In China, Tommy Hilfiger is faced with aging brand image and declining brand awareness. Coupled with the pandemic lockdown, brand sales in China were grim.

In 2022, TH launched a new design collection – Tommy Hilfiger Monogram Collection. With this launch, they hoped to increase brand awareness/build brand equity and attract more consumers - particularly aiming to increase sales conversion among a younger generation.

However, the challenges we face in China are enormous. The market is cluttered with competitors, with staggering investment levels, while the attention of young consumers is increasingly fragmented. How can we overcome this challenge with a small budget and declining brand market share?

We needed to reintroduce TH for this younger generation in a way that broke through the clutter and swept away fashion cliches, so that our target audience couldn’t help but take notice.

In May 2022, Alibaba, the Chinese tech & e-commerce giant, unveiled the first “user-customised” (based on 21k internet users voted-for preferences) VI “Noah”. He was hugely popular and amassed over 400,000 followers on China’s largest microblogging site ‘Weibo’. Noah fits the TH band perfectly, both in terms of image and platform attributes, so we approached Alibaba to enlist him as the brand’s newest "future experience officer.”

As the future experience officer, Noah wore the new collection in the TH metaverse space for the opening of NY fashion week and conducted publicity events and interaction for TH on social media.

But we wanted to go even further, other brands were already debuting VIs in their campaigns – so how could Noah go beyond what was already becoming a norm in the region? We would let his fans get closer than ever.

Although there is considerable cooperation among virtual characters and virtual assets, brands have been unable to use virtual assets to build a complete link with real-time interaction. This is because available advanced technology hasn’t been fully applied to marketing practices.

The use of virtual idols is still just on a visual level only. Real-time interaction is difficult to achieve and creates an unfortunate "blind spot" in the communication chain. But all this was about to change.

After extensive planning and negotiations with Alibaba, on the day of the TH new collection launch in China, Noah conducted an interactive livestream in TH's e-commerce channel virtual pop-up store. In this livestream, we overcame the technical hurdles and Noah become the first ever metahuman influencer to appear in a livestream with real people. This brought him closer to fans that ever before, while simultaneously closing the purchase loop and ensuring great sales results.

Tiktok: Noah is featured in the tiktok feeds for the New York Fashion Show, bringing 5.35M impression to the fashion show, over 64K audience engagement in this video (3 hours on the debut day）

Livestream in Tmall: Pioneered the first instance of live-streaming ultra-realistic digital idols interacting with real people in virtual space getting 670k impression within one hour, No.1 on the hourly top list of menswear brands.

Tommy Hilfiger E-commerce flagship store

• Sales in the live-streaming room increased by 288% on the day of the virtual-person live-streaming event compared to the average day.

• More than 720% sales growth on Big Day.

Tommy Hilfiger E-commerce consumer base

• Membership increases 661%

• The number of core consumers increased by 3 million, an increase of more than 300%