Dinner anyone?

Among the new items we show at the Home, Garden and Patio Expo are three dining tables, consisting of a balanced mix of regular prims and sculpted prims aimed at fast loading and good Level of Detail (LOD) rezzing. The tables feature a Spring, Autumn or Holiday runner and have two sitting-on-table poses built in. Right now they are exclsuively available at the Expo. Versions with different permissions will be available in our shops next week.

Irish Love

I am a friend of all things Celtic, and apart from Scotland Ireland is one of my most favourite countries. Ivanova even has Irish roots – her red hair and her love for all things green are living proof for that. So it’s no surprise we made a special edition of our Berlin sofa to commemorate St. Patrick’s Day (March 17), the most important Irish holiday. Find this special edition in any of our shops, or on Xstreet SL.

Putting some EMPHASIS on color

GREENE concept is pleased to announce the Emphasis range of chairs. Inspired by the modern classic “Emeco 1006 Navy chair”, a back-pleasing aluminium chair fabricated in a 77 step process, the Emphasis range offers a LOD (level of depth) optimized modern sculpted look with only 7 prims (including shadowprim). Each Emphasis chair contains 4 poses that can be manually changed or automatically cycled.

Emphasis is availbale in 9 colors: Blue, Gold Metallic, Green, Orange, Purple, Red, Silver Metallic, Sky and Yellow. The menu-driven “Any Color” pack allows seamless tinting plus adding shine and glow.

Pricing:

• Emphasis singe color, transferable: 50 L$
• Emphasis single color, copyable: 150 L$
• Emphasis any color, transferable: 100 L$
• Emphasis any color, copyable: 350 L$

The chairs are available in our shop at Beachwood and will be on OnRez and Xstreet SL soon.

The dynamics of Dollarbies – advice for content creators

Washu Zebrastripe, widely accepted as the inventress of prim hair, had the opening party for her “Hairspray 2″ sim tonight, and asked some designers for gifts to hand out during the party. Being not exactly the target audience for a sim dedicated to hair, we decided to donate the Halloween Berlin and the Halloween clock as a gift for the opening. Washu said it can either be set for sale as a freebie at 0 L$ or to be set to sale for 1 L$ and become a “Dollarbie” – a term coined by another hair designer – Teagan Blackthorne. As both items are from our regular portfolio with retail prices of 222 L$ resp. 111 L$, I opted for the Dollarbie option, and set the boxes up. My expectations got exceeded when I saw that our boxes got bought 198 times during the event! While this only constitutes a revenue of 198 L$ (which is not to be dismissed of course), the real value is the additional exposure we got. Since most people got both boxes, we now have 100 people who know about GREENE concept who did not know about us before. And if they rez our items in their homes, friends might see them and inquire further.

From Dollarbies I have seen at other places, there are a few observations for content creators – which also apply to real freebies:

• Quality
  Your Dollarbie is like a business card. If you set an outdated item as Dollarbie, or stick two prims together and paint them, then the person getting the gift will either generalize the quality of your whole range with the quality of the gift, or they will get a bad impression from the dedication you have. Both is negative.
  But if you see your Dollarbie as a reference and use the same care creating it as you do with your other items, then you leave a good impression. Not only does your customer have the feeling of making a bargain, they will also have a good impression from the way you run your business.

• Psychological value
  Funny enough, customers seem more reluctant to pay 1 L$ for an object with unclear content, than paying several hundreds L$ and knowing exactly what they get. So if you package your Dollarbie, dont pack it all into one prim and name it “Gift from xyz”. Instead, put the items separately into the vendor prim. This applies especially for clothing, where more layers are considered more valuable.

• Dollarbies DO add up
  If you have the choice of setting one Dollarbie up or two – chose the higher number. If the event or venue is attractive enough, you will get a lot of sales from the Dollarbie boxes, and a second box effectively doubles the revenue.

• Give additional information
  This sounds like a no-brainer, but I saw it neglected a lot in Dollarbies and Freebies I bought. Even if you think you are a well known brand, don’t forget to put a landmark to your mainshop into the box. A notecard outlining your product portfolio is certainly advisable. Adding attractive photos of your best-selling items to the box is the ultimate you can do. If the customer likes your Dollarbie, s/he is likely to look at the photos and notecards to, and will probably visit your mainstore as well.

• Provide customer service
  People who bought a Dollarbie are your customers. They paid money to get one of your products. Even if it is “only” 1 L$, my advice would be to treat them like regular customers. If they come to you with an issue regarding the Dollarbie, they are not a nuisance, but they actually demonstrate that they USE your creation. And if they use it and like it, they are very likely to like other items from you as well. Denying customer service to them, simply based on the fact that they did not pay regular rates, can ruin the best impression they might have had so far. Again – they showed willingness to spend money for one of your creations. So see a customer service request as an opportunity to win a loyal repeat customer.