How Drest relaunched on Unity to merge fashion with gaming

To mark International Women's Day we reached out to the games industry to secure a snapshot of the women working in across games today. We're highlighting the work they do and get their tips on how to break into the sector.

In this interview we speak to Drest founder and co-CEO Lucy Yeomans about her career in fashion, starting her own fashion gaming company, and offers advice for women in a male-dominated industry.

PocketGamer.biz: Could you tell us a bit about how you got started?

Lucy Yeomans: I was the editor of Harper’s Bazaar UK for 12 years before moving to Net-a-Porter at a time where luxury e-commerce was just starting to accelerate.

There, I launched the company’s weekly digital magazine and soon after, Porter, a print magazine under the Net-a-Porter umbrella, that very quickly became highly successful in the media landscape.

I was always very interested in the way people consumed news and was excited by Net-a-Porter’s vast audience. I became fascinated with gaming after receiving an invitation to play Farmville, which I found compelling despite my lack of interest in the subject matter.

I started to play other games and started noticing the similarities between gaming and fashion: both are about storytelling and going on a journey; they’re also highly competitive and have very passionate audiences.

And it got me thinking… What if one could create a game about luxury fashion? A game where people who love the fashion world could interact with and learn about real brands and designers – a fashion playground that enables everyone, everywhere to feel like they are a part of this wonderful world and part of an exciting community.

This is how the idea for Drest came about. 

Why did you decide to target the fashion gaming space? What makes your approach unique?

There is a big audience out there that I believe is currently underserved. Out of three billion gamers globally, almost 50% are women. However, when you look at the top 10 mobile games in the App Store, you don’t see a fashion game.

While I was at Net-a-Porter, I could see that the way audiences interacted with content was changing. People did not just want to be told what is “in fashion” by journalists or influencers, they wanted to have and share their own opinions and to feel truly included.

Social media accelerated that transition by allowing anyone to have access to content, and create their own, but you still needed to look a certain way or have access to products or events, which made it less democratic. The interactivity of gaming enables the ability for all to get involved to go a step further. It turns users from passive observers to active participants.

Our approach at Drest is unique as we are a business that merges gaming, luxury fashion and publishing. This starts from the very top – my co-CEO Daniel Svärd was the GM of Candy Crush Saga for several years – and is also evident in our wider teams.

We have people with strong gaming backgrounds, while others come from luxury fashion, but all are united in delivering this fused “fashion meets gaming” vision. This means we understand both worlds deeply and fold the strategic goals of both into our product development.

This ensures that all our brand partners, be it Gucci or Valentino, Jimmy Choo or Christian Louboutin, trust that when they are activating within the game, the results they will get are of exceptional quality.

Another unique aspect of our game is the ‘Real-Virtual-Real’ concept Drest is based on. In the game, everything comes from the real world: our challenges are based on real fashion and lifestyle news.

This means you could be asked to style your avatar to hit the Oscars red carpet or to sit front row at New York Fashion Week in new-season Michael Kors, always using the latest products from over 260 real luxury brands. We then spin all these elements up to create a beautiful environment where we invite people to discover, create and experiment with fashion.

The last “real” is very important as it means our players have the ability to discover a product they love, develop brand affinity or perhaps even purchase an item they played with virtually, back in the real world.

A lucky few even get to win real life prizes from the brands through special partnerships and collaborations. 

How has the journey been for Drest from founding the company to now? What have been the biggest challenges you've faced?

The journey has come with exhilarating success stories, huge learnings and, as is to be expected, a fair number of challenges.

After successfully launching the game in 2019 – and introducing some fantastic partnerships with brands such as Gucci, NARS, Prada and Cartier – we realised that our back-end platform would not allow us to truly scale the product in line with our ambitions.

We took the difficult – but necessary – decision to replatform Drest with Unity which meant having to scale down our marketing and partnerships for a substantial period of time.

This was challenging as we just had started building a solid user base, and a name within the market. I’m grateful for the unwavering support of my investor, as this would not have been possible without another funding round that we secured in 2023, and of course, without the whole team’s dedication to run simultaneously two products – one that was going to sunset and a brand new one that was in development.

It was, however, an exciting time, as we had the opportunity to build the new product as we really wanted it, introduce new features and gameplay mechanics that we strongly believed our players, and brand partners, would love. 

How many staff do you employ at Drest?

We currently employ about 60 people. Our team is extremely diverse in all aspects, it is a melting pot of professionals coming from different countries, backgrounds and industries.

We have gaming and fashion industry experts that have to co-exist and work together. I’m always amazed when I see an engineer in a meeting with a fashion stylist and a UX designer, managing to speak the same language. Not only are they experts in their areas but they learn from each other, acquiring new skills that they would probably never have had in another setting. 

From the get go, I wanted to build a company that was open to everyone, as long as they are passionate about their field. Today I am proud that 57% of our executive leadership team is made up of brilliant and successful women who lead our product, marketing and people functions.

These are numbers that are difficult to achieve and maintain, as we know that in tech and gaming – and sadly even in fashion – most leadership positions are still held by men.

You relaunched the game after a six-month hiatus last year. Why did you do this and what changes did you make?

We felt it was necessary to replatform Drest with Unity to be able to really unlock the potential of the game, level up our features and offer more opportunities to our brand partners to reach highly engaged audiences.

We relaunched last November and one of our biggest changes is that we are now available globally both on iOS and Android. The previous version was only available on iOS.

We introduced a new mission statement which is “Exclusive for All”. We want to open up the worlds of luxury fashion, beauty and lifestyle to everyone, everywhere.

To do this, we introduced a series of new gameplay features – such as Narrative Quests and VIP Events – that allow for deeper storytelling and meaningful ways for players to enter the world of fashion and feel that they are coming up close with the brands they love.

These features are based on experiences I had when I was an editor, when brands would organise exclusive press trips all around the world for journalists and their top clients. You would come back from these events and feel so close to the brand, and so knowledgeable about the product.

This is what we are replicating in-game, all these elements that make you feel like a real fashion VIP. This is a fantastic opportunity for our brand partners. They spend huge budgets putting these experiences together for only a very small group of people, but Drest allows them to expose these to a much larger, and hyper-engaged audience.

The game also has a brand new look-and-feel, with a home feed that is inspired by digital magazines; a brand new line-up of model avatars who each come in different body sizes; weekly leaderboards to boost our players competitiveness and a constantly growing roster of luxury brand partners.

How has the relaunch gone?

The relaunch was very successful. We decided the relaunch campaign would initially be B2B, making sure the luxury fashion industry was aware of our new product proposition and all its capabilities.

We operate in a much more competitive market than when we first started, so we wanted to make sure our brand partners understand what we offer, and what makes us different from others.

For our launch we partnered with iconic Italian luxury brand Versace, with British heritage brand Manolo Blahnik – famous for appearing hundreds of times in Sex & The City – and with the biggest red carpet event of the fashion industry, The Fashion Awards, on Quests and a VIP Event.

Players got the opportunity to engage with these brands and their products up close, spending hours completing challenges and creating looks.

We were able to report that more than 1.5 million Versace items and over four million Manolo Blahnik shoes were tried-on in-game during the respective campaign periods. Some players won real-life prizes such as a Versace bag or tickets to attend The Fashion Awards and walk the red carpet next to Rihanna and ASAP Rocky. 

What are your plans for the future of the game and the company?

Mobile games evolve rapidly – much faster than other apps – and Drest is no exception. Every couple of weeks we improve the user experience and expand our offering, from new game features to new brands added to our ever expanding catalogue.

2025 will be a year that sees the product develop dramatically, with a particular focus on social features and growing our community.  As the business grows, so does our team.

Just this week we onboarded our new VP of Brand Partnerships, Alex Holder, who joined Drest to drive the global commercial strategy in order to attract additional revenue streams. Alex joined from data and insights platform GEEIQ and has a wealth of knowledge and experience in the gaming, tech and fashion space.

As we cement our positioning as the trusted gaming partner of the luxury fashion industry, we also look at expanding further into beauty and travel, which are both areas of huge interest for our users.

While there has been some progress, the games industry does still remain male dominated, especially at a more executive level and among leadership roles. What advice do you have for women looking to work their way into leadership positions in the industry? Also, what advice do you have for those looking to start their own company? 

Gaming is similar to fashion in that respect. In fashion, even though women make up about 80% of the workforce, only 25% of executives and C-suite positions are held by women. There is no magic formula on how to succeed as a woman in a male-dominated industry.

My advice is first and foremost to be determined, resilient and knowledgeable. Don’t wait for anyone to offer you a seat at the table. Build the seat yourself if you have too – or build a new table!

Know your business inside out and get rid of your imposter syndrome. We’ve all been in situations – myself included – where we felt we didn’t belong. That’s normal. The important thing to know is how to address that, and get rid of that feeling.

Be aware of your own limits and shortcomings and make sure you build a team around you that understands your vision, complements your skills and is able to challenge you in order to get the best out of you.

And finally, build a community around you. I’ve learned so much from fellow female entrepreneurs and founders. We share the same excitement, issues and problems and it’s wonderful to have a peer group to rely on.