American Apparel's Recent Closure

Hi there,
I noticed on the Second Life Business Communicators Wiki that American Apparel has shut down their presence.

Does anybody have any details on why exactly they closed? I notice that a griefing incident occurred, but unless there was multiple recurring griefs I can't see that causing a shutdown. Did they simply see no business value in keeping a second life presence? Since they were a fairly high profile business presence, does this seem like a bit of a shaker to the whole Second Life hype to everyone?

http://americanapparel.net/presscenter/secondlife/

Let me know your thoughts.

L

Simple, they sold shit. Overpriced shit. In my opinion, of course.

"So we're closing our doors on Lerappa Island for now. This doesn't mean we're finished with the virtual world. Stay tuned to see what we do next."

Basically, they offered nothing.

It was simply a store, selling their stuff, and unstaffed if I remember rightly.

Very few of the corporate presences are any different, to be honest... and it always seems a terrible waste of potential to me.

The American Apparel store was clearly just "cheap advertising", and as such, I feel no sense of loss at their departure.

Broccoli

Do corporations come into 2nd life with the mission of making more Linden dollars than what they pay in tier? I assumed they generally expensed the $1675 plus $295 a month as advertising to the hip virtual universe crowd. Not that it necessarily works, but I think that's the idea.

I like their clothes in RL. But the model of simple and solid-colored would likely come across as shit on an SL avatar. I don't pay any attention to RL companies in SL, so I didn't even know they were here.

Perhaps, but nothing I see from them here is going to make me run out and shop in their stores. But then again, I'm not part of the hip visual universe crowd, so It could be just me.

True, I was editing something to that effect into my comment just as you were answering.

2nd edit: ...agreeing with you about the uninspired clothes of course, not about you not being hip!!

LOL. I'l type slower next time.

American Apparel didn't seem to have any purpose for their Second Life presence beyond getting PR for the opening.

The store was staffed for the opening event, which was a lot of fun -- Aimee, who built the Lerappa sim for them, was there, as well as other greeters who held contests and gave out prizes. (I got a US$25 gift certificate for RL clothing.) After that, however, they did absolutely nothing with it. There was no staff in the store, no in-world publicity, and no new designs for sale.

I really shouldn't describe their stuuf like I did. Someone took time to make it, more than I could do. but I did think it was overpriced.

It's not a matter of making money. Corporations don't sell SL Items for that purpose, but to draw attention to thier rl business efforts.

I think it was the fact that their sim was a ghost town. No one was ever in the store; no one seemed to give a $&^# that they were here. What's the purpose of paying $195+ a month in tier for a place no one ever visits?

P2

What? Are you implying that a corporation thought that just having a physical presence in SL would be enough to get people flocking there? Am I to believe that they didn't think it was necessary to have either something entertaining or worth having? No corporation would be that silly.

I think that's sort of what I said already. And surely they were paying $295? I can't picture them buying a mainland sim at auction.

That's exactly what I mean, and I believe that's exactly why it failed. They never had anything but the store, a nice store, built for them by Aimee Weber, I believe, and the clothing, also created by Aimee; nice enough, but boring compared to much of what we as SLers are used to.




Well, they had been here a while. I said $195+ because I didn't know what they were actually paying. Not that that's anything but pocket change in the corporate world.

P2

Exactly. Corps are sold a bill of goods by developers about the alleged importance of having a presence in SL. The developers walk away with a fat check for making a mundane build and the corp build becomes a ghost town. Ever take a look at the poor uncreative build the Playboy sim was, what a wasted opportunity.

My tongue was planted firmly in cheek when I made my comments. I've been to enough of these ghost towns to shake my head at the lack of creativity these companies have.

This thread with all the ban line/security orb threads have given me a great idea though. Apparently all I have to do is make my home look like a corporate store and offer nothing of value and I wont have to worry about any type of security. Finally, I will have peace and quiet.

So will Second Life soon be approaching a huge crash like DotCom? There seems to be way too much hype over companies making mediocre islands just so they can say they have one, and not enough meaningful development.

Deja-vu anybody?

Maybe you're attaching too much importance to corporate presence in SL. Nobody I know cares about it. At a superficial headline-skimming level, it seems like a good idea to have a corporate presence in SL, but anybody who has spent more than a day or so in-world understands pretty quickly that corporate advertising in there won't work very well. It never has. Nothing has changed.

Even from Linden Labs' perspective, why do they care whether a corporation wants to buy a sim, or I want to? We pay the same. The difference is that I care about SL, will provide something valuable to other users, and have a higher likelihood of sticking around paying them tier for a much longer period of time.

To be honest I think the problem is that corporates HAVE to build fairly plain, mundane sims, because they're afraid that if they do something experimental, some people will HATE it, and then they'll pass that hate on to the real life company (and it'll get associated with them elsewhere, too...)

I had to giggle at that. Of course after 1 day of living there you would die of boredom...

I always found American Apparel's clothes dreadfully dull in RL. I can't imagine why I'd want to buy them in SL. Long live SL's quirky home grown designers.

In todays face paced MTV society, I would imagine a company would want to be associated with anything except boring.

Sure, but they think that _Second Life_ itself provides all the "non-boring" they need.

After that, it's better for them to create something mundane that everyone thinks is ok-ish rather than something spectacular that half the population loves and half the population hates, because they don't want to be hated.

becuase after the opening party theres nothing to do (on almost all of these money pit big name places)

and with a whole world, why stand around doing nothing

Well sometimes in RL I just want a nice plain shirt that fits well and accentuates me rather than the shirt. A.A. does that well. But that doesn't translate very well into SL: it makes you look like the white shirt / bluejeans noob.

I wouldn't want to wear SL's quirky stuff in RL, and I also have no interest in seeing A.A.'s understated stuff in SL.

I like the idea of virtual self-sufficiency in SL. By that, I mean that I don't want to see it turned into a 3D directory or catalogue for RL services and goods. That's why at my small parade of rental shops the rules ask people not to sell or advertise RL things.

There is a distinction. If a car company like Toyota makes nice replicas of their cars for us to drive round and crash on sim boundaries, that's fine, that's entering into the spirit of things. But if they just deploy hoardings with photos and links to RL info, that isn't.