E-sports and Gamers: Fashion’s Lost Multimillion-Dollar Opportunity?

It’s a nine-digit business opportunity in the making, but up until now, the mainstream apparel industry has largely ignored the potential of e-sportswear. That’s the clothing worn by players and teams involved in online gaming, competing in digital games like League of Legends, World of Warcraft and Fortnite online. “Who will be the Off-White of gaming?” Jens Hilgers, one of the founders of ESL, the world’s largest e-sports company, asked at the recent FashionTech conference in Berlin. “The fashion industry is late to this sector. They have tried to put e-sports into a box, but that’s the wrong thing to do.” “It’s a lot like skateboarding was once,” Hilgers explained to WWD later. (He now runs Bitkraft, a Berlin-based venture capital fund focused on the sector and one of his recent investments was in H4X, a specialist clothing brand for gamers.) “It was a subculture people were unfamiliar with. People were saying: ‘What the hell are those kids doing with those boards?’ But skateboarding went from being a small subculture to something really huge, that a lot of other people also wanted a part of.” Hilgers thinks that’s where e-sports is at now. With up to an estimated 800 million players worldwide, 200

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