In their weekly interview series Womenize! features inspirational, diverse people who work in the games and tech industry, to share their experiences, give valuable advice and talk about their projects. In cooperation with Womenize! and Madeleine Egger, GamesMarkt is republishing these inspirations.
Womenize! – Inspiring Stories is our weekly series featuring inspirational individuals from games and tech. For this edition we talked to Kelly Vero, Technical Founder of NAK3D. She speaks about her unconventional career across industries, her passion for pushing the boundaries of digital identity and technology, and her mission to inspire the next generation to shape the future of tech. Read more about Kelly here:
Hi Kelly! Your career spans more than three decades across television, journalism, game development, and now digital fashion with NAK3D. When you look back at that journey, what experiences shaped you the most as a creator and innovator?
What shaped me the most was never staying inside a single industry. I began in television and journalism, which taught me storytelling and how audiences connect emotionally with ideas. Moving into games showed me something different: technology can be playful, interactive, and incredibly powerful in shaping culture.
Through my mentoring and my book Breaking Through Bytes: Women Shaping the Digital World, I wanted to highlight something simple but important: women have always been shaping technology, even if their stories were not always visible.
Games in particular rewired how I think. When you work in game development, you start to see systems everywhere: economies, behaviour loops, identity, communities. That mindset has influenced everything I’ve done since.
When I later founded NAK3D, I realised that many industries were only just beginning to understand things the games industry had known for decades: people care deeply about digital identity, ownership, and expression. Whether it’s a sword in a game or a handbag in digital fashion, the emotional relationship people have with digital objects is real.
The most important lesson across those decades is that innovation usually happens at the edges between industries. If you stay curious and bring ideas from one field into another, you start seeing possibilities that others miss.
You describe yourself as someone who loves pushing technology “to its edge.” What continues to excite you most about the intersection of gaming, fashion, and emerging technologies today?
What excites me most is that we’re only just beginning to understand digital identity.
For years, games have been laboratories for culture. Players experiment with identity, status, creativity and social belonging through avatars, skins and virtual worlds. Now those ideas are spreading into fashion, retail and even how we think about ownership.
With NAK3D, I’ve been exploring how objects can move between worlds: from physical items in our day-to-day to game environments, virtual spaces and new forms of commerce. The really interesting challenge isn’t just making something look good in 3D. It’s building the infrastructure that allows those objects to carry meaning, provenance and value wherever they go.
We’re entering a moment where gaming technology, AI, digital assets and commerce are converging. That intersection will fundamentally reshape how brands, creators and audiences interact. We won’t be selling whale items on forums anymore, we’re really just getting started on this cultural journey in game technologies.
For me, pushing technology to its edge simply means asking: what happens if we treat digital worlds as real cultural spaces rather than experimental ones?
In many ways, NAK3D is about connecting culture with collection, commerce, creativity and conservation. We’re giving objects a digital life that travels with us. And while we can digitise almost anything, I’m not entirely convinced we’ll manage someone’s pet goldfish just yet.
Through your work, your mentoring, and your book Breaking Through Bytes: Women Shaping the Digital World, you spotlight the contributions of women in technology. What impact do you hope your own journey will have on the next generation?
If there’s one message I hope the next generation takes from my journey, it’s that there is no single “correct” path into technology.
When I started, the industry looked very different and the idea of working across games, fashion, AI and storytelling would have sounded unusual. But creative industries are evolving quickly, and the most interesting careers are often the ones that combine disciplines.
Through my mentoring and my book Breaking Through Bytes: Women Shaping the Digital World, I wanted to highlight something simple but important: women have always been shaping technology, even if their stories were not always visible.
Something I talk about a lot with younger women entering the industry is the importance of finding your tribe. Technology can sometimes feel isolating, especially if you feel like you don’t fit the traditional mould. But there are communities everywhere once you start looking for them, and those communities help you understand what drives you and what kind of future you want to build.
Once you know what makes you tick, you can choose role models that resonate with where you are in your life and career. And sometimes, particularly in emerging fields, you realise that the role model you’ve been looking for doesn’t exist yet.
In those moments, you simply become your own.
Technology is still being written, and the future of it shouldn’t belong to just one kind of person/gender/personality trait, it belongs to all of us and we all have equal responsibilities in making technology survive long after we’re gone. So we all need a voice.
