The funding strengthens DREST’s position as the premier fashion gaming experience and enables the business to maintain its promising trajectory.
In order to continue the development of its new product offering, DREST Game 2.0, the mobile gaming company DREST, which makes the frequently exclusive worlds of luxury fashion, beauty, and lifestyle accessible to everyone, everywhere, has announced that it has raised £15 million in funding.
The funding strengthens DREST’s position as the premier fashion gaming experience and enables the business to maintain its promising trajectory.
Breitling, Cartier, Christian Louboutin, Fendi, Gucci, Prada, and Valentino are just a few of the over 260 brands that DREST directly partners with since its launch in 2019. The company has also raised £30 million and seen a 250% increase in users year over year.
The investment comes at a time when mobile gaming revenues, which made up 50% of the $184.4 billion global gaming market revenues in 2022, reached $92.2 billion. By 2025, the value of the global gaming market is predicted to reach $221 billion.
DREST gives players the chance to showcase and hone their styling skills by using the most recent luxury fashion and beauty collections to style hyper-realistic avatars. It does this by fusing the creative worlds of luxury fashion, beauty, and lifestyle with the limitless metaverse possibilities.
With the digital fashion selection provided by FARFETCH as well as brands directly, DREST is a platform for user-generated content through its in-game challenges. This enables players to easily discover, style, and shop the newest collections.
In order to give its stakeholders access to new and highly engaged audiences, DREST combines gamification with brand marketing and partnership opportunities.
The investment round was agreed upon with Graham Edwards, co-founder and co-chair of DREST, and his family office. With fellow founder and co-chair Lucy Yeomans, who was formerly the global content director for NET-A-PORTER and the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar UK for 12 years, Mr. Edwards recognised the potential of DREST from the beginning.
In his role as DREST’s co-chair, Mr. Edwards brings a wealth of knowledge and experience from the investment and technology sectors, as well as a keen sense of commercial strategy, to help the organisation grow and go global.
Graham Edwards said: “We’re delighted to be able to support Lucy in her quest to bring the merged worlds of gaming and fashion to an excitingly large global audience.”
Lisa Bridgett, CEO DREST says: “We are thrilled to have secured investment to help us scale DREST, especially in such a tough market. This is testament to the strength of our product delivery and pipeline of ideas. We are now ready to take the business of DREST to the next level, and offer a new one-of-a-kind experience to our users while maintaining the core elements of the game. There is an undeniable interest in gaming from the luxury fashion and lifestyle industries and we are very well positioned to cater to this increasing demand. We very much look forward to the next chapter.”
The company is getting ready to launch a significantly enhanced, metaverse-enabled version of its current product, which will include a number of new features, with the goal of becoming the top creative platform for fashion, entertainment, and lifestyle gamification. This capital will enable DREST’s evolution across gaming, media, data, and e-commerce.
In addition, there are plans to expand on the platform’s user base growth by scaling DREST through the developer ecosystem, marketing channels, and strategic revenue streams.
Over the course of the next 18 months, research and development will begin on additional games in the web3 and lifestyle genres.
The news comes after Henri Holm, a leader in finance, business development, and digital strategy creation who has worked with privately funded, venture capital-funded, and publicly listed companies, was recently appointed as chief financial officer. Holm is an expert in gaming and web3 technology.