Welcome to Friday, futurists. 

Summer isn’t gone yet, but with the launch of back-to-school sales and tax holidays, we’re starting to smell the Pumpkin Spice. 

Today we’re going to go deep on the back to school relaunch of Walmart Realm. But before we do, make sure to check out this week’s issue of the London Brief for an insightful essay on a culture-meets-commerce outpost in Notting Hill: The Museum of Brands.

Metavarsity Blues: Walmart Realm’s Going Back to School

When Walmart Realm first launched, analysts and social media pundits were quick to dismiss it as "an agency pitch run amok." The don’t-say-it-don’t-say-it (metaverse) investment surprised many due to the proximity of its launch just weeks after Walmart Discovered—its branded Roblox land—debuted IRL Commerce to a Gen Alpha audience.

Our analysis, however, took a more measured approach, recognizing Realm’s potential and its cultural alignment and trend savvy (with a tip of the hat to Cowboy Carter) while also admitting its many challenges. 

This week, Walmart doubled down on its spatial shopping experience by more than doubling its footprint in a campaign for Back To School, centered around the collegiate dorm room experience, while signaling confidence in its strategy to engage Gen Z and younger millennials through immersive environments.

The Web: A Platonic Ideal of Commerce?

Back in May, we noted Realm’s launch roster of impressive content creators. The tie-ins were deep, and featured a wealth of video content from each content creator, who doubled as both a face of new type of shopper and as a creator-representative of the brand. With Realm 2.0, Walmart has traded depth for breadth. Despite the realms themselves shrinking in size, they’ve continued to partner with content creators who reach aggregated millions of subscribers. 

During our livestream event where we reviewed the launch, we were confronted with a fundamental question: Is the traditional web-based eCommerce the Platonic ideal of online shopping? Walmart Realm 2.0 presents us with a curious paradox—it's a space designed to optimize time spent with the brand, replete with gamification elements and aesthetically pleasing environments. Yet, it's inherently limited in providing the critical information shoppers need to make informed purchase decisions.

If so, it makes sense why Walmart Realm has received such criticism. When one challenges ideals, norms, and best-practices they have to both preserve the core and stimulate progress (to quote Jim Collins’ Built to Last).

Each of the eight realms is curated by influencers with followers in the millions, not just across one platform, but on multiple social media channels. As we observed during our livestream, this commitment to partnering with top-tier influencers signals Walmart's serious investment in capturing the Gen Z and younger millennial market. It's not just about creating a cool virtual space; it's about leveraging the massive reach and cultural cachet of these digital tastemakers.

Infinite Spatial Paradox (Itty-Bitty Living Space)

However, this influencer star power comes with an intriguing twist. While Walmart Realm 2.0 boasts an increase from three to eight realms, each individual space has been dramatically downsized. Gone are the sprawling, multi-room experiences of the original launch. Instead, we're presented with more compact, easily digestible spaces that cleverly disguise their diminished size as "dorm rooms" - a thematic choice that aligns with their back-to-school focus.

The reduction in space is palpable, with each realm featuring just a single short-form video from its associated influencer. This is in stark contrast to the launch which had numerous videos including GRWM (get ready with me) style content and full-scale product endorsement. This scaled-back approach suggests a shift in Walmart's strategy and potentially lessons learned from the prior Realm incarnation.

Lo-fi, High Weird

What these new realms lack in size, they make up for in eclectic world-building that ranges from the amusingly incongruous to the downright eerie:

1. The Lo-fi Realm: Here, we encounter the only male of the creator bunch: a Resident Assistant (RA) named August who's into lo-fi music. The choice stands out in an otherwise female-creator-centric universe primarily because he was described by project lead Justin Breton in an interview as an “NPC”—in other words, a persona that isn’t backed by a real-world creator.”It's giving me BioShock video game vibes," we remarked during our livestream, hinting at an unintended layer of surrealism.
2. The Royal Realm: In a spatial twist that defies the confines of dorm living, this realm features expansive outdoor areas. The juxtaposition of regal gardens against the backdrop of student living creates a fantastical, if somewhat disjointed, experience.
3. The Serene Retreat: Perhaps the most jarring of the new additions, this realm takes an unexpected turn into the uncanny. "The serene retreat? YOU’RE the treat," we quipped during our exploration, noting the unsettling presence of mannequins and woodland creatures that wouldn't be out of place in a horror game.

The IP-based partnership with Hello Kitty parent brand, Sanrio, hits right on-target with the Gen Z dorm-room demographic. Based on successful Hello Kitty Cafe launches in Las Vegas and Vancouver (and the persistent lines of content creators at each location), a college freshman shopping for dorm life certainly needs more than a little bit of Hello Kitty.

These curious design choices, while unexpected, do serve to make each realm more memorable. They offer a stark contrast to the more polished, but perhaps less distinctive, environments of the original launch. Whether this trade-off between cohesion and quirkiness will resonate with Walmart's target audience remains to be seen.

The Thrill of Not Knowing

After navigating the various realms, we found that the Instax camera was persistent and recurrent throughout. We will make an assumption: this ubiquity isn’t a coincidence or a quirk of Gen Z taste – it's likely an ad unit cleverly disguised as organic content.

In the world of commerce—spatial or otherwise—prime digital real estate comes at a premium. Brands like Fujifilm (Instax's parent company) are likely to see the value of their products front and center in these influencer-curated spaces. The cost and opportunity is justified by the potential reach: millions of eyeballs belonging to a coveted demographic, all in an environment where the line between content and commerce is blissfully blurred.

As with the initial Realm launch, pricing runs the gamut from a $2.99 tube of lipstick to a $499 Dyson bladeless fan; and everything in-between.

Despite the star-studded lineup of creators and the intriguing realm designs, Walmart Realm 2.0 still grapples with the fundamental challenges of spatial commerce. As was the case with our prior analysis, many of the decision factors (ratings and reviews, third party shipping times, mixed-mode shipping, and stock-outs) all require multiple clicks and moving further down the funnel to qualify. As a shopper this is annoying, but in the videogame aesthetic, it’s a forgivable growing pain.

This lack of crucial information at the point of discovery will lead to higher “cart abandonment rates,” suggesting that Realm 2.0 may be more effective as a brand play than a direct conversion tool; but that probably wasn’t the main goal here.

Walmart's Retail Crystal Ball

Walmart Realm 2.0 represents a bold, if somewhat perplexing, step in the evolution of eCommerce. It's a space that prioritizes engagement, star power, and brand immersion over traditional shopping efficiency. While it may not replace the tried-and-true eCommerce website, it offers a glimpse into a future where shopping is as much about the experience and the influencers behind it as it is about the transaction.

This tension between engagement and practicality is at once Realm 2.0's biggest challenge, and its greatest strengths. It's a world where you can play Flappy Bird clones and memory games, but can't easily compare product ratings or shipping times.

What's clear is that Walmart isn't just dipping its toes into the waters of spatial commerce—it's diving in headfirst, influencers in tow. Are consumers eager to rush into the spatial commerce sorority? That remains to be seen. But in a world where attention is currency and experience is king, Walmart's virtual dorm rooms might just be the weirdest, most fascinating development in retail since the invention of the shopping cart.

— Phillip

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P.S. ‘Tis the season! Yes, for Pumpkin Spice (two more weeks!), but also for The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. Before the report drops, get the skinny on how analysts quantify and qualify technology, and how software and technology firms vie for position. Listen to this week’s episode of the podcast for the full breakdown on analyst’s reports on Apple or Spotify.