J. Crew launches virtual beach house storefront for 40th anniversary

In a brown shingled beach house tucked behind stalks of reed grass, J. Crew customers encounter a new shopping experience. 

Just beyond a set of wood steps and a wraparound porch, shoppers can explore a series of white-paneled rooms, a boathouse and a secret lighthouse that highlight the brand’s history and some of its most popular apparel. 

Inside the rooms, shoppers can browse barn jackets, rollneck sweaters and rugby shirts. Outside on the porch, bathing suits are displayed on a clothesline.

While customers can select and purchase items as they would in any J. Crew store, the beach house comes with one key difference: It’s entirely virtual. 

To mark J. Crew’s 40th anniversary, the brand is launching its first immersive shopping experience Friday with e-commerce platform Obsess, which creates 3D, virtual stores for retailers that customers can access from their phones or laptops. 

Derek Yarbrough, the chief marketing officer of J. Crew and Madewell, told CNBC the company is planning a series of events to celebrate the brand’s anniversary. But they tend to be in places such as New York and Los Angeles, which limits the number of people who can attend, he said.

“With Obsess, we were really looking to have an exciting activation that we could execute for a larger audience and reach more of the people who love the brand in a bigger way,” Yarbrough said in an interview. “We really wanted this to be a passport to explore the world of J. Crew … and as the team brainstormed on it, it was a little bit of a no-brainer to take the form of a beach house.” 

Obsess was launched in 2017 by its CEO, Neha Singh, a former Google software engineer. It aims to transform traditional online shopping into something more immersive, so shoppers remain engaged rather than lose interest as they endlessly scroll for their next purchase. 

In Obsess’ virtual storefronts, customers can create their own avatars. Depending on the retailer, they can also play games that can unlock more content, promotions or other bonuses that keep them in the virtual stores for longer, the company said. 

“What our platform does is it enables brands to create that much richer and more immersive digital experience that borrows the interface from gaming,” said Singh. “Today, the experience is so generic. Other than font and color, there’s really no differentiation between brands’ digital presence, but their physical retail presence is so different. So how can we bring some of those elements into online?”

Many retailers saw the metaverse, a virtual world that offered another possible platform to sell products, as the hot new technology throughout last year. Many of those same companies have now largely forgotten it, as strides in artificial intelligence have surged to the top of business leaders’ minds a year later.

While the metaverse may be dead — for now — virtual…