Question About Doing Customized Work

I've search through the forums, and I can't find any past threads dealing with this.

Here's the background. . .

I was asked by a club to design some clothing for their workers to wear. They wanted three clothing items including: long jeans, jean shorts and a jean mini-skirt. They want the clothing to have full permissions.

I spent quite a bit of time on the project. I developed an attractive belt buckle with their logo incorporated into the buckle. Each clothing item also has the club logo embroidered into the back pocket. The clothing is good quality: no discernible color difference between joints, nice shading, and three dimensional texture appearance. They look very nice.

Here's the question...

I'm not into making a killing off this. But I want to receive a reasonable compensation for my work. There's the rub. I have no idea what is reasonable. Can anyone give me a ball park figure? What would be a reasonable and fair amount?

Thanking you in advance for your ideas.

For "good quality" I would say 100 million dollars is fair.

Ummmmm..... shouldn't you have discussed pricing with them up front?

By making the stuff full perms, you're basically giving it all away to the entire SL population and can never expect L$ out of it. You would probably want to make it modify/transfer but not mod/trans/copy. Or get the club owners to let you set up your own vendors in the club, and set however you want.

Okay - Okay. I know I should have discussed pricing before I did work ... but I didn't. What I need is some rough idea in actual Lindens. If you've done work like this, what have you asked for?

I bought some full perm clothing once - a unique set of dresses, not the run of the mill stuff and supposedly I'm the only one with the full perm set. It was one dress style in 4 color, including top, pants, and prim skirt and all the textures were included, with full rights for selling it. I only paid L$1000-L$1500 for it.

Since it was a custom job, especially incorporating their logo into the buckle, I'd probably charge around L$1500 if you can resell it in your shop, or L$3000 if you're giving up all rights to resell. But it's totally your call; what do you think your time is worth?

How many hours did you spend doing the work?

And if you give them the items full perm. Have them sign some sort of agreement to not resell the items and to not give them away with Transfer perms.

At a minimum: take the hours you spent doing it, multiply by 40, and then by 260. So if you took three hours, they owe you L$31,200.

This is why I almost never do this kind of custom work. In the time I spent making the items you described I could make items to sell in my shop over and over again worth maybe 100's of thousands of L$ over time. OK that may be a bit optimistic but I would make a lot more money if I spent the time on something to add to my shop inventory than I could ever expect to charge for items I could only sell once.

L$3000 would not make it worth my while. Maybe you can work a deal out with your customer that would include a bit of free advertising at his club.

Just curious, how did you come up with this? Any particular reason, or just a rate you feel is fair?

It's about half what I'd personally ask for a short term work-for-hire contract.

I do clothes full perms for my customers , normally i use this "formula"

1.- i think about how much pay if i was a final buyer for determinated clothes example 210 $L

2.-I multiply by 10

Before i continue ,i must to say:
I only sell 5 copies of each design and the customer compromosise to not sell it full perms and I not to resell it again.
And i recomend a maximun price for them to sell it.
Maybe some one think "yeah right , you dont sell it again and them dont sell it full perms", yes its all about trust from the 2 parts.

3.-then in my personal case put 5 boxes of each desing in my store.

4.- if one of my customers whant it exclusive (they get the copy of the desgn just for then) i take out all the copies and discount 1 box price.

So the formula its something like this.

210 x 10 =2100 (price for each of the 5 boxes)

total = 7500$L (if i sale the 5 boxes)

if it was exclusive - 1 box = 5400 $L

I'd hazzard a guess that the club won't pay what's reasonable for the work. They'll be thinking along the lines of what the items would cost in SL (e.g. a pair of jeans) multiplied by a small number - say 5 or 10 - SL amounts. But it's RL work, which isn't the same at all.

Selling the item yourself doesn't come into it, and I doubt that you'll get anything that made it worthwhile. When you are commisioned to create a club 'uniform' it's for the club and not for anyone else to sell.

Oryx, would you charge $3,000 per clothing item ($9,000 total) -- or for $3,000 for all three?

i sell full perm textures for L$750-L$1000 per texture, and then i delete the product from my machine, and i no longer have rights to it.

i do not include the photoshop files, however. just the uploaded SL texture, nothing more.

A friend asked me to custom design tshirts for his club, which I happily did and gave to him full perms. He gave me 1K which was great since I had told him I would do it for free. It took maybe a few hours tho, pretty simple Tshirts with a logo.

I make custom tee shirts fairly often. Usually it's part of a larger project that I'm getting paid for. But since it doesn't take much time or effort to customize templates I already have, I'll do it as a stand alone job and charge about L$1000, depending on the circumstances.

I have done custom work, but do not sell it full perm. I then retain the right to put it in the store to sell to the general public.
(I have not done any branded custom work, and even if I did it would be the same rules, except the one I would put out would not be branded)

I do custom colors of existing items, for the same price as the item is already for sale at

So what you need to ask yourself is... would this product sell without their brand name on it, would you then want to try to put it out for sale, how much would it sell to the general public for, and what permissions are you willing to sell their branded one to them at and then price from there.

Yes, you should have negotiated a price up front.

Try this, maybe...Model the stuff, and take pictures. Send the client the pictures for approval. Tell him he can have a full perm version of the clothes for...oh, let's say L$5,000. Or whatever you think the market will bear.

He might come back and say, No thanks. Or he might send you the money. Or he might say, "That's more than my dance balls and all their dances! Would you take L$1,000?" In which case, you haggle.

The winning post!