Square Enix announced this week that it is partnering with Xavel Media Group to form the company "Style Walker". The aim of this new company is, essentially, to sell clothes to women.
Xavel's game is to advertise its e-commerce site, "Girlswalker" (http://www.girlswalker.com) on every e-mail magazine it distributes. The idea is that readers will click on the link in the e-mag and browse Xavel's online shop. And apparently it works, because the company posted sales of $21 million last year.
In this new joint venture, Xavel will be making use of the "Avatar Engine", developed by Square Enix, to pipe advertisements into people's mobile phones. They plan to target female mobile users ages 20-34, and aim to have 50,000 registered users of Style Walker's SNS (Social Networking Service) by the end of their first year.
The basic idea is that the Avatar Engine will display ads for Xavel's partner's fashion brands while they are using Style Walker's SNS service. Registraion will be free, and the service will offer not only shopping, but an online community.
Quite interesting. Gamer girls will be all over this. Hopefully it'll also bring a few more hotties into the fold.
They're not really going for the gamer girls specifically. One look at their girlswalker site can tell you that. They've got mostly brandname stuff, and one site I read whilst researching Xavel mentioned highend brands like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Hermes.
I'd say they're looking for young adult, professional women if I had to guess. Not that some of them don't play games, though. But I don't think gamers specifically are high on their list or targets.
As I said on MSN a couple hours ago, this is truly bizarre. I hope Square know what they're doing.
The way I see it, it's nothing more than some sorta side-project, where a few experienced people from Square cooperate with a few marketing dudes from the other company. I'm pretty sure those experienced people played a part in Before Crisis, or whatever other mobile stuff SE's done so far.
It's like Microsoft peeps working for Google, I guess. Shared expertise. Not really uncommon in the business / software world, as far as I know.
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