Emperia

Emperia started with a single moment of doubt about the way we shop online. Consulting for Microsoft on a fashion project around 2018, Olga Dogadkina put on a virtual-reality headset for the first time and couldn't shake a question: if a physical boutique is designed to be walked through, why is its online version a flat grid of thumbnails?

A year later she and VR and game-development specialist Simonas Holcmann founded Emperia in London to answer it. The company builds virtual stores — three-dimensional, branded spaces that a customer explores the way they'd wander a flagship on Bond Street, except it loads in a web browser and works on a phone, a laptop or a headset.

The premise is simple to state and hard to build: keep the accessibility and checkout of e-commerce, add the engagement and atmosphere of a game, and give brands the data to see what customers actually do inside the space. That combination is now running for some of the most guarded names in luxury.

Where a conventional online store is a spreadsheet with pictures, an Emperia store is a place. A customer can turn a corner, find a product staged in a scene, and buy it without leaving the environment. Emperia reports that this shift lifts conversion by an average of 73% against traditional websites, and points to an average return on investment near 750% for brands that deploy it — figures the company cites from its own client work.

Online retail is efficient and flat. It is very good at helping a shopper who already knows what they want find it and check out. It is much worse at the things a physical store does well: telling a story, staging a mood, letting discovery happen by accident. For fashion, beauty and luxury — categories built on desire rather than convenience — that flatness is a real cost.

Emperia's answer is to give brands a way to build the missing layer without hiring a game studio. Its no-code, cloud-based platform lets a brand's own team design, deploy and update an immersive store, integrate its existing product catalog and payments, and read analytics on how customers move through the space. The stores are cross-device by default, so there is no download and no headset barrier between a shopper and the experience.

The customers are brands, not consumers — this is B2B software. Emperia has reported roughly 45 clients across fashion, beauty, luxury apparel, sports and art, from Dior and Burberry to Christie's and Getty Images. The end shoppers are those brands' own customers, reached through campaigns, product launches and seasonal activations.

What makes Emperia different from a bespoke agency build is repeatability. A one-off metaverse stunt is expensive and dies after the campaign. Emperia is selling a platform — procedural generation tools and AI-assisted 3D models drive the cost of building environments down, and the same store can be refreshed for the next season instead of rebuilt from scratch. That is the line between a marketing gimmick and retail infrastructure.

Emperia sits in the small, still-forming category of virtual-store platforms, where its most-cited rivals are Obsess and ByondXR. Beyond those direct competitors, it competes against in-house CGI studios and the broader field of AR and experiential commerce vendors — and, more quietly, against inertia, since the default for most brands remains a conventional website.

Its edge is less about rendering and more about the unglamorous parts: getting cinematic environments to load in a browser on a phone, making the tools usable by non-engineers, and tying it all back to conversion data a retail team recognizes. When the wider "metaverse" narrative cooled after 2022, many entrants left. Emperia kept signing luxury clients — a sign it was selling outcomes rather than hype.

In January 2023, Emperia raised a $10M Series A led by San Francisco's Base10 Partners, with participation from Sony Innovation Fund, Daphni, Background Capital, Stanford Capital Partners, Concept Ventures and angel Jay Radia. The round was earmarked to expand the virtual-store management platform into new markets and retail sectors.

Recognition followed the traction. In 2025, both co-founders were named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in the Retail & Ecommerce category. Dogadkina also mentors designers for the British Fashion Council and sits on the Forbes Technology Council.

The rest of the team blends 3D artists, narrative-environment designers and marketers — roughly 50 people in all.