The Sweatshop, the Witch and the 10L$ Wardrobe

people are assuming that this merch is all crap. i saw the merch when it was still listed, and it was far from crap. there is no reason to assume her worker bees cannot churn out high quality items. i doubt they will be what has come to be known as 'freebie quality'.

Another point to consider

Often the more basic type furniture is basic becuase its lower prim.

People who want advance, intricate items need more land to place these things.

I redid Brendas End tables becuase of this they were simply too many prims for their needed function.

Most business-in-a-box (BIAB) kits contain either freebies or items lost by creators via fraud or permissions exploits. In my experience (which is considerable as I have gone through dozens and dozens of BIAB kits looking for freebies for NCI), only about 10% of the BIAB content was created to be sold as a full-perms BIAB.

Pretty good point -

Some freebies are full quality, even high end items where the perms were lost.

Best example that comes to mind is that CS malibu skin. that was a 6000L skin...

Now that hair comment made me throw my fresh cup away in disgust
seriously though i totally agree, we don't walk around in freebies and 10L stuff because after a very short while you realise that if you want to look different from everybody else, you need to make an effort, either ihn money or in making things.

No, they are not available on SLEx! They are quite nice though.

Centaine Decatur is working hard to join the ranks of the quality content creators in Second Life
I see many high quality creations in SL and I compliment the hard work that goes into all that you creators do. You know who you are

QFE

Isablan is 100% right. We already have this sort of competition in SL between users. It's all about one upping each other. Some things people just can't grasp in terms of style. IE- a content creator who lives a "goth" lifestyle will have their finger to the pulse of the goth scene more than some mass producer who is just trying to exploit the genre.

I'm a content creator and I wasn't bothered much about the $10L items, I'm more laughing at the logic that what works on IMVU will work in SL. pffft hahaha.

The point I take out of this, also as someone who is working hard to get on top of the SL learning/building curve is that some of us look to quality creators for inspiration, not just to emulate them to make L, but to try to achieve the quality that they have. I'm not judging the quality of the 10L stuff, nor am I uninspired by something just because it's cheap, but if there is a builder out there who really produces high quality stuff and I look at what they are doing and am blown away, it inspires me to work harder, and I have no problem dropping more money on their products. No matter how good a product is, if it is mass produced to be sold at discount prices so as to manipulate the market, I am not going to be impressed.

Plus the amount of money we are talking about is negligible, from a consumer's standpoint. I don't want to talk about how much cash I've dropped on video games. Figure $50.00 for an early release, plus an expansion at $20 more. That's around 20,000L. Multiply it times God knows how many games I've gone through. the difference between 300L and 10L is slightly more than $1. I can spare the buck.

That is correct, at least to one consumer. I saw some rather nice looking outfits for 10 lindens but I didn't buy them as I feared either 1) the quality was poor and nothing like the pictures on the boxes, and/or 2) it is either stolen from someone else, or freebies sold for 10 lindens.

On the other hand, my favorite clothing store sells outfits between 120 and 300 lindens, and I believe I've spent more than . . .let's think . . . ooh, more than 2400, maybe 3000 lindens at that store. Great quality, low prices, lots of lindens changing hands . ..

ah well . . . I do not particularly like guilds . .. nor do I shop at Wal-Mart . . guess I'll go naked then . ..

Thank you sweeti

I guess, though, that even the best freebies--which may be very good quality--are still recognizable as commonly available for free, and the same will obtain for L$10 items.

But I did just think of something a little ominous about this: If the stuff is in fact produced in the PRC, there's a very good chance that the textures are from a pirated copy of PhotoShop. Not that big a deal, because the difference between PhotoShop and the Gimp is mostly just user familiarity, at least for making clothing and building textures. But it's a different matter if suddenly hordes of content creators are sitting in front of pirated copies of Maya, which is quite dramatically more productive than, say, Blender for making well-textured sculpted prims. God knows what's possible with pirated motion-capture animation software.

It's one thing to have cheap labor, but if the best third-party software tools represent no barrier to entry because they're all pirated, that L$10 pricetag could quickly acquire the cachet of a designer label.

Just a point - Mrs C is Chinese, but I am pretty sure she (and her business) are actually in Germany.

I don't know why people assume it will be freebie quality. 50-100 people working full time creating are going to get a LOT of practice, I also assume she isn't going to be employing people full time who have no artistic talent.

I am a little concerned as I am in her first catagory of creating, furniture. How will people feel when she increases her factory into their area? Business hasn't exactly been thriving lately for most.

What is the ultimate aim of it? Put a lot of people out of buiness and then raise the prices when you have a monopoly?

If you think about it, the vast majority of SL users spend far less than the monthly WoW fee of ($15?) on SL "stuff." (We're not talking land purchases, tier fees, rent, etc. Just "stuff." I think that if I knew that I had a set monthly budget for my hobby/recreation, I'd be very careful on how I spent it, and I would tend to buy fewer, high quality/unique items, as opposed to many, medium quality/mass market items.

As it is I just buy too many of the former anyway.

Chinese furniture is good. But you are already wanting to redecorate after an hour.

Reading SLEx, some are saying that she has returned to China, don't know if that's correct or not. I must say, being a millionaire and the amount she makes from SL would go a lot further there.

I also can't imagine factories of people making 10L SL items in Germany, you would have to sell a lot to make the living required there.

Argh wildfire. Although Im' not a fan of slx because of how they deal with people personally or behind scenes among other things and they are known for now always practicing good business the 10L dump won't ever dominate the world.

The category was silly that's for sure beacuse it was exclusive and really a kick in the teeth to other merchants. However slx does often kick merchants in the teeth so get used to it ^^.

The actualy concept. This person also sells higher end stuff and having looked at their lower end stuff for 10L is no real threat to anyone who produces decent stuff that truly is worth more then 10L. The baronesse in question will not be making stuff to equal the higher end stuff she already produces and making it 10L for the simple reason that she would loose money doing so as none of the other things she makes would sell. All she is doing is trying to bring the price tag down on average things which in some cases are too high to start with.

I make stuff that is higher end and then i make stuff that is more average or regular. I had underpriced my average market stuff long ago and kept being told to raise the price so eventually i did. I wont worry about lowering the price again because I had originally valued it at that lower price anyhow. She is not going to be pushing me out of the market for the more exotic or unusual stuff I make for the simple reason she would ruin that market for herself.

So no need to panic they changed the name of the category and if she wants to sell with her name stamped all over it she has to create her own shop elsehwere or use ones like everyone else does. i would suspect she will use onrez because it allows to you make a better customized storefront etc.

Anyhow no need to worry about world domination she is better at land then with furniture and houses anyhow her permissions for houses and many furniture items is not one that people would use especialy with some of the price tags on the houses I saw. She may be decent at selling land but content creation and marketing it is a whole other thing in SL and she is not good at that "yet".

If you make stuff that is not average then you have no reason to worry. If your busy selling mediochre stuff to start with for inflated prices then start worrying and making better items

shes' born in china but married and living in germany, but the business is based in china

/me is not in the majority

I think this is only the beginning. Next will come clothes or weapons or vehicles or houses. I understand from reading the SLX forum that the furniture is sold with full perms. I wonder how the person whose anims are used, feels about that?

How can a "monopoly" get created if the items are sold with Full perms?

That had to be a screw-up. It's unfortunately too easy to do if one isn't careful about following the instructions for making full-perm animations *really* have proper perms when sold in an object. (That is, they must be taken into inventory with the animations having proper next-owner perms before being put in the object to be sold.) One sees the same mistake at yard sales all the time.

The furniture itself was not full perms, it was transfer only. The 3rd party animations that the furniture contained, was full perms. And being full perms, you could help yourself to a full perms copy of said animations, after spending L$10 on the furniture.

-Atashi