Advice on Sales!!

Daros and I have just started re-designing our whole mall! Weirdly, for such a big task, it's got me completely re-energised about making items, and all the things we make in general.

So, apologies to those who come to our mall in the next couple of weeks. Expect to trip over halfbricks and scaffolding

til at windmills? That is a new one for me hehe
what does it mean?

re: inviting existing group members to another group... I find that the others said it much better than I did, and yes that is why I am not comfortable with it

sorry if my explaining how it feels to me came out wrong, I do apologize, sometimes I just can not find the right words to say things.

I think she actually meant "tilt" at windmills. Tilting at windmills is to fight an imaginary ememy.

I think Amar meant "tilt at windmills" which is a reference from the book "Don Quixote" made into the play/movie "Man of La Mancha" ("The Impossible Dream" is a great song from it.)

Anyway, basically means to not do something that is basically fruitless.

EDIT TO ADD: Betty beat me to it I did add some literary/theatrical info though...lol

oh never heard that either

thanks

That was what I meant- I am also a hopeless typist.

Edited to add I meant it as Czari explained it: "Anyway, basically means to not do something that is basically fruitless." I do not see any enemies real or imaginary - other than entropy

on a totally different topic

I was just looking at your blog amar, and I am surprised you are just now trying the windlight settings

been awhile back people were discussing windlight and facelights and all that, when I mentioned I had a notecard giver at the store that handed out a notecard with instructions on how to optimize the advanced world settings.

I do all my ad shots in that light, it gives the best results and washes away those ugly shadows

I invite anyone to drop by and grab the notecard and try it themselves

if you do not like it, just revert back to default

(also on a side note, facelights are becoming less and less useful as for how others see you, with the debug menu option of renderattachedlights and renderattachedparticles set to false)
no more blingtards and no more facelights for me LOL

Czari I can relate to the small group thing I don't really try to get people to join my group other than having a group join sign up and personally, I don't really care if they do or not at this point (I used to worry about it but my sales keep going up and with the freebie groups and now the cheep peeps as well as fashcon, I have plenty of people to poke when something new comes out). My group has me, my partner, a few alts, my partner's rl daughters and sister, and 2 other people.

Amar, I did send a notice to my group but see above, don't know how much that helps...but it was just worded as a friendly 'hey did you know this was out there', no pressure.

I don't care about competition, hell there is a ton of it out there, if people like my stuff they will buy it and if they don't, they won't.

And yes, Kudos to Jo Jo for pointing out that the BizOwner group is not for advertising, from time to time we do get new members and they will have to be gently told, I don't think they intended to do wrong...just maybe new or misunderstood what the group is about.

As far as the freebie groups and the Cheep Peep group, hey...it's all exposure It's one more group to send my notecard to, and takes about 30 seconds out of my day which is well worth it to me.

One final question- how the hell do I turn off Hippos if I do not have a damn password for their site?

I made a choice not to jooin the cheep peeps or now because i haveso many groups with notices right now that I am waiting to see if it is worth dropping a group for it.

I have a small group for my store anyway, only like 25 people, so adding me and asking them to join wouldnt be of much benefit overall. I dont ask people to join, i simply have a group inviter at the store if they wish to be added

go to their website, then click the link to manage the groups on that next page it has a link to how you can get a password

just like any site you have to set up a password (register as it were)

(read my post back a few, I explained how to do it)

oor go here (this is where the link goes to, hopefully it works)

http://www.hippo-technologies.co.uk/resources/hippogroups/myhippogroups.php

What Rha said, but just adding - it says this in the instructions on the website, but you have to go in world to get your initial pw that you can change once registered.

I'm still doing a happy dance about that...gold nugget of the day, Rha

Awww, thanks. When I saw someone had actually joined my group the other day, I was like a kid at Christmas! I wrote a notecard (that I will now send to each person who joins the group), put that and a gift in a box, "giftwrapped it" and sent it to the person. Now that I have one, I want to keep her

wading in here on the hippogroups, subscribe o matics etc.

I personally have a subscribe o matic that people have to click to subscribe too, i love them it keeps me informed whats going on in sl with my fav shops. If i need to unsubscribe any i just click and be done with it. I would hope someone would im me if they had problems with it, i would hate to get ar'd over it, in fact i would be devastated, lol. Im a big follow the rules person. I use my subscribey thing for new releases and thats all, i means other people cant write spamming stuff into the group window, so i have more control over it. There are so many people in sl now and new groups popping up all over the place for this and that.

publicity for our shops, which i new the magic ingredient My partner and i are doing a shop together, and just putting it all together now. We did the pumpkin hunt to get people to notice what we have, got a few sales, more joined the group so we are hoping once the dust settled they will look at their gifts and like what they see. Only time can tell. If anyone is in the area pop in and have a look what we have done. Just find my name in world or the link is in my signature (if you have it on). Let me know what you think, honest constructive critiscm, no kissing ass, oh yest they are lovely, but no nasty unconstructive critiscm either. I have a kinda vintage style i guess when it comes to clothes i like designs from the 50's up to the 90's i guess.

okay, wading out now going back to figure out what to put out this week! clothes, furniture or jewellery Oh My!

as a consumer I am in a few subscribe o matic groups and a few hippo style groups and I much prefer the hippo as I can log onto the website and check msgs there
I had to leave one subscribe o matic group of a well known designer because I do not like getting 3 or 4 notices (sometimes per day) for items that could be put all in one notice once a week. (it reminds me of folks who do 1 new post after another on the new products forum here, when they could do just one post about all the new stuff)


as a merchant I used the subscribe o matic and it got too costly (almost 500 members before I switched to hippo) and no ability that I knew of to create additional groups on the one account, and no real website interactivity. (this was before they changed to the free for up to 500 members deal they have now) I think they are feeling the crunch of competition

I now use the hippo group system and absolutely love it, I love that I can send a msg from the web, so if SL is acting up for me, or if I happen to be away from my PC I can simply use the laptop to log on the web (or a net cafe pc, library pc, friends pc, etc) and send out a notice to the group via the web...

you are welcome czari, I have mentioned it before (about the hippo having the online usability and such) guess a lot fo folks either did not read it or missed it LOL

Surreal I think that you are coming along nicely Only problem I had was your freebies wouldn't work so I couldn't get one to dissect hehe but I've had a good day today so I bought a gown

When I examine another designer's stuff, the very first thing I look at is the shoulder seams and underarm, where the front template meets the back template. The gown had no shoulders but under the arm the seams matched perfectly and believe me, that is not always the case! I have picked apart things from some pretty well known designers and sometimes what I see there surprises me. (of course I am usually picking apart freebies but meh, it has their name on it). Perfect shoulders and underarms are hard to achieve (and since there were gloves with this gown, I checked them too) and when they are nice like that, I know that you put some real effort into it, it doesn't happen by luck. The next thing I look at is the shading and wrinkling which (I am not sure if it was by design) did not seem to be much of. I am basically still learning that part, and I think still have a tendency to overdo (less is more less is more less is more I tell myself as I add just one more), but done well it gives the clothes a more realistic look.

(and let me say here that I don't claim my stuff is perfect, I'm human!)

I think the gown is lovely, and I love the almost transparent top part of the skirt, gives the skirt a very gauzy, floaty feel.

As for the packaging, a couple things. I prefer myself for things to be copy/mod but I think that as consumers, SL are pretty divided on this, so whatever works for you But one thing I would do differently, is to put parts on multiple layers. Usually when I offer a gown (for example) the pant/glitch pant will be on 2 layers, and the bodice will be on 3. This gives the consumer a lot of options, and they appreciate that.

Feel free to pick apart my work as well, that goes for anyone

If people pick apart your clothes, won't they fall off?

/me blushes

edit: reminds me of a funny story, the other day I was in Alady cause there was a 'free 10k worth of skins' thing so I had to get mine I went home and started trying on skins, in order for me to evaluate a skin to see if I want to keep it, I need to get naked. So there I am on my pose stand, butt naked and bald. I open a new package and a landmark opens and I click on it by mistake. I end up naked in the middle of Alady and because of the free skins thing, it was...of course...full of people. /me blushes again

/me cringes for you just thinking about that *hugs*

Thank you for you constructive critiscm, i really appreciate it . I hadnt thought about putting them on different layers but i will def look into that. I have a thing about seams not matching so i really work alot of them. Im still learning wrinkling shadings etc, and sometimes they look really great in ps and not so great in sl, lol. Though i just bought a new graphics card so im hoping that will make a difference.

Im glad you liked my dress, its one of my favourites, i love the overlay cause it does give it that chiffonny feel

Oops on my freebies, i will check them out. If i remember i will send them off to you

thanks again for taking the time

*sighs and nods* I scrapped one tonite lol...looked so good in paintshop

yep same here, hate mismatched seams, makes me cringe

and been there done that, looks soooo good in ps, only to not quite meet my expectations in SL

Rhaorth, I was wondering if you had found an easy way to move members over to your new group when you changed systems? I've been looking at the Hippo group system since it was mentioned here, and it really would save me a lot of money and seems to have some nice features, but the idea of moving over almost 1700 members manually is pretty daunting....

I'm thinking, as I use also Subscrib-o-matic system, that not all your members are active one. That's a feature I would like to have with subscrib-o-matic, at least to know the last logon date to be able to eveluate this.
So if I decided to move to Hippo system, I would send a notice each day during one week throught subsrib-o-matic offering a big gift to the one who will subsribe the new Hyppo system. Also with that, it would help me to update with active and not with unactive members.

Speak for yourself. I absolutely hate getting a bajillion items, all the same except for the layering, in the same folder. If a designer wants them to be worn as glitch pants and not glitch underwear, that's fine with me. The less crap in my Inventory, the better.