How Amy Madison Luo Is Building Blueberry Into the LVMH of Digital Fashion on Roblox

0:00Ian Shepherd:Hello my friends and welcome to the Business of Creators. Today I'm sitting down with Amy Madison Luo, the new CEO of Blueberry, for a conversation about one of the most innovative spaces emerging in the creator economy. We create fashion in games. We're zeros and ones. We exist purely on screen and in pixels. There is no physical, you know, equivalent made in fabric. Amy opens up about the world of digital fashion and the powerful new tools Blueberry is building. We're basically building in like Blender plus Photoshop on top of Roblox to give these players the tools to be able to remix their own designs.

0:35It allows the average player to become a designer.

0:38Ian Shepherd:She also talks about the journey that brought her to the role of CEO. Being an investor is what really allowed me a bird's eye view of the industry and identify the opportunities. And she lays out an ambitious vision for what's ahead. There is no billion dollar digital fashion company that exists, but that's what we're building here at Blueberry. I would love Blueberry to be the LVMH of the digital world. This is an absolutely fascinating look at where digital fashion is heading and a conversation you don't want to miss.

1:09Ian Shepherd:So Amy, what is Blueberry? First of all, Ian, thank you so much for having me on this podcast. I've been very excited and I'm a big fan. Blueberry, we're a digital fashion house. Our mission is to supercharge the unlimited freedom of expression. And that's something very uniquely special to a digital environment where, you know, the traditional boundaries of whether it's speed to market, gravity, or even tariffs don't exist. And there's all sorts of different levers that you can pull to really gamify and involve play with the users. What makes us uniquely special is that we were birthed in gaming.

1:43And so we have over a decade of deep learning experience and engaging with the audience. That makes us really special and unique.

1:49Ian Shepherd:And for anyone hearing the term digital fashion for the first time, like how do you define that? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And I like to think about it in, I guess, two ways. One is the practical and two, the philosophical. I think from a practical perspective, we're zeros and ones. We exist purely on screen in pixels. There is no physical, you know, equivalent made in fabric that exists in the real world. On the other hand, the philosophical is what is digital fashion? You know, we're interacting with each other on a screen right now. Can you tell what I'm wearing is real? I could be, you know, there could be a green screen.

2:29There could be a whole virtual situation going on here. And similarly, when I think about how people engage with fashion in general these days, you know, I'm oftentimes on my phone when I'm watching a fashion show or I'm watching even the Met Gala. I'm not in front of these celebrities or these models or even these, you know, fashion houses in real life. And so is that digital fashion? It exists in a digital format to the majority of the audience that actually is consuming it. And so I think that that's actually something really interesting to think about. And even if you take that a step further, you know, we do digital fashion.

3:03Yes, we create fashion in games. Well, if we were to take one of those garments and created a physical version of it and locked away in a vault while millions of people experience than game? Does that make us real fashion all of a sudden and to be taken more seriously in today's age? I think these are all really interesting questions that people are going to start to think about.

3:23Ian Shepherd:Excellent. Well, I'm excited to get into the detail of that. And for listeners who've never logged into Roblox before, can you paint a picture of what it looks like when people wear blueberry pieces in the game? Yeah, they look the most beautiful, the coolest version of themselves. That aside, it is literally clothes that you put on your avatar, right? So like, what is an avatar to begin with? It is a digital representation of you. And it could be, you know, a person with a head, two arms and two legs. It could be a banana. That's the beauty of existing in a digital world. You really could be whoever you want.

3:57And at Blueberry, you know, our motto or tagline is dare to be. Dare to be whoever you want and whatever color, whatever shape, whatever size and whatever gender. and that really is what makes digital fashion super beautiful and we exist to really super charge that and so that exists in your avatar form so your profile photo um it also exists on your avatar as you're running around games so roblox is a gaming platform there's multiple there's millions of games on roblox and you run around in these games whether it's a role play game a shooter game a dress up game and you're wearing blueberry clothes i'm really curious

4:33Ian Shepherd:what makes a good digital fashion piece? Is it like the design, the storytelling, or is it how it moves in the game? What is it? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think it's all of the above. You know, there's definitely the element of design, just like people care about design in the real world. Design actually matters a lot. The article of clothing still needs to look good. And now I think the difference between platforms, especially gaming platforms like Roblox, in terms of when you think about design, is that there's an element of there's beauty and imperfection in the real world. And especially speaking as a fashion designer, I've been spent, you know, the past two years designing in the physical world.

5:12Every stitch, every pattern, every, every, you know, like garment needs to look a certain way. There's a level of quality to it. Well, in Roblox, there's a lot of beauty in just in putting something out there and experimentation and not being perfect and actually co-creating with your audience and like tweaking it and fixing it along the way. So I think when you think about design, there's different elements to design and what adds value in a digital environment. I think the other things you mentioned were the performance of it, how it moves. Absolutely. We at Blueberry spend a lot of time thinking about the creases, the shadowing, how the light hits the texture.

5:51There's also an element of rigging and caging when you're thinking about digital worlds. And so once you finish creating the garment, you actually have to fit it to the model. And so how does that fit look, right? You don't want an arm to accidentally pop out. And how does that fit look when you're translating it to different size bodies? These are all things that we think about. So in terms of design, performance, all the typical things that you think about in the real world also apply.

6:16Ian Shepherd:It's fascinating to learn more about it. I know that Roblox creators have earned over a billion dollars this year. How do fashion brands fit into the creator economy side of Roblox? Yeah, a billion dollars and we're just getting started, which is absolutely crazy. I think fashion brands have a very, very large role to play. And to give you some context in terms of how early we are, you know, Roblox only released UGC two years ago in 23. And Blueberry, we just created the first digital fashion stage on Roblox, the first formal fashion stage. And so we released that in September in collaboration with Aespa.

6:55And now all future fashion shows will be on the Blueberry stage. That's how early we are. And we're really, really, really proud of the work that we've done at Blueberry. We are bringing culture, fashion, and the truest sense of when you think about fashion in the real world to digital economies, to gaming platforms. We're not just taking replicas of what exists in the real world and duplicating it. We're coming up with original design. And our thesis is given the audience and given the growth, right, given the attention spent in these virtual economies, trends and culture is going to they're going to start in gaming natively.

7:29And hopefully we're going to be the brand that's going to start them. Why does fashion exist? Right. Fashion exists for a multitude of reasons. And I think the same reasons they exist in the real world also apply for the digital world. They exist for self-expression, to show status, to show belonging, to show community, to express their mood, identity. These are all people, real life players, right? That exist in real world that think the same. And now they're just in a digital environment. I actually think that fashion probably has the potential to play an even larger role in a digital economy.

8:02And I say that with a little bit of girl math. And in terms of like, you're bang for your buck, you're used per wear out of a garment, right? Especially if you have a limited budget. If you're wearing a shirt, for example, today, I've worn this shirt now. I probably, if I were to see you tomorrow, Ian, I probably can't wear the same shirt. You might have some questions in terms of, you know, like, do I bathe? Do I do my laundry? Well, in the digital world, there's not only not that expectation for you to change your clothes every day, but it's quite common. And so you get so much more wear out of one garment, but you also have the ability to, you can wear your garment more often, but you can also change your garment multiple times a day.

8:42Every single game you go into, you can go into five games in one hour and change your garment five times without having to go home. And so the potential of fashion brands to really access that consumer mindset and that desire to play more with fashion in a zero waste way. You can change clothes, you can buy clothes with absolutely zero waste, I think is really exciting. And I think that we're just scratching the surface right now of what fashion can do. And it's absolutely going to take off if you believe that gaming as an ecosystem is going to increase, more users are going to onboard into it and spend more time, more attention, more money.

9:17It's absolutely a playing ground for fashion. I think that the community would absolutely welcome it.

9:23Ian Shepherd:I love the way you describe this with so much passion. I really want to get into some of the things that you're working on. So I know you're launching a capsule collection with creators like Natasha Panda. Can you tell us more about those? Yeah, I would absolutely love to. So I had the great privilege of attending Roblox Developers Conference earlier this year. And what it is for folks that might not know that are listening is it's this exclusive invite only conference with, you know, the brightest minds in the Roblox ecosystem. It's creators, it's, you know, developers, it's artists that are youth.

9:58They're all relatively young that are making some of them are making millions and millions of dollars. Right. It's just pure creativity. At this conference, I found myself surrounded at a certain point with, you know, like half a dozen influencers, Roblox influencers, each of them having several million to double digit millions of followers and viewership across their platforms. And I was extremely, extremely inspired. You know, community is a word that often gets thrown around. It was thrown around a lot in the metaverse NFT days. It gets thrown around in gaming worlds. but I really got to experience it firsthand and I really got understood what it meant when I was there in the community interacting with these influencers and that excitement that sense of community really inspired me on the spot as I was engaging with these influencers including Natasha Panda to think about this capsule collection concept now where did that come from I took a lot of inspiration from sports teams and you know like rock bands and artists musicians that exist in the real world.

10:58As a fan of some of these teams and some of these artists, I really crave for that, you know, that celebrity, that, that, the fan experience, right? And they do a really good job of doing that in the real world with merch. I get to go buy like a t-shirt, a cap of my favorite team, right? And go show my support to feel part of that family. I get to do the same thing at a Taylor Swift concert, whether it's with, you know, like beaded bracelets or, or, or a t-shirt. But that is really missing in the Roblox world, I realize. You have these influencers that are engaging with their fans through gameplay, through social content, but they don't have that same fan to influencer experience.

11:37And I would love to bring it to them in terms of we have the tools to create the best clothes in the entire ecosystem. We have the team to do it, the designers, the ability to really take the true authentic taste and style of that influencer and flip it and turn it into a digital collection. And in a way that allows the influencer really add a ton of value to the community, to allow their community to participate with them along their journey. And so we've actually been in conversations not only with Natasha, who you've seen has been an excellent partner. She's one of the most authentic, positive, so much fun people that I've ever met, but also in conversations with a lot of the other influencer partners that we talked to at the conference.

12:21in addition actually we have Kate Young we're very privileged of Kate Young who is a celebrity stylist has been in the industry for a very long time styling you know folks from Selena Gomez all the way to Scarlett Johansson and last year's Roblox Developers Conference she actually styled some of the influencers on behalf of Blueberry so we styled them for this gala at the end of the conference in real life and then we duplicated the real life garments into digital versions a la blueberry style and we sold them on the marketplace and actually today if you looked at these garments they're being sold for multiples more on the secondary market than what they were

12:59Ian Shepherd:released for wow that's very cool i'm really curious to understand like the detail behind this so what kind of creative control do creators get when they collaborate with blueberry i would say a ton of creative control we have an amazing amazing team of artists and designers that really do a lot of deep homework and research in terms of what does this creator stand for? What is their specific style? What does their audience look like? We go through all of their socials and do a lot of homework and put together sketches. I would say 10 out of 10, every single conversation I've had with these creators, when I pull up the sketches, initial sketches that we've shown them, they've signed off immediately.

13:42It's such a delight to see their eyes light up and And the comments have gotten where, wow, blueberry, you really know what you're doing. To, oh my gosh, I can't believe you just captured that detail, that trucker hat, that ice cream hat. Like, I can't believe you noticed. To, I would wear this in real life. Like, if you design this right now, I would go on to wear it. And so we do a fantastic job of capturing their essence, their DNA, and adding a blueberry spin to it. But we'd love to co-create. You know, the important part of operating in a gaming native economy is, I think there's two words, community.

14:14is what I've said a bunch now and co-creation. And that's part of the journey. We want to take these creators, these influencers, their authentic style and bring it to their community because that's what they're looking for. And so we're a very feedback, welcome creative process to put another way.

14:33Ian Shepherd:And I'm really curious, what do the economics look like for a partnership like this? Yeah, I can't go too much in the detail because it is bespoke depending on the creator. But roughly, I would look at it in terms of there's three buckets. One is the upfront costs, right? And some of those costs sometimes just have the designers, the creators on our team to do the end-to-end design and production process. And some of the time, depending on the creator, we'll cover some of those costs as our investment into them. Two, there's a component of revenue share. And so the more sales we have, the more we all benefit and win.

15:07And then three is a sense of shared responsibilities. So our responsibilities are, hey, we design and create the garment and do marketing for it. And the creator's responsibility is to excite and engage with their audience and to really communicate this across. And that really comes across, you know, it's come across in different forms. Live streaming in one of our games, running contests with our community. We really defer to the creator to decide and design how they best decide to interact with their community.

15:34Ian Shepherd:Excellent. Is there something that surprised you about a creator's approach to digital fashion versus maybe physical fashion? I think what has been interesting is that, you know, we talked a lot about what is digital fashion. And in the creative process of us designing the digital fashion special capsule collections for these creators, we were taking real life inspiration. So the real life style, whether it's a baggy pair of jeans or a trucker hat, and we were adding the digital spin to it. And the fact that it translated that well, but you can tell at the end of the day when we flip the asset to a digital asset, that it was uniquely a digital piece that exists in Roblox.

16:16In terms of the similarity that really resonated with the creator was surprising. And then also us adding that special element of blueberry that delighted them and surprised them in a way that they might not have thought about. but it just became so natural and it's such a natural part of their style whereby you almost question like how did this not exist before i think that that that was really delightfully

16:40Ian Shepherd:surprising and i know you've just launched the blueberry creator studio as well what problem does it solve for like new designers or fans my gosh i feel like we're entering a new era of not not only Roblox, but Blueberry as a company. So Roblox launched an API two weeks ago now at the top of the month. And basically this API allowed users, players to go into experiences that were set up in this particular way to co-create their own custom designs. Now this has never existed before on the platform. And to even take a step back, we have a team of dozens of artists and engineers and creators designing and producing these assets.

17:25It is definitely not easy, especially to be producing at the level that we are, where we're taking into consideration, you know, all of those details that I just mentioned. And it's not just what you see on the surface. It's actually the architecture of each garment on the back end that we spend a lot of time on. It's the details that really make a difference. Now, it's very sophisticated work. You know, it doesn't only require the experience, but also the tooling. I mean, it takes a lot of time. Sometimes it takes over an entire week just to create a single garment at the level of detail that we want.

17:55And so what does this tool do? It really democratizes design. It allows the average player to become a designer all of a sudden, right? And how do we partner with the community and really leverage the powers of this tool? Well, we've been around for over a decade. We have thousands of meshes at our disposal. now that we can really give to the community and really invite them to co-create with us. We've created the tools, we've created the meshes and we've created the infrastructure now. And when I say infrastructure, we've built on top of Roblox's API. We have layering, we have save, we have redo, undo functions.

18:35We have accessory scaling. We're basically building in like Blender plus Photoshop on top of Roblox to give these players the tools to be able to remix their own designs in really simple ways. This is a whole new world and it's extremely exciting just to see the creations that the audience is coming up with. I think that it also opens up a lot of really lucrative and exciting and creative opportunities to partner with brands and other creators. One way that we're doing this right now is let's say with Natasha Panda's collection. We had designed a unique capsule collection for her. Her signature is the panda.

19:11So we had a really cute panda beanie, a panda hoodie, you know, panda track pants, with little panda dolls on top of it. Well, that was sold in the marketplace in several colorways, black and white and pink. And a bunch of her fans purchased it. Well, now that we have this brand new game, which we're actually launching right now as we speak, Design UGC, her fans can go into the game, they can take the outline mesh of the hoodie and they can make it uniquely their own. It's a one-on-one, they can publish it, they can own it, they can take it around to other games and wear it and be truly part of the Natasha Panda fan club in their own unique way.

19:51Ian Shepherd:It's so fascinating. What have you learned from watching how players remix and personalize the designs? I've learned that, man, we have a lot of talented and smart youth and oftentimes kids on this platform. It's absolutely insane. And we take a lot of inspiration from them. I think in a future world, I think that this is a great way to identify talent and invite them to co-create with us. It could be just through the game. It could be as formal designers. It could be, hey, we take the best designs and we turn them into UGC on the marketplace. We can highlight them in our experience. We can even turn them into physical fashion.

20:29Ian Shepherd:I love that. And do you think that players or creators will almost develop their own labels within Blueberry? That's definitely the direction that we're starting to experiment with. We have just such a strong team of artists. We have an efficient and optimized team to be able to create assets at the highest quality, the most efficiently. And we love to be able to take, you know, back office or supply chain and work with existing creators and influencers to create their own lines. It is very much the same philosophy, as I mentioned, in terms of why we decided to work with Natasha Panda. Let's do what we each do best and come together to be able to enhance the fan experience, to be able to add more value to the community and to be able to give back.

21:15We're really good at creating clothes. We're really good at the production process, the design process, the end to end. These creators are really good at engaging with your audience, knowing exactly what excites them and engaging with them. And so let's come together and give the people what they want. So far, all of the creators that we worked with have been extremely excited. The feedback from the community has been extraordinarily positive. When we see all of these and we're able to see, you know, like a Natasha Penn address, we're able to see hundreds of our community remix it in their own authentic style.

21:48It definitely is something very special. And it's something that you can only do in a uniquely digital environment.