Dear Clothing Shops

How do you price your items?

You mean like an outfit all together? Most just put all the clothing pieces in an object. Shape it like a wall poster, put a pic of the outfit on the object. Edit the object and on the first tab set it for sale and the price and check the "sell contents" thingy. And be sure not to set full permissions on next owner because you could have copies floating around on the market of your stuff. Not sure what you were asking but I hope this helps.

I'm sorry. What I meant was -- how do you decide what to charge for things? In RL, Percentages are added to a base manufacturing cost by middlemen and vendors, etc ... but how does one assign prices for things that are easily tweaked in photoshop?

Uh oh

Welcome to Second Life Enoch! As you will no doubt hear, creating compelling clothing in Second Life is an artistic endeavor that takes a while to master. Pricing is arbitrary, but eventually driven sensible by free market forces.

Are you thinking of designing clothing? Can't wait to see what you do!

I just tick the "Allow everyone to copy" box

That's, uh, not going to make you any friends.

Most solid designers I know spend hours making their stuff in Photoshop. One particularly obsessive one I know spends upwards of 12 hours making her stuff from scratch in GIMP. It's not easy at all to bring clothing to life in the weirdness of the SL avatar UV map.

I'll dork around in Photoshop making stuff for myself, but there's no way I'd want in the clothing designer's business.

the less work you put into it yourself, the cheaper it should be. and if you're only tweaking, you're probably not doing much work.

First, I consider the amount of effort I spent in designing the item. A plain t-shirt with text on it would sell for far less than the same t-shirt with detailed custom artwork. Most of my t-shirts start as Photoshop docs with many layers, to add cloth texturing, colors, and the artwork itself, and are alpha-chanel mapped to have nice crisp edges. They are far more than just importing a flar color square with text in the right place.

A dress that uses two seperate pieces that have to be carefully matched to get the seams to work, and where you have to carefully adjust or position the clothing patterns so the artwork doesn't distort horribly for a flat-chested wearer or for a busty babe, requires far more work to produce, and thus commands a higher price. Outfits that have multiple parts and textures cost more, because of the extra effort to coordinate the parts, and the added cost to import the textures. A complex ensemble might require tweaking and re-importing the textures many times, just to get it right.

Finally, I check other vendors, comparing the quality of my work to similar items that are available, and set my final price based on that survey.

Ditto.

EDIT: I totally misread the coversation and posted something completely off-topic, well not totally but sort of. But it's a valid point and I'll let it stand. Just read and move on. NO thread hijacking here.
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Since some clothing has parts that you want to remain white, tinting a piece ruins that, so they have to be hardcolored in PS/Gimp. However, I'm one that enjoys owning a lot of colors, to go with whatever mood I'm in, whatever weather I'm in, whatever new hair/jewelry I have.

Now yes, the actual shirt took a while to make and I can respect the effort that goes into it. However, "paintbucketing" or using a layered tint to change the color is a very trivial thing, and it has always made me not buy items that are sold this way, even if I really like the shirt/pants/outfit. (This applies to most anything that isn't sold in packs of all colors for me)

I'll pay someone for being able to draw a wonderfully done outfit and reward them for their time. Knowing how to adjust the tint of a layer in Photoshop or how to set a prim to a different color is not worth my money however.

I do houses, but I don't consider the amount of effort I put into something at ALL when I set the price.

Same irl - I never consider the amount of effort I put into something when I set the price. (Actually, my agent sets the price; but the point is, how long it takes me to finish something is irrelevant, some things just take longer than other, similar things.)

I figure the amount of effort I put into something reflects only personal attributes of my own: How slow I am, how picky I am, how anal-retentive I am, how skilled I am, how demanding I am, how practiced I am, how difficult a particular challenge is for me, etc.

And it reflects things out of everyone's control: What bugs are afoot at the time, whether or not we have just been dealt the builder's death-blow of 1.7, etc.

Or it could be just that, for various reasons, something just causes me a lot more trouble than other similar items usually do. No use penalizing anyone for that.

I set my prices mainly on general market prices and the customer base I am trying to reach.

Is it a 512 house for a new player? Ingrid and Barney sell theirs at $200. For me, that sets that price.

It matters not if I have spent six nights or twelve nights making that house, and I don't care if it would take others only one night to make that house. What matters is only: Am I happy with that house? Will the people buying it be happy with it, or is there something about it that will put them off? If there is something about it that will put a few off, is that same something a thing which will draw others like flies, and so is worth it? And - is it the absolute best house, most accurate house, I can possibly make, in all respects, given the shape and colors and style of it I have chosen?

When I am as happy as I'm going to get on all the above aspects, I set the dang thing for sale at my usual price no matter how much of a headache it might have been for me.

If it is a larger house, for larger landowners, I still price it in a level where a larger landowner - in other words, someone like myself, who may have 4012 - would consider it not overpriced, and actually something of a bargain. This is partly because my larger houses are not very generic - they are somewhat more stylized, and will thus appeal to a smaller subset of buyers.

Case in point: My houses for tinies. These are VERY non-generic, in that they are useful only by Tinies (though they can be stretched to any size, actually.) And most of them, only by that specific type of tiny (the specific critter). And only to be used when that player is being a Tiny!

Thus they are very, what we call in the mag biz, "special." So I price them VERY low. However, each of them took me just as long to make as any smaller, regular house I have made. And each of them was made with just as much precise attention to detail.

So if you are making something you know won't sell to just everybody and her dog, then you can go one of two ways: Price it higher, because it is more "special," and the ones who want it will have a hard time finding it, or lower, because you may be wanting to help make people want more of that sort of thing.

(Please, clothing designers: Make more nice things with higher necks, longer sleeves, etc. - such as one might actually wear on the street and look classy and chic without any of the "come and get a piece of this, honey!" factor. Wanting more things like this is about to drive me into clothing design myself.)

In terms of clothing, or anything else, I think the same basic principles would apply: Make the best quality you can for whatever it is you are making, no matter how "special" or how small the customer base for it may be. Then charge what the going rate will allow, based on your perusal of other, similar items.

It's kind of like setting up a garage sale: What would you pay for that item? And like setting up a garage sale, it is hard to be objective about items you feel a strong attachment to, but it's good to try.

My motto, in SL and irl: Always give them their money's worth and THEN some.

coco

A case in point:

I just released a collection of eyes. I took the time to make one Photoshop document where the color, shading, highlights and other aspects were on different layers. This allowed me to create additional color variations by 'paintbucketing' one layer, as you call it. Yes, creating each individual shade took very little time... once the main document had been created. But setting up the file so it looked good when I did that took far more time. It's a trade-off.

If someone wants the eyes to look their absolute best, with the highlights hard-colored along with the rest, they should buy the individual colors that they want.

However, I also offer for sale a 'tintable' version, where you could use sliders to adjust the color. So for someone like you, who doesn't care that the highlights also get tinted when you tint the Iris, they can just get the one eye set.

I also sell the entire set of nine colors for a reduced price.

I'm pretty good at photoshop and with enough "tweaking", I can arrive at pretty good semblance of a clothing item. But I prefer to buy. It primarily boils down to economics for me. If I can find a wonderfully designed item that sells for say $200L, I'm grabbing it. I estimate it might have taken myself, say, 2 to 4 hours to create and tweak something similar. That $200L translates to what - 1$US ? I'm not interested in being a merchant and my time is worth more to me than 25 cents an hour. This doesn't even address the vast creativity gap between the best designers and myself

I love tintable everything! But I also like collections of things where the designer has chosen 5-7 colors himself. It gets me to look at new colors, and also has done the pre-selecting of good shades for me.

coco

That's the way it *should* be done and I think that is a great way to ship products like that.

Personally, I do care that highlights get tinted, and would probably buy the entire set for a reduced price.

I know enough about Photoshop to notice when paintbucketing has occured and when it hasn't. If there's substantial effort made beyond recolorings, then yeah I might be persuaded to pay full price again for another color.

However, *most* designers I've run across set up their templates to make recoloring as quickly and painlessly as possible. I don't blame them at all for it (You spend 5-10-20 hours on one piece, you don't want to spend a lot more time just doing the same piece over and over in every shade of chartreuse) Just don't expect me to buy it either without a heftly discount over what it would cost to buy each individual item separately.

You've got to decide which player market you're targeting when you price items for sale in SL. I've always aimed at the newer player, pricing single clothing items at L$50 each; I don't, however, think my items are lower quality though they are mostly priced below the norm for similar clothing items in SL (the seams match, the colors are consistent on all pieces, the detail is good, etc.).

There is one particular clothing seller in SL who began his/her career pricing his/her items quite high for the going market rates. Doing so helped him/her gain a reputation as an elite SL designer. This is a valid method for a seller to use to determine pricing, as buyers often choose items based solely on the status that will be brought by the price they pay for them (much as it is in real life, as well). I'm not sure this method would be as effective in today's SL market climate, however, given the wide array of competitors who now populate the field of SL merchants.

I think for most people who sell things in SL, it comes down to being familiar with the market and deciding what you think is a fair price to charge for your items.

Price is usually a measure of marketing and what the traffic will bear.

Sure, you can price really cheaply, but unless you're getting a lot of volume you can't afford to take the time to market properly.

This is why free stuff doesn't sell, because no one bothers going around and marketing it. Why bother? There's no payment..

Thanks for all the replies, people!

I have a bit of experience in various types of programming and graphic art programs, but SL requires a bit more practice, so I'm gunna hold off on actually trying to peddle these things. The practice, of course, being lining up seams. I think I should reinstall poser