Millions of Kids Play Dress to Impress on Roblox. Now Meet the People Behind It.

The developers making the Roblox phenomenon are nearly as interesting as the game itself.

May 16, 2025

Would you give this one star or five stars? Credit: Dress to Impress

Last fall, the fashion game Dress to Impress broke an incredible milestone: more than one million concurrent players. All video games aspire to be that popular. By comparison, that would immediately make it one of the five biggest games on Steam. And in the last 24 hours, Fortnite saw a little more than a million players at the same time. In other words, Dress to Impress is a huge hit—and it’s only playable in Roblox.

My children are also obsessed. It’s not hard to see why. They’re two young girls who like to play with dolls, and Dress to Impress is a virtual game where you get access to a seemingly limitless supply of incredible-looking fashion that looks very “grown up.”

Even when screen time is over, my daughters will ask to put the Dress to Impress music on via a looping YouTube video and demand my wife and I to give them “themes.” It’s cute! Roblox has problems, as I’ve regularly outlined on Crossplay, but Dress to Impress is a good game, the monetization does not feel sleazy, and it makes my kids happy.

Plus, the hook to Dress to Impress is that you’re competing with other players in real-time, with the group voting on who made the “best” dress, according to a theme everyone is assigned. It’s fine to play dolls, but can you win at playing dolls? (It has been useful in helping my five-year-old deal with “failure.” It doesn’t always go well!)

“Dress to Impress was the perfect game that just fills a gap between something we all do every single day anyway, which is dress ourselves,” said Dress to Impress community manager Beatrice Elizabeth in a recent interview. “We all think about what we're going to wear every single day.”

“People are naturally inclined, especially when they're younger, to just fully express themselves,” said the game’s director and senior/general manager Umoyae FreeSpirit.

It’s not hard to track down the people who make traditional games. It’s harder to track down the people making the games being played by millions of children in places like Roblox. They often operate under aliases—or anonymous. But I recently chatted with several folks who work on Dress to Impress, a team of “approximately 30” developers. (They would not disclose how many were full-time versus contractors.)

The day-to-day of running a Roblox game—or “experience,” as Roblox prefers to call them—is like any other job. It’s a lot of time in meetings, emails, and chat rooms. (In video games, people tend to use Discord. It’s not that much different from Slack.)

But because the Dress to Impress team is small, it means people wear different hats. FreeSpirit also writes lore for the game and design new modes for its ravenous fans.

Both are present and visible in the community, but Elizabeth, who came from YouTube, is the one who most interfaces with the game’s many fans and influencer connections.

“I immediately check our influencer server to see if they've asked us any questions,” explained Elizabeth. “People who are inside of our celebrity program, if they've asked us any questions, or if they have anything that they'd like to share with us—gameplay feedback, suggestions, things like that. Which I then come forward to the developers, if there is any.”

How Elizabeth and FreeSpirit both ended up on the team is, itself, telling of the moment.

FreeSpirit is 18 years old and has been homeschooled her whole life by her mother.

“My learning has always been based on what I want to learn about,” she said. “And my mom's always been really supportive of that.”

She started playing Roblox in 2016. (The platform launched in 2006.) Roblox resonated with FreeSpirit and her creativity, prompting her mom to tell her something that’d later prove prophetic: “I feel like this is something you could have a career path on.”

Eventually, FreeSpirit found herself in the community of a game like Dress to Impress.

(Dress to Impress, which launched in 2023, had not been released yet, but fashion games have been a Roblox staple. Dress to Impress did not invent the genre, and Roblox is full of games copying and/or taking inspiration. i.e. Fashion Famous came out in 2016.)

Then, a revelation while taking a shower: she should start a digital magazine about the community. For the next year, that’s exactly what she did. The magazine took off.

It’s around this time that Dress to Impress launches and also takes off. That’s when Freespirit has, once again, a revelation in bed: “I really want to work for this game.”

The next morning, she pitched herself to the Dress to Impress and immediately hired.

Sometimes, you manifest what you want. Other times, you need to go viral, like Elizabeth.

“I had an electrician in my new house recently. He was like, ‘What do you do for a living?’ And I was like, ‘That's complicated." [laughs] [It's] always kind of hard to explain to people who don't or aren't in that industry, how the industry works. They're like, ‘You can get paid for that? That makes money?’ Yeah, it does.”

Elizabeth started playing Roblox in 2009, when she was just 10 years old.

“I made an account at school because back then they didn't block them,” she laughed.

The open-ended nature of Roblox is what attracted her. It was a place where one minute, you could be playing a platformer (an “obby,” in Roblox terms), the next a fashion game, the next a role-playing game. With Roblox, you always can indulge in whatever you’re into at that moment, the blessing and curse of the modern internet.

At 15 years old, Elizabeth started making her own YouTube videos.

“As long as my schoolwork was done, of course,” she said. “My mom was very particular about that. [...] I started watching a lot of YouTubers who were playing video games and sharing with their audience those games and I got excited about things like Minecraft and Roblox again.”

That’s when serendipity struck, as she started covering Roblox fashion games.

“I started playing some fashion games in Roblox and the videos just happened to blow up,” she said. “And when I say blow up, I mean, I went from nobody in September to it [the videos] being my full time job in December. It just absolutely exploded.”

It won’t shock you to learn this explosion happened during the early days COVID-19.

As time went on, Elizabeth found keeping up with YouTube a drag. She was interested in going behind-the-scenes on fashion games, and Dress to Impress was looking for a community manager. Soon enough, the two had synced up. It was serendipity again.

My children would probably quibble with my outfit selection for this. Credit: Me

“I had an electrician in my new house recently,” said Elizabeth. “He was like, ‘What do you do for a living?’ And I was like, ‘That's complicated." [laughs] [It's] always kind of hard to explain to people who don't or aren't in that industry, how the industry works. They're like, ‘You can get paid for that? That makes money?’ Yeah, it does.”

Video games—sorry, experiences—are pretty different in 2025. As is making them.

Lastly, ahead of this, I told my children I was talking to the developers of Dress to Impress. It is rare when something Dad is doing catches their attention, but they not only wanted to pass on questions, they wanted to know if they could join the call.

The latter was not possible because of school, but I did pass on their questions.

My Five-Year-Old: “How Do I Win?”

FreeSpirit: I mean, that's a difficult question. You have to follow the theme, dress up for the theme, and just hope that people will vote for you and vote fairly. That's also a thing we're working on—trying to implement different ways to make sure our voting stays really fair. I know me personally, I win every single round, only because people know I'm a developer, so they just automatically vote [for] me. It's actually annoying, because I would like to be voted based on how good my outfit is, not just because you know who I am.

Elizabeth: I think learning to layer helps, because people really like that in the community. They really love the layering and making things match well. It also depends on the server you're playing in, too. I think if you're in a server with your friends, you're more likely to win, obviously. [laughs] There's different levels of servers, the master servers and the pro servers, as well. So naturally, those ones are going to be a little bit more difficult because the people are going to hold you to higher standards. I think what Umoyae said is right there, just matching the theme and have fun. Sometimes when you get really creative and don't take it too seriously, sometimes people really like those outfits—the ones that are a little bit more out there and different.

My Eight-Year-Old: “How Do You Make All the Clothes and the Bags and the Stuff in the Game?”

FreeSpirit: Well, two things. We take a lot of inspiration from real life fashion, real life fashion trends, high fashion—things that are on the runway. We also have two designers in our team. They actually come up with original concepts, and we've actually had them for a few months in our team. A lot of the things that we recently added were original concepts.

They also take inspiration from different designs they've seen, but some of it is just like really unique, really fun designs that we add into the game. But it's also based on player feedback. Some players are like, “I want to see a skirt that has this specific detailing or this specific design.” Then, we implement something based on that feedback. [It’s] the same way with the themes, as well. We add themes based on what's trending or what seems fun or what people are suggesting.

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