As part of my interest in commerce in virtual environments, I started a business in SL - Inside & Out, to sell houses and home furnishings that I build. I have a store on the web that you can visit by clicking here. I also have an inworld store if you have a SecondLife account; here is the SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vetiver/136/116/113. I'm focusing on researching the marketplace, creating content, trying to reach customers. I'll talk a little about each of these three aspects below.
Interior of the one room forest retreat, The Apen I'm reading related blogs

Lots of stores and designers have blogs. They put up pictures of new releases. They announce contests. Some even share textures. You get a sense of the store's products. And sometimes you get a sense of the designer as a person - their sense of humor, their color preferences, their design influences. Most designers post frequently and regularly. Here are a few blogs

I'm making products

I started making big sculptures not long after I joined Second Life. I love creating big abstract sculptures with glass and tile textures. I like starting with a prim (the basic building block in SecondLife), stretching and twisting it, coloring it, folding it, lighting it...playing with it. It's a powerful feeling. I have a page about my art and my graphics creation efforts...click here to see it.

I recently started building houses. They're another kind of large shape...but a bit more useful than the abstract sculptures I built before. With houses, you have to worry about making them big enough for people to move around inside but not so big that they make the humans feel lost. You have to line up corners and align textures. I see giant houses...multiple floors, multiple bedrooms, huge entertainment spaces...and I don't understand them. Of course, I don't "get" McMansions in RL either. So I build small houses...1-3 rooms with lots of wall space for art/photos and windows set up high for views of the outside. I built a one room forest vacation retreat, a 2 room beach house with lots of windows. I built a conservatory based on The Orangery, on the National Trust in Britain. I'm currently building a 2 room home based on a 1940s motor court that I grew up near in St. Louis, MO. (anyone remember the Coral Courts on Highway 66/Watson Road?) So I'm researching period textures and furnishings and playing with glass block textures to make curved walls.

Then I started making things for the inside of the house. So far I've made pillows and rugs and a bench. I want to make a window seat and a Murphy (hide-away) bed for the home based on the motor court hotel. Making the furniture then led to making poses...for sits and leans...and animations. This is tedious business but the results are very cool.

Picture of the front of the beach house I built: LaJolla Segrass
Front of the Aspen with the stone exterior I'm trying different social media to reach customers.

The designers and store owners use a lot of different social media to keep in contact with their customers. They have twitter feeds, plurk feeds, flickr groups, blogs, and websites. They have Facebook pages. Things are connected so customers who find them on one site are led to other sources of information and to their store. They tweet about new blog posts. They post pictures of new releases on flickr and plurk. And they talk back to customers; they respond, react, and interact. One designer said she spends about 4 hours a day on social media, more on days when she has released a new product!

So what do I have for Inside & Out?

I'm just starting out in the business. I will continue to experiment with these communicaiton tools. They are necessary because there is not a lot of mass media in virtual worlds.

This page last updated June 2011 by Kim Gregson

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