The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2022–2023
Loro Piana puts Gift of Kings garments on the blockchain, QR-scannable from field to store
With The Gift of Kings launch approaching, Loro Piana and AKQA built a blockchain web app: scan the QR on a garment to trace its journey and prove ownership.
Loro Piana
What it had to solve
Loro Piana’s exclusive The Gift of Kings pieces were about to launch, alongside the private opening of its new Palo Alto store — a city chosen for its concentration of tech companies. The maison wanted customers to experience the craft story as a verifiable fact rather than a marketing claim.
How it works
Loro Piana’s most exclusive line, The Gift of Kings, is built on a claim few competitors can make: the maison owns and controls the wool’s journey from the fields of its breeders to the finished garment. With the line’s next pieces about to launch, the brand wanted that story to be something a customer could check rather than just hear.
Working with AKQA, Loro Piana built a blockchain-based web app. Each numbered garment carries a QR code on its label; scanning it traces the item’s journey from the field to the store and serves as proof of ownership and a certificate of authenticity, because the blockchain records every step and change of ownership.
The initiative was introduced at the private opening of Loro Piana’s new Palo Alto store — deliberately placed in a city known for tech companies — and it scaled quickly from a launch moment into the line’s standard: from the spring 2023 collection, digital certification applied to all Gift of Kings products in stores worldwide.
Why it lands
- The brand’s real claim is vertical integration, and a blockchain record lets the customer verify that claim directly instead of trusting an ad.
- Tying the certificate to the physical garment through a QR code makes the digital identity inseparable from the product it describes.
- Registering ownership and passing the certificate down fits luxury’s legacy logic: an heirloom object gains an heirloom record of where it came from.
- Introducing the technology at a Palo Alto opening paired the oldest craft story with the newest credibility language, making the provenance leap part of the launch event itself.
What it did
The certificate turned Loro Piana’s integrated supply chain — its central selling point — into something a customer could verify and pass down. It began as a limited collection available at the Stanford Shopping Center boutique and was set to extend from the spring 2023 collection to every new Gift of Kings product worldwide; D&AD preserved the web app in its awards archive, and the entry records no usage figures.
What you can take
If a brand’s differentiator is an unbroken supply chain, prove it: a digital certificate tied to the garment makes the story verifiable, ownable and inheritable.
Since then
The Palo Alto opening in March 2023 made the blockchain certificate the centerpiece of the launch rather than a side feature, and the brand signaled that the service would extend to every new Gift of Kings product in its stores worldwide from the spring 2023 collection. D&AD preserved the web app in its awards archive, and AKQA’s work for the project was recognized among the agency’s Webby wins in 2024 — an early luxury-market example of using a garment’s digital identity to protect and transmit its physical story.
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