Charli Cohen is a fashion designer and entrepreneur who’s been building for the metaverse since 2012. She’s developed digital / physical fashion collaborations for brands such as Pokémon, Ubisoft, and Capcom and created extended reality fashion brand Charli Cohen. She’s currently working on launching digital fashion platform RSTLSS.

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. Let’s start with your childhood. You launched your first fashion brand at 15. How did you make your way into fashion and entrepreneurship at such an early age?

I had a bit of an unconventional childhood in that I sailed from the U.K. to New Zealand with my parents when I was 13. So, I basically spent two years on a boat finding ways to entertain myself while I was at sea. A lot of that was sketching and designing and creating a plan for what I wanted to do when I was on land and had a bit more normality.

By the time I arrived in New Zealand, I was pretty set on wanting to go into fashion. The way that the education system worked in New Zealand meant that I had a lot of free time on my hands because it was very easy compared to in the U.K. So, I decided that the best way to learn the ropes of what it meant to run a fashion business would be to start something and figure it out. I knew that design would be a very small part of the bigger picture. I wanted to learn how to do wholesale, how set up the supply chain, how do marketing, and how to do tax returns. So, I had these strange circumstances that gave me space to do that and try it out.

At 23, you founded Charli Cohen, a technical fashion brand that led to you being featured in Forbes ‘30 Under 30’. What’s technical fashion and what inspired you to launch the brand?

Technical fashion is fashion using technical sports performance fabrics. Since the beginning, I’ve been working with mills that produce for the Olympics teams and military, and using those fabrics and construction techniques for streetwear and fashion. Technical also from the perspective that there’s always been a very digital component to my work. I’ve always been quite involved in world building one way or another. I got into AR and VR quite early, finding ways to link physical garments to digital experiences.

I discovered these interests both in sports performance tech and also in digital world building while I was at university. I got to really explore that though my graduate collection, which garnered a lot of press and attention. So, I used that momentum to launch straight away. It had been my intention to launch a brand at university. It was the perfect set of circumstances to be able to do that.

In 2019, you began partnering with gaming companies to create digital-physical fashion collaborations. How was your first foray into blockchain and NFTs and what excites you most about the technology?

We started working with the gaming industry a little bit before blockchain came into the picture. So, we were working within the walled garden of the traditional gaming industry where we were creating in-game items and skins that were only available within that particular ecosystem.

I fell down the NFT rabbithole as I was trying to find a solution for interoperability. We were doing more and more of these collaborations and that was a real frustration for me. NFTs were a way that I could maybe solve this problem. As I started investigating, I discovered the whole community around NFTs — all these people working and building at the intersection of crypto, culture, and technology. I really felt like I found my home versus the traditional fashion industry where I’d always felt sort of out of place.

I really threw myself into the community and started using the collaborations we had as a proof of concept experiments for dabbling with NFTs, trying to get very traditional companies comfortable with the concept of blockchain and their fan consumer base comfortable with entering that space. We started really looking at how can we handhold people into more a user-friendly version of this space — kind of like a web 2.5. That’s really what we’ve been doing over the last couple of years.

In 2021, you partnered with Pokémon and Yahoo Ryot Lab to create Electric/City, a virtual city where you can shop for physical and digital garments. What inspired this collaboration?

It was once again a fortuitous set of circumstances. We signed the Pokémon license at the end of 2020. And shortly after that, Selfridges approached us about creating a metaverse experience for them. We hadn’t decided exactly what we wanted to do with the Pokémon license other than their celebrating their 25th anniversary so we decided we could make a really big splash by trying it with this major luxury store, which Pokémon loved the idea of as well. Ryot we had worked with earlier in 2020 on a big immersive virtual reality project and we knew that they had the right resources and team for us to build out this metaverse experience that was very consumer-friendly. We brought them in and created something that’s probably my proudest project to date. We built out this whole world in Unreal Engine and created a really easy way for users to be able to navigate around it and buy both physical products and metaverse ready digital products from within Electric City.

You are currently founding a new startup, RSTLSS. What do we have to look forward to?

Through doing all of these projects with Charli Cohen, one of the challenges has been how convoluted the process has been working with all these different stakeholders. You have the license, different game environments, partners, and the physical supply chain. Everything’s been very slow because it has to go through us, back through the licensing, and back to the partners. Within Charli Cohen, I was trying to figure out some kind of platform to streamline the process and that evolved into the idea for RSTLSS.

We can work with IPs to allow their fan bases to customize wearables and then choose a bundle of different metaverse and game environments that they want to export that design into, as well as being able to redeem a physical design. It’s kind of a one stop shop that allows fans to work with their favorite brands and artists to design garments, export renders for all sorts of different worlds, and be able to access a physical versions of the designs too.

On Twitter, you call yourself the “The Ray Donovan of the Metaverse.” What’s the origin of this nickname?

I’ve had a number of quite high profile companies approach me to solve issues that they’re having with integrating with the metaverse, whether it’s that they don’t know where to start or that they have had issues with the crypto community being a bit of the wild west. They seem to be looking to me as someone who can solve those problems for them, hook them up with the right partners, help them with the right strategy, and so on. It just got to a point of ridiculousness in the last couple of weeks and then one of the people that I was working with described me as the Ray Donovan of the metaverse.

What opportunities are you most excited about at the intersection of digital fashion, crypto, and NFTs?

I’m excited about being able to give people real control over their identities in the metaverse. They can have flexibility whether they want to have a consistent identity everywhere or create numerous different identities on different platforms. I’m excited about wearables and cosmetics that enable people to express themselves fully in digital. And then the other piece is wearables and cosmetics are a really great way for artists and designers to monetize and compete with the traditional industry, which has had a lot of barriers to entry both in terms of the actual costs but also network. Wearables give this accesible point of entry to artists and designers that are looking to make a name for themselves.

Rapid Fire:

• Web3 trend to watch this year? Obviously, wearables. Something that I’m betting we’ll see this year is the beauty industry starting to enter the metaverse.

• Project you’re excited about? My most beloved project at the moment is Capsule House, which is with the artist Seerlight. They’ve already done a really impressive of job building game mechanics into their project.

• NFT collection you love? One of the other projects I love is CrypToadz. It was the first major project to be a CCO and to really give the community power over bringing value to the project and they’ve done it in such a nice way. They have such a lovely, open, and welcoming community. The pixel artist behind it, GREMPLIN, is a legend.

• Alter ego in the metaverse? Personally, I’ve been doxxed since day one. Every way that I express myself in the metaverse is an extension of me so far. I’m sure there will come a time where I could explore the anonymous alter ego.

Charli Cohen is a fashion designer and entrepreneur who’s been building for the metaverse since 2012. She’s developed digital / physical fashion collaborations for brands such as Pokémon, Ubisoft, and Capcom and created extended reality fashion brand Charli Cohen. She’s currently working on launching digital fashion platform RSTLSS.

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. Let’s start with your childhood. You launched your first fashion brand at 15. How did you make your way into fashion and entrepreneurship at such an early age?

I had a bit of an unconventional childhood in that I sailed from the U.K. to New Zealand with my parents when I was 13. So, I basically spent two years on a boat finding ways to entertain myself while I was at sea. A lot of that was sketching and designing and creating a plan for what I wanted to do when I was on land and had a bit more normality.

By the time I arrived in New Zealand, I was pretty set on wanting to go into fashion. The way that the education system worked in New Zealand meant that I had a lot of free time on my hands because it was very easy compared to in the U.K. So, I decided that the best way to learn the ropes of what it meant to run a fashion business would be to start something and figure it out. I knew that design would be a very small part of the bigger picture. I wanted to learn how to do wholesale, how set up the supply chain, how do marketing, and how to do tax returns. So, I had these strange circumstances that gave me space to do that and try it out.

At 23, you founded Charli Cohen, a technical fashion brand that led to you being featured in Forbes ‘30 Under 30’. What’s technical fashion and what inspired you to launch the brand?

Technical fashion is fashion using technical sports performance fabrics. Since the beginning, I’ve been working with mills that produce for the Olympics teams and military, and using those fabrics and construction techniques for streetwear and fashion. Technical also from the perspective that there’s always been a very digital component to my work. I’ve always been quite involved in world building one way or another. I got into AR and VR quite early, finding ways to link physical garments to digital experiences.

I discovered these interests both in sports performance tech and also in digital world building while I was at university. I got to really explore that though my graduate collection, which garnered a lot of press and attention. So, I used that momentum to launch straight away. It had been my intention to launch a brand at university. It was the perfect set of circumstances to be able to do that.

In 2019, you began partnering with gaming companies to create digital-physical fashion collaborations. How was your first foray into blockchain and NFTs and what excites you most about the technology?

We started working with the gaming industry a little bit before blockchain came into the picture. So, we were working within the walled garden of the traditional gaming industry where we were creating in-game items and skins that were only available within that particular ecosystem.

I fell down the NFT rabbithole as I was trying to find a solution for interoperability. We were doing more and more of these collaborations and that was a real frustration for me. NFTs were a way that I could maybe solve this problem. As I started investigating, I discovered the whole community around NFTs — all these people working and building at the intersection of crypto, culture, and technology. I really felt like I found my home versus the traditional fashion industry where I’d always felt sort of out of place.

I really threw myself into the community and started using the collaborations we had as a proof of concept experiments for dabbling with NFTs, trying to get very traditional companies comfortable with the concept of blockchain and their fan consumer base comfortable with entering that space. We started really looking at how can we handhold people into more a user-friendly version of this space — kind of like a web 2.5. That’s really what we’ve been doing over the last couple of years.

In 2021, you partnered with Pokémon and Yahoo Ryot Lab to create Electric/City, a virtual city where you can shop for physical and digital garments. What inspired this collaboration?

It was once again a fortuitous set of circumstances. We signed the Pokémon license at the end of 2020. And shortly after that, Selfridges approached us about creating a metaverse experience for them. We hadn’t decided exactly what we wanted to do with the Pokémon license other than their celebrating their 25th anniversary so we decided we could make a really big splash by trying it with this major luxury store, which Pokémon loved the idea of as well. Ryot we had worked with earlier in 2020 on a big immersive virtual reality project and we knew that they had the right resources and team for us to build out this metaverse experience that was very consumer-friendly. We brought them in and created something that’s probably my proudest project to date. We built out this whole world in Unreal Engine and created a really easy way for users to be able to navigate around it and buy both physical products and metaverse ready digital products from within Electric City.

You are currently founding a new startup, RSTLSS. What do we have to look forward to?

Through doing all of these projects with Charli Cohen, one of the challenges has been how convoluted the process has been working with all these different stakeholders. You have the license, different game environments, partners, and the physical supply chain. Everything’s been very slow because it has to go through us, back through the licensing, and back to the partners. Within Charli Cohen, I was trying to figure out some kind of platform to streamline the process and that evolved into the idea for RSTLSS.

We can work with IPs to allow their fan bases to customize wearables and then choose a bundle of different metaverse and game environments that they want to export that design into, as well as being able to redeem a physical design. It’s kind of a one stop shop that allows fans to work with their favorite brands and artists to design garments, export renders for all sorts of different worlds, and be able to access a physical versions of the designs too.

On Twitter, you call yourself the “The Ray Donovan of the Metaverse.” What’s the origin of this nickname?

I’ve had a number of quite high profile companies approach me to solve issues that they’re having with integrating with the metaverse, whether it’s that they don’t know where to start or that they have had issues with the crypto community being a bit of the wild west. They seem to be looking to me as someone who can solve those problems for them, hook them up with the right partners, help them with the right strategy, and so on. It just got to a point of ridiculousness in the last couple of weeks and then one of the people that I was working with described me as the Ray Donovan of the metaverse.

What opportunities are you most excited about at the intersection of digital fashion, crypto, and NFTs?

I’m excited about being able to give people real control over their identities in the metaverse. They can have flexibility whether they want to have a consistent identity everywhere or create numerous different identities on different platforms. I’m excited about wearables and cosmetics that enable people to express themselves fully in digital. And then the other piece is wearables and cosmetics are a really great way for artists and designers to monetize and compete with the traditional industry, which has had a lot of barriers to entry both in terms of the actual costs but also network. Wearables give this accesible point of entry to artists and designers that are looking to make a name for themselves.

Rapid Fire:

• Web3 trend to watch this year? Obviously, wearables. Something that I’m betting we’ll see this year is the beauty industry starting to enter the metaverse.

• Project you’re excited about? My most beloved project at the moment is Capsule House, which is with the artist Seerlight. They’ve already done a really impressive of job building game mechanics into their project.

• NFT collection you love? One of the other projects I love is CrypToadz. It was the first major project to be a CCO and to really give the community power over bringing value to the project and they’ve done it in such a nice way. They have such a lovely, open, and welcoming community. The pixel artist behind it, GREMPLIN, is a legend.

• Alter ego in the metaverse? Personally, I’ve been doxxed since day one. Every way that I express myself in the metaverse is an extension of me so far. I’m sure there will come a time where I could explore the anonymous alter ego.