Reimagining An Industry: The Luxury CEO Catalin Dascalu On The Upcoming Launch Of Luxandia.com "The possibilities are basically unlimited, and we will offer an open source development platform to allow the interested communities to develop their own businesses in Luxandia."

With an aim to revolutionize the luxury industry, The Luxury CEO Catalin Dascalu is getting set to launch Luxandia.com, a new project that he expects to result in a complete reimagination of this high-end sector. Excerpts from a conversation with the entrepreneur:

To start with, can you tell us about your new project, Luxandia.com, and what it's all about?

Luxandia.com is a project that will revolutionize the luxury industry by connecting real life with a virtual world into a unique project that contains dozens of virtual malls that will provide rental space for luxury brands to be customized to the smallest details, leisure locations, cinemas, clubs, restaurants, car showrooms, and a single location for the expo.

Imagine that in the comfort of your own home, you put on a pair of VR glasses and enter Luxandia. Maybe you want to buy a dress, and in Luxandia, you will also have the opportunity to change the colors, sizes, to see how the dress looks on a mannequin, and if you like it, you can add it to your shopping cart and the order will arrive at your home. Or, maybe you want to see a 3D movie, and then you choose one of the cinemas available in Luxandia, you pay the ticket, you sit comfortable, and the movie will run into a cinema atmosphere.

The possibilities are basically unlimited, and we will offer an open source development platform to allow the interested communities to develop their own businesses in Luxandia.

Image source: Luxandia

You have said that Luxandia aims "to revolutionize the luxury industry by leaping into the metaverse"—can you elaborate on that?

We have been active in the luxury industry for 10 years now, offering luxury concierge services for ultra high net worth (UHNW) customers. Over time, we have accumulated the necessary experience, and we have managed to have a psychological portrait of the perfect client for our industry. Knowing their behavior as clients, knowing even intimate details, from allergies, to the position of the most important events in their lives, we have the necessary basis for the Luxandia project. We know that a number of brands in the luxury industry are interested in the metaverse, and that some of them have projects in development, but at the moment, Luxandia is a unique initiative, far too complex to be developed by another company. We believe that we have a starting advantage, and the determination of our teams will make a difference in the near future.

Take us through some of your ongoing projects/initiatives at The Luxury. What can customers expect to see or gain from these new endeavors?

From luxury concierge services, we switched to blockchain technology out of necessity, and as we deepened this industry, we realized how many opportunities we have, so we created The Luxury Bank, which in practice is not a bank in its own right, but it is a functional platform that includes a series of satellite projects, such as the marketplace where every business in our industry can have its own store, to accept payments with cryptocurrencies, to launch marketing campaigns through rewards functions available on the platform, as well as to offer this platform to our existing customers.

The luxury industry is extremely divided, contrary to expectations, and we know that such an initiative does not exist, although we are talking about a US$224.8 billion industry. We avoid saying that they lack the courage, because already a series of brands have stepped into the non-fungible token (NFT) area, but we still don't feel that impulse towards digitalization. Adoption will probably be a difficult process, only to the point where we take the first clients on board.

Can you explain how your business is going to stand out not just now, but for the foreseeable future as well? How are you safeguarding the business for the long term?

We have already launched our digital currency with a market cap of $110 million, which is going through a rebranding process these days, based on the experience gained from the first listing on exchanges until now. Thus, The Luxury Coin (TLB) becomes The Luxury (TLX), and it is already used in our platform (https://theluxurybank.com), as well as on the application available on Google Play. We already have the crypto payment solution, and now, we are working on the necessary licenses to allow us to implement it in different jurisdictions around the world. We estimate that by the end of the year we will be present in over 100 locations with our crypto PoS, TLPoS. All these, gathered with the experience obtained by offering luxury concierge services, gives us stability, and provides us with the necessary funds to develop Luxandia.

Finally, what's your personal vision for Luxandia, and for yourself as an entrepreneur? What's your strategy to make sure your dreams for the business come true?

I am a person who learns from my mistakes, and most importantly, I am careful not to repeat them. I want the beta version of Luxandia to be on the market by the end of the year, and in the first half of next year, to have at least 50 brands with us. I have formed a series of teams that are side by side with me in the projects I carry out; we also have a community formed on Discord where every evening, I answer their questions. I am connected with them at least one hour a day, and it's a growing community seeing with their eyes and from whom we get the most real feedback, considering that a large part of them are practically future users of Luxandia. At this point, I have gone over the user experience, I established the architecture, and I have now moved on the programming stage. In the next period, we will open the waiting lists for the first 1000 who will test Luxandia starting on December 1, 2021.