LV MEETS THE GAME INDUSTRY

What is it?

For the 2019 League of Legends world championship finals in Paris, Louis Vuitton and League of Legends collaborated to create different kinds of material for the fans of the game. The world championship (called worlds) is the biggest event of the year for the game, and the collaboration with Louis Vuitton made it even bigger. On their side, Louis Vuitton designed and created digital assets and designed costumes for the characters of the game, which were also made and sold in real life by Louis Vuitton and made a mechanical trophy case for the winners of the championship, which are crowned the best professional team of that year. The designed costumes can be bought in the game and used by players for about 5–10$ each, and they were also used in a music video which was revealed before the finals match.

Why it’s Cool?

• This was the first time a luxury clothing brand collaborated with a gaming company, and they have since inspired many others.
• Louis Vuitton did not have much to gain from this collaboration, since the game is free to play, and the clothing they sold from this collection was at minimum at 1 610$, and at most 5 650$ for a leather jacket from the LVXLOL collection.
• The designed costumes will forever be part of the game and are considered some of the best purchases a player can make inside of it.
• The collaboration also allows both companies to discover areas in which they could not have operated without the collaboration, like the digital items for Louis Vuitton for example.

Why it has future growth potential?

This article talks about one collaboration between two brands, but the luxury market and video game market are big enough to have these collaborations become more and more trendy and common, and not one-time things, the same way Fortnite is hosting virtual concerts in the game with visuals that would otherwise be impossible to achieve in a physical world. Since this collaboration in 2019, many other fashion companies have collaborated with video game related organizations, like Gucci who got an Esports team (Fnatic) to model some of their watches and winter collection as a marketing collab.