Animal Crossing: New Horizons was all the craze during lockdown 1.0, the game amassed 26 million sales, making it Nintendo’s second most successful release. This is the fifth instalment of the game that was released for the Nintendo Switch. The appeal of escaping to a deserted island and building a community from the premise of your own home seemed more than exciting to most.
(Nyupenko, 2021)
The Animal Crossing: New Horizons quarantine fever got to FRAKS©, and we couldn’t resist playing the game too. The game itself is very intuitive, so I quickly grasped the basics and was off to build my own deserted island from scratch.
Fashion brands didn’t shy away from an opportunity to jump on the bandwagon and capitalize on the momentum of the game either. Sandy Liang, a New-York based fashion designer pioneered this movement by hosting her own pop-up shop in Animal Crossing. GCDS, Valentino, and Marc Jacobs were the next to release digital versions of their designs that players could purchase within the game and dress up their characters into. This collaboration allowed players to experience the brand’s lookbooks on their characters and brands to gain more recognition as well as increase brand awareness through a playful approach.
‘Adapt or die’ became the key approach for many brands over the pandemic, which lead to the exploration of new, more creative promotional strategies and expanded the classic promotional mix beyond its existing limit. At FRAKS© we believe that innovation, creativity, and disruption are the key concepts that fashion brands have to adopt in order to reach their maximum potential.