Ledger Exec Ian Rogers Sees Fashion's Future in the Metaverse
From Apple Music to Web3, the crypto executive Ian Rogers always has his eye on the next big thing.
When Ian Rogers left his role as the chief digital officer of LVMH at the end of 2020 to join the crypto security firm Ledger, it seemed as radical a career shift as his decision to sign on with the largest luxury conglomerate in the world five years prior.
Back then, he had just helped launch Apple Music after building Beats, which the tech giant acquired in 2014. Instead of seeing it grow further, the American moved to Paris. He turned his attention to a very analog industry he knew little about, helping LVMH set a strategy for e-commerce, data management, and digital clienteling.
Rogers is the chief experience officer at Ledger, founded in Paris in 2014 as a hardware wallet for Bitcoin holders— essentially a high-tech thumb drive where users could store their digital cash and protect them from hacks and malware. Today, Ledger boasts that it secures 15 percent of the world’s crypto assets through its enterprise and consumer divisions, and has sold more than 3 million wallets.
But the world of crypto—a blurry concept typically covering digital assets and currencies, and the blockchain databases on which they are built—has more in common with fashion than Rogers imagined just two years ago.
“I’m having dinner with [Givenchy Creative Director] Matthew Williams on Tuesday,” says Rogers on a recent spring afternoon via Zoom in Paris, mentioning an upcoming Ledger project. “We were on with Fendi yesterday; we talk to Kering every day.”
Rogers maintains strong relationships in luxury and fashion, serving on the boards of Lyst and Dr. Martens, and still consulting for LVMH on its digital strategy.
These connections are about more than friendship. Rogers sees an inherent tie between crypto and fashion that will transcend recent headlines. Following the increased focus on all things Web3, many fashion brands have developed Metaverse strategies or released series of NFTs amid the recent surge of interest in crypto. Gucci, for example, collaborated with NFT firm Superplastic to release a series of digital sculptures. And the luxury conglomerates LVMH, Richemont, and Prada partnered to fund a non-profit, Aura, that aims to authenticate luxury products on the blockchain.
“NFTs exist for the same reason that fashion exists—[they] help us belong to one tribe and say, ‘We don’t belong to another,’” Rogers says. If you’re wearing Gucci, that says something about your identity, he explains, much in the way that having a Bored Ape as your profile picture on Twitter or having a David Hammons piece in your personal art collection does, too.
“It doesn’t make any sense to me when someone says, ‘Oh, I understand the craft of making a leather handbag, but I don’t understand the craft of what Matt Kane does with Gazers, which is an incredible art project,’” Rogers says. Kain is a Chicago artist whose Gazers project, a series of 1,000 NFTs inspired by phases of the moon, are programmed to evolve over time, shifting in different ways and at different rates.
“[There’s] zero logical conclusion where a leather bag is craft and what Matt Kain did with Gazers is not craft,” Rogers adds.
If there’s one through line in Rogers's career, it’s his knack for making analogies that help regular people—fashion leaders, in this case—understand how the internet will change culture and think beyond the traditional categories of “physical” and “digital."
Not that everybody has been ready for his message. “In 1998, when I was doing digital music, I said, ‘Well, of course, we’re not going to have these compact discs in the future because we don’t need them.’” Most of the music business, however, was still thinking “We’re gonna sell compact discs forever,” he remembers.
"NFTs exist for the same reason that fashion exists—they help us belong to one tribe."
Rogers was an exemplary computer science student at Indiana University in Bloomington in the early 1990s when the Beastie Boys noticed a fan website he had built. The group hired him to take over their first official website and go on tour with them, a life-changing turn of events for a tattooed skateboarder from a small town in Indiana who became a father at age 17. Rogers saw a future where music was distributed online, and he began uploading live MP3 files from Beastie Boy concerts.
It set him on a path to bring music online that eventually led him to Yahoo Music, Topspin (a service for bands and their managers), and Beats, where he was named CEO of its music streaming service business in 2013. After Apple acquired Beats the following year, he oversaw the launch of Beats’ online radio service before leaving for LVMH in 2015— much to the shock of the music and tech industry watchers.
“I’m much more interested in when it’s early, and it’s all being built,” he says.
At Bernard Arnault’s luxury giant, Rogers says he received an “MBA that’s not available on the market.” He is most proud of his work helping brands like Louis Vuitton and Dior set a strategy for e-commerce—one dominated by sometimes competing interests in direct retail, wholesale and marketplaces. He also launched LVMH’s own multi-brand e-commerce platform, 24S, and advanced the conglomerate’s use of data and technology to serve its customers. From the outside, his influence is clear: before Rogers arrived at the firm, most of LVMH’s luxury fashion brands had minimal or nonexistent direct e-commerce operations.
“We had laid a lot of the groundwork for e-commerce, home delivery, click and collect... bringing the same level of customer care to people at a distance that you could in store,” Rogers says. “We worked on that for five years before the pandemic hit.”
Rogers doesn’t claim to be able to predict the future, especially in a space as volatile as crypto. After a boost of growth and interest in the first years of the pandemic, the crypto market recently suffered major losses in a dramatic sell-off that highlighted fears around unregulated currencies. It has bolstered criticisms by some that see crypto as more akin to a pyramid scheme than a new monetary system.
It reminds Rogers of the steep ups-and-downs of the early Internet in the ‘90s. “What you had then is the same thing you have now: you have a new human invention, you have a lot of excitement about the potential of what that brings. You get over-excitement, and then you get this trough of disillusionment. And then, ultimately, you get real growth.”
He believes Ledger is well positioned to thrive, regardless of the rise and fall of any specific cryptocurrency. Much of his work involves education, not just to make it easier for more people to participate in crypto, but also to show them why they need a wallet to protect their assets.
“I don’t have to believe, you know, just the Bitcoin narrative, or just the Ethereum narrative, or just the NFT narrative, or just a digital fashion narrative, or just the digital sports narrative,” he says. More simply, Rogers is betting that there will be more digital assets in the future, and people interested in keeping them safe.
“The fact that you can own your own assets is kind of a new human right...the fact that I don’t need to keep my money in a bank where there can be a run on the bank, and I can still earn yield on it,” Rogers says.
But Rogers does not recommend fashion and luxury brands rush to release NFT collections that can require speculative investments for consumers. “It’s okay from a marketing perspective, but you’re not going to learn that much,” he says.
Instead, Rogers is advising that brands offer shoppers a “digital twin” or digital proof-of-purchase with every physical item they sell, at no additional cost.
“We are already at the place in human history when, to a 21-year-old, a physical good plus a digital good has more perceived value than a physical good alone,” he says. “So when everyone’s trying to push sales to direct-to-consumer and dot-com, it’s a no brainer...You’ve got a new connection to your consumer, and who knows what grows from that?”
In the meantime, Ledger is focused on growing the crypto community and helping it become a safe, secure, thriving environment. For now, that means projects like special editions of its wallets released with Fendi and Hublot, and partnering with leaders and builders across the crypto space on security. But in the future, Ledger could also occupy a platform role: a vehicle for communicating with NFT owners about releases and evolutions in the space.
“There’s still a ton of explaining to do, because the models are nowhere close to being worked out, and neither is the consumer experience,” Rogers says. His enthusiasm is only building, however. “This is gonna fucking change humanity. For sure. No question.”
