For a lot of companies, establishing a footprint in the metaverse is an enigma. Who to talk to, where to start—it all can seem like a giant web of confusion. Terms like “web3” and “digital world” might be met with a blank stare. But in the near future, metaverse adoption will be much more common than we think.

Justin Hochberg, chief executive officer of Virtual Brand Group — a company that works with global intellectual properties, brands, rights holders and personalities to help bridge the gap to the metaverse — believes that the future is now.

“People are using the metaverse to discover brands first,” Hochberg said. “Forty-seven percent of Gen Z say they will first discover a brand in the metaverse before the real world, which is to say, if you are not there now or next year, somebody else will be and will replace you.”

If that sounds like an aggressive assertion, it is. Hochberg and Virtual Brand Group are all-in on the metaverse and the opportunity it represents. ““Twenty-five years ago, no one knew what to do with the Internet,” Hochberg said. “Fifteen years ago, no one knew what to do with social media. Today, many perceive the metaverse as early, but 470 million people play, use, and spend there monthly.”

Read more: Don Anderson’s Quest to Ensure the Metaverse Isn’t Dominated by the West

Virtual Brand Group has positioned itself as the space between brands and the metaverse, but unlike an agency, the company is involved in helping its clients strategize, build and operate their projects. “We are on the ground floor of knowing what works on each platform and what the current trends are,” Hochberg said. “I’m seeing day-to-day, minute-to-minute real-time data, which you can’t unless you’re an operator.”

Think it’s another big assertion? Hochberg and VBG have real case studies to back up their claims.

“Last December, on the one year anniversary of Forever 21 being in the metaverse, we took our top-selling Roblox items — led by the ubiquitous black beanie that has sold millions of units — and created a line of real-world clothing based upon that,” Hochberg said. “Black beanies, pink beanies, t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies. That existed in the metaverse and existed physically in the stores.”

Like he said, bridging the gap.

“We took those items and had them designed in Roblox by the community so they were user-generated content (UGC),” Hochberg said. “Because we were iterating in the metaverse, there were no carbon emissions. There was no supply chain, there were no dyes used, there was no shipping, and there was no fabric that didn’t work. It was sustainable. We were also able to test and tweak until we came up with a product we knew was a high volume seller, so the guesswork that comes out of trend fashion — or any fashion — was removed.”

He continues, “it’s never 100 percent — because the only way I know it’s going to work is if you buy it — but we were able to have a better guess and a better set of data than we could have any other way. We created a very simple story because we showed ‘here’s the virtual version and here’s the physical version,’ and people could understand that we were solving a real problem.”

For most companies, that problem is how to get started in the metaverse. A large part of what  VBG is doing is allowing companies to begin blurring lines between the digital and the physical and creating an enjoyable experience around it.

“We also made it fun,” Hochberg said. “Don’t forget, you need to delight the consumer. We ended up doing these ad campaigns where you saw the virtual character and the real character together laughing during a photo shoot. It looked like they were part of the same thing, and that was very successful for us.”

The overall umbrella under which everything Hochberg is talking about pertains to a new age of digital prototyping. The metaverse presents an opportunity for brands to — with the help of their communities — innovate and test out products virtually at a fraction of the time and cost it would take in the real world.

While Hochberg’s team was busy converting top-selling Forever 21 Roblox items into real-world clothing, they were also at work designing a new set of holiday items — crazy, over-the-top masks and hoods. “We launched them as a limited edition collection, and we did that to test what we would do for next season,” Hochberg said. “It’s an infinite innovation loop, where you’re constantly testing to put out virtual to physical to see what sticks.”

Ultimately, it’s the brands ability to interact and iterate with their community in the metaverse that makes entering it such a vital tool and experience for their future success. By being able to get real feedback from real people who are passionate about a specific brand you eliminate a lot of the traditional marketing guesswork.

“What used to happen was all top down,” Hochberg said. “A bunch of people would sit at the top and go, ‘What do we think these people want?’ and conduct a bunch of research. What’s exciting about what VBG is doing in the creator economy is that you’ll start to see a purely [user-generated content], bottom up approach from the community through our entire system.”

That’s a secret to UGC, he said, “allowing people to show off what they create, and creating a marketplace where the rest of the community can—on their own—judge and decide for themselves what the trends are.”

Another example of how VBG is helping bridge the gap between the digital and the physical realms is its client the TV show The Voice that’s shown in one-hundred and eighty countries.

“We really have a devoted group of loyal consumers — who, in the era of declining TV — still tune in every week,” Hochberg said. “Last November, we launched The Voice in Decentraland’s Metaverse Music Festival. The festival had over one-hundred and seventy [musicians] — from Ozzy Ozbourne to Björk — and we were the only TV show in it.”

VBG allowed Decentraland users to meet the coach avatars of Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani, John Legend and Camilla Cabello and to take a selfie in the big red chair. They could also apply to be on the show, he said. “It was the first time NBC had ever done a metaverse activation and it was wildly successful,” he said. “I’m not ready to announce anything, but when something is that successful, it typically leads to something next.”

That “something next” could be anyone’s guess, but VBG’s presence in the metaverse is helping brands present themselves in a different light, apart from how they’ve come to be known in the real world by creating a new virtual identity.

“One of the things VBG has become known for is its ability to redefine the way a brand thinks of itself,” Hochberg said. “Take Forever 21. There was an article written last December, which was our 12 month anniversary [in the metaverse], and it said Forever 21 was one of the top 10 fashion brands in the metaverse. Not bad for twelve months of work, but here’s what’s important. The other brands were the likes of Balenciaga, Prada, Gucci, Polo, Nike, Adidas. In the physical world, Forever 21 – -despite all of its success — is never in the ultra luxury box with Balenciaga and is never in the hyper-marketing performance box with Nike.”

He continues, “through our efforts in eleven and a half months, we were able to create a persona for Forever 21 in the metaverse. That’s not to say it’s better or worse than their physical world persona, but in the metaverse under VBG, brands have the opportunity to be whoever they want to be in whatever category they want to be. We can help push them into adjacent or far away spaces that embody a brand’s specific DNA. When it costs the same amount of time and money to make a racecar as it does a t-shirt in the metaverse, you can be anything you want.”

The ability to “be anything you want” as a brand enables companies to take more chances, and allows people to start thinking about your brand in a different way. “The metaverse is basically the best new-product development system that’s ever been invented,” Hochberg said.