Agency Announces New Key Hires And Debuts World Building Capabilities
By Godson Umejiego, Senior Correspondent, USA
Fresh out of stealth, Journey, announces the launch of its Metaverse Studio and the opening of virtual offices in the Core Metaverse, Decentraland, The Sandbox, Roblox, Fortnite Creative, RecRoom, and VR Chat. To celebrate, the company, alongside Nasdaq, rang the opening bell in the metaverse for the first time.
Together at Nasdaq, Journey CEO, Andrew Zimmerman and Journey Co-Founder and Chief Metaverse Officer, Cathy Hackl, rang the Opening Bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square and simultaneously in the metaverse, in a virtual version built by Journey on the Core Metaverse platform. Journey was joined by some of its Metaverse Studio clients and industry partners who helped them to celebrate this historic moment.
The Metaverse Studio is led by Journey’s co-founder and Chief Metaverse Officer, Cathy Hackl. The studio works with global brands on everything from education, strategy, and roadmap creation, all the way to implementation and execution. The Studio provides companies with world building services for experiences in many gaming platforms, as well as strategic advisory for the creation and implementation of Web3 and metaverse strategies and roadmaps. The studio’s main goal is to help brands and organizations make sense of the metaverse and Web3 beyond just the hype.
“Journey’s Metaverse Studio is born from the need for brands to understand, enter and create long term strategies for Web3 and the metaverse,” said Hackl. “We work with our global partners to build solutions including virtual worlds and experiences in the metaverse, bespoke NFTs, and virtual fashion collections. We help our clients to build the future, create successful strategies and meet fans and customers where they are now and where they are heading.”
Journey’s new studio has hired some of the industry’s top leaders to help lead the virtual world building, metaverse and Web3 strategy, and market research initiatives. Some of the visionaries that have joined the studio include:
Sasha Wallinger, formerly Superplastic’s CMO and ex Nike, H&M, SOREL
Lee Kebler, formerly at Nike, Intel, and will.i.am’s former CTO
Lily Snyder, editor of The Augmented Workforce and former COO of Doghead Simulations
The Studio team is composed of skilled developers, strategists, creatives, and futurists, who have pioneered this new emerging space for many years already. The Studio already works with global brands like Clinique and with organizations like the Orlando Economic Partnership, to name a few.
Through providing education, bespoke events, from IRL to URL, and seamless integrations of people, places and things across the virtual, digital and physical, the Journey Metaverse Studio de-mystifies Web3 ecosystems, builds brand-centric virtual approaches, that meet audiences where they are and creates best-in-class Metaverse World-building solutions to ensure launch strategies that help brands stay two steps ahead of their consumers’ expectations.
“Journey is harnessing best practices from physical experience design, conversational AI and metaverse/web 3.0 capabilities to meet audiences where they are going with seamless integration. We will do this by helping our clients understand how to unleash the power of their brands in the metaverse, build best-in-class voice programs and choreograph the physical to digital interplay in connected environments where they live, work, learn and play,” added CEO of Journey, Andy Zimmerman
