Walmart Realm aims to break Gen Z market

Having earned its chops by successfully creating virtual worlds for retail companies like L’Occitane and Bloomingdale’s, digital design firm Emperia was onboarded by Walmart to carry the vision through to completion. Whether or not the project will succeed, however, remains to be seen.

To start off on a decent footing, Walmart was keen to ratify that Walmart Realm is categorically not a metaverse retail shop, recognising how passé the metaverse has become. It may have all the trappings of one, but it is billed as a standalone website for young people to invest time and cash – without needing a VR kit or legless avatar to do so.

Given how quickly commercial and consumer interest in the metaverse slumped, it’s surprising that Walmart sees virtual shopping as such a major opportunity in 2024. It claims, however, that data from its previous Gen Z-geared offerings spurred the decision and not a random hunch.

Following a third-time lucky collab with Roblox, after its previous two projects were shut down for alleged ‘stealth marketing’ to kids, Walmart launched ‘Walmart Discovered’ on the game in September 2023.

The immersive shop and play experience remains the top-rated brand integration on the platform with peak-time at nine-minutes per user and 21 million visits (as of March). Compiling data and insights from this primarily young audience, Walmart strongly believes its own virtual storefront could thrive and be a Gen Z hit.

Any chance of that coming to fruition will, as already alluded, rely heavily on Walmart distancing itself from the outdated and uncool label of metaverse, which will not be easy given the obvious parallels. Look at how Decentraland and Sandbox have already fallen off.

Either way, given Walmart’s incredible financial muscle, it can – quite literally – afford to try its hand at breaking into emerging markets without risking profit catastrophe.

It has previously spoken of a trial-and-error mantra to fully break into Gen Z. I guess we’ll see whether Walmart Realm can avoid the scrap heap soon enough.