.

“My excitement about acquiring Draup was largely driven by the excitement around Dani and the unparalleled energy she has been able to create both within our industry and beyond,” Tribute Brand founder and CEO Gala Marija Vrbanić said in a statement. “We met when she was just starting out. Since then, she has become one of the most prominent voices advocating for and working in the digital fashion segment.”

The combined Tribute Brand team will launch its new Fashion.Fun platform for digital wearables. The new platform is set to launch in January.

“The fashion industry is facing challenging times, but we are at a pivotal moment, one where the necessary change is happening, and something new and transformative is about to emerge,” said Vrbanić.

Tribute has a history of bringing traditional luxury brands into the digital fashion space, and has collaborated with Carolina Herrera, Jean Paul Gaultier and Sacai on digital-only pieces. Celebs are on board, too; their digital dressing service has outfitted Kim Petras and Charli XCX.

Draup has a history of collaborating with artists including Nicolas Sassoon, Linda Dounia and Emi Kusano on digitally native fashion collections, as well as selling digital pieces at Christie’s.

Fashion.Fun is positioned as a platform that will unite all of Tribute Brand’s technologies from algorithm-designed physical clothing, AR and digital wearables into a single platform. The brands, artists and crypto projects that currently use Draup will use the new virtual sale space to offer their digital wearables as collectibles or items that can be worn as skins or in video games.

Tribute was founded in 2019, and Draup in 2020. In July 2022, Draup raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Ledger executive Ian Rogers and Trevor McFedries, the tech guru behind CGI Influencer Lil Miquela, among others. That same month, Tribute Brand raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Collab+Currency, with Alice Lloyd George and Lattice Capital, among others.

Since the near simultaneous fundraising rounds, the two have been framed as competitors. But Loftus, who also runs the publication This Outfit Does Not Exist, said they have been working together over the years, especially on influencer content.

“I’ve always admired their work a lot and, over time, we started to see that we were coming up with a lot of the same ideas. We’d always have these jokes about how closely aligned our strategies were, which then grew into the idea of becoming one company,” she said.

The relative newness of the industry opens up avenues for collaboration as companies seek to build excitement around digital fashion, and the team hopes that the strength of their digital designs will encourage fashion houses to produce digital items and fight overproduction.

She added that with Bitcoin now topping $100,000, the team sees opportunity for renewed interest in digital assets, including fashion.

The 14 digital looks from Tribute’s AR-assisted Los Angeles Fashion Week show “Uniforma” will be among the first collections available on the Fashion.Fun platform. This collection also featured the brand’s first physical ready-to-wear pieces, which are equipped with proprietary near-frequency communication (NFC) technology called Tribute Touch, which enables customization and authentication.

Tribute Brand launched the physical collections to promote zero-waste fashion, and all the pieces are made from deadstock.

The name Fashion.Fun for the platform reflects the company’s ethos that digital fashion should be fantastical and playful, and promote freedom of expression in the virtual world as a way to combat overproduction and the environmental damage of clothing waste in the physical one.

Fashion.Fun’s first fashion partner will be revealed soon, Loftus added.