11 May 2014

Faun




Faun legs: Caverna Obscura - Faun Legs Dark Tones
Antlers: Illusions - Rusa Antlers
Skin: Bite&Claw - Skins Aria - Reindeer (Blk) Tone 3 (gacha)
Tattoo: By Snow - Reindeer spots
Eyes: By Snow - Satyr Eye Mesh Gold
Deer Tail: Bite&Claw - Deer Tail - Brown (gacha)
Hair: Exile - Bad reputation
Mesh panties: Bite&Claw - Reindeer Top & Panties - Plain (gacha)
Top/Skirt: Cellar Door - Fatima

I love the hooves (rigged mesh) and the antlers (also mesh, with about 4000 colour options... okay maybe not that many, but definitely enough to keep me happy). I only wish the faun legs came with a tattoo version to cover the upper-legs area.

By Snow is, as always, great value for money. The tattoo is free, and the mesh eyes are 15L$ or so.
Exile is my new go-to hairmaker.

The Deer Tail by B&C came with Faun legs too -- good looking ones, I may add. They're made of sculpties, however, which I tend to avoid whenever possible. The skin is very cute.

The Cellar Door outfit comes with sculpty horns and mesh bracelets. I'm not wearing the bracelets because although they look good up-close, they lose their shape too quickly for my taste. I also took a risk with Cellar Door: their demos are untextured. I'm not happy with that. The texture can make or break a good mesh. How hard is it to slap the word "demo" on the texture, and include it as part of the demo? Arhumpf. Anyway, I quite like the Fatima outfit for my faun. I'm wearing it with mesh panties because the alpha doesn't cover my bits, and I didn't feel like creating an alpha for it. But I think that's a feature, not a bug :-p .

02 May 2014

Learning from my mistakes

I'm just going to copy a post I made in a forum thread about running a business in Second Life. Just some advice given to someone else, coming from a hobbyist who didn't have any business experience when she started. I know a lot more about business now - some because I ran a store, which ultimately failed (= stopped being enjoyable; profitable doesn't even come into it), some because of my RL job experience which is now a lot more business-focused than it used to be.

Anyway, the forum post, unedited.

Please for your own sake listen to the advice given here.

A lot of us in SL had to let things go. For me it was my clothing store. Whose fault was this? Mine.

I started with a reasonably niche style : latex. It was technically challenging and I liked the look of it. Trouble is, I wasn't 100% into the lifestyle that's linked to it. I started developing an interest for historical clothes and costumes. That's when I did my best work, IMHO.

That's also when I made my biggest mistake. I should have shut down the latex side at that point and focused on the niche I loved... But I was still proud of my latex line. I didn't want to let go. Instead I branched out even more, and made a handful of casual clothes, because I thought that was where the money was.

You know what? It didn't work. I didn't have the time to run three businesses, on top of my day job. So eventually, I got fed up and overwhelmed. It stopped being fun. I closed the store.

I'm back onto my feet now, with a new store and a niche that is more solid. It's taken me a while. It's been a painful process.

Think. What's your core business? What do you really want to do? Importantly, are these two things the same? Then, prune that tree. Make it healthier.
I hope someone will find this useful.