THE SIMS & CLOTHES & PRODUCT PLACEMENT ....BLOGGED BY jOYCE Schwarz @www.hollywood2020.blogs.com. Anyone that knows me knows that I've been talking about 'dressing-up' avatars for years, it seems.
In fact a couple of years ago when I was working as a consultant for eco-luxury designer Linda Loudermilk,(www.lindaloudermilk.com) I even got into a bit of a discussion at one of her planning meetings with another consultant who was kind of making fun of my idea to product place Linda's amazingly glamourous clothes on avatars in video games! That deal didn't move forward but it should have -- her designs are so forward thinking they deserve to be in the spotlight!
Seems that I was just a year or so too early. According to a recent BUSINESSWEEK.COM article - "This coming winter, video game publisher Electronic Arts (ERTS) and clothing retailer H&M plan to transform the bits and bytes of the digital world into a physical product. While they're going the more traditional route, featuring H&M fashions in recently released Sims software, the companies are also holding an online contest to allow a Sims 2 player to design clothes that might be produced and sold in the real world. "
Facts are according to that report: The Sims franchise, which has sold 85 million copies in 22 languages in its seven-year history has never featured a major brand before; nor has H&M, the Sweden-based designer and retailer, ever appeared in a video game .Steve Lubomski, U.S. advertising manager for H&M, wrote in an e-mail to BusinessWeek that the idea of the partnership is to attract new customers and engage existing buyers in a fresh way. . "We are really more of a lifestyle brand," says Nancy Smith, president of EA’s Sims Div. in San Francisco. As such, the connection with a hot apparel brand seems to make sense.
This blogger was just wondering what happened to the H&M partnership announced last fall and it was buried in the last graph of the BUSINESSWEEK.com story ....Last December, H&M sent a group of stylists to work directly with the Sims team to help design virtual garments and accessories. The Sims 2 H&M Stuff Pack, which allows players to design an H&M store and dress their avatars in H&M clothes, was released in North America earlier this month, and has been a top seller since its release.