Hot Topic launches metaverse Halloween collection on Roblox

This week, popular clothes and accessories retailer Hot Topic launched a Halloween-themed line of digital collectibles on Roblox. It’s the first metaverse activation for the company, which operates 800 Hot Topic and BoxLunch stores, as well as related e-commerce platforms.

“Halloween is a year-round lifestyle for many Hot Topic employees and customers, and with this initiative launching in the Halloween seasonal window it was a no-brainer that our best foot forward in Roblox would be a Halloween capsule drop,” Andrea Lewis, vice president of marketing for Hot Topic, told us.

Earlier this year, the company partnered with web3 animation studio Toonstar to help develop animated content linked with digital collectibles. For the current Halloween campaign, the retailer drafted Super League Gaming to support the virtual 3D experience within Roblox.

Dig deeper: What’s hot in the metaverse for consumers?

Virtual collection. The “Halloween Forever Collection” is a series of avatar offerings and virtual extensions of real-life clothing items. The capsule’s digital items include cosplay hats, sunglasses and mini-backpacks, among other designs.

To help make the collectibles’ designs, and the virtual experience of collecting them, up to the high standards of Roblox users, they also recruited high-profile Roblox designers — among them, @Junozy, @StrapCode, @MatthewDelRey, and @0929lego.

Roblox experiences. These Hot Topic exclusive designs are available in the Roblox Avatar Shop. Additionally, they are made available at the Hot Topic Pop-up Shop that can be reached through three popular games in the Roblox ecosphere.

The three games where the Pop-up Shop appears are The Floor is Lava!, Catalog Outfit Creator! and Speed Run 4.

Dig Deeper: What does the metaverse mean to consumers and marketers?

Metrics. The three games with Hot Topic’s virtual swag have accumulated nearly 3 billion visits.

How does this translate into exposure for the company? In the first three days of the campaign, the Hot Topic Pop-up Shop has reached more than 900,000 players. And the content engagement time with the brand in these games has totaled more than 1.2 years of playtime.

“Partnering with Super League Gaming really helped us determine the best games to feature in our Hot Topic Pop-Up Shops, based on a mix of impressions, userbase and styling experiences,” said Lewis.

Why we care. Digital collectibles provide a deep level of engagement for a brand’s biggest fans, if those consumers happen also to play in virtual environments like Roblox. So, for marketers who haven’t taken the leap into the metaverse, it’s worth seeing where your brand audience overlaps with the user base of the platform.

In the case of Walmart, reaching the 17-24 demo on Roblox was a no-brainer. This Hot Topic activation is a good example of how a brand doesn’t have to build an entire territory from scratch in Roblox with their own games. Instead, they can place a pop-up within established Roblox games and see where it goes from there.

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.