Olga Dogadkina

Emperia builds virtual stores. Not app-store apps, not headset experiences, not metaverse land parcels, but browser-loaded 3D environments where a shopper can walk through a rendered Dior boutique on a laptop and then buy the bag. The company is nine years younger than the iPhone and has been used by, among others, Dior, Burberry, Bloomingdale's, Tommy Hilfiger, Harrods, Giorgio Armani, Lacoste, Dom Pérignon, Christie's and Getty Images. Olga Dogadkina, thirty-something, Russian-born and London-trained, is the co-founder and CEO.

Emperia's clients, one notices, already have stores. Real ones, in expensive neighborhoods, staffed by trained associates. Dogadkina's proposition is that this is not the argument against a virtual store but the argument for one. If a brand has spent decades building a physical vocabulary - the marble, the lighting, the exact spacing between mannequins - it needs somewhere online that isn't just a product grid to say all of that in.

The other part of the pitch is quieter and more technical: you do not need a headset. Emperia's environments run in a browser, which is a specific and deliberate bet. Around 2018, when the company was founded, the going assumption in immersive tech was that consumers would eventually own VR devices and step into shared virtual worlds. Dogadkina's team built for the world where they do not. That call has aged well.

Emperia is headquartered at 5 Hawley Crescent in Camden, a stretch of London historically associated with music television and now, apparently, with 3D commerce. The company has around fifty employees, raised a $10 million Series A in early 2023, and has been building on Unreal Engine 5 - the same game engine that renders large chunks of contemporary console gaming. That's what a Dior virtual boutique is made of underneath: game-engine geometry, textured with luxury retail.

The strange specific here is the client list. It reads less like a startup's early adopters and more like a Christie's auction catalogue. Emperia has managed to make itself the default vendor for a category most luxury houses did not know they needed until roughly the pandemic, and by the time the metaverse cycle turned cold, it had graduated from "interesting experiment" to "quiet infrastructure." Dogadkina has been running the company through all of it.

In 2017 Dogadkina was consulting for Microsoft on a fashion-related project. Somebody handed her a VR headset. What she was supposed to do, presumably, was write a strategy deck about content and channels. What she did instead was start a company.

Her academic path had already lined the runway. An undergraduate at the University of the Arts London in International Fashion Management, focused on retail, followed by an MSc at the University of Westminster in Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Enterprise Development. Fashion, retail, entrepreneurship - the sequence looks in retrospect like it was set up to converge on exactly one company.

Her parents, she has said in interviews, ran their own businesses in Russia. Father in advertising, mother in real estate. It is not a coincidence that Emperia sells to brands - the advertising side - and builds virtual real estate for them - the property side. She has essentially recombined her parents' businesses into a game engine.

The other founder is Simonas Holcmann, Emperia's CTO. Dogadkina publicly credits him with sharing what she calls "this crazy ride" from the start. In an industry where solo-founder narratives dominate the press, Emperia's org chart has always had two names at the top.

By the time the metaverse cycle peaked in 2022 and Emperia signed a partnership with Tokens.com to offer virtual storefronts to fashion brands, the company had a working thesis, working clients, and a product that did not depend on any specific piece of hardware. When the cycle collapsed, Emperia kept selling stores.