Smart Bunny: Playboy Sells Fashion Created And Co-Branded By Second Life Designers

Bunny Kerowynn Lubitsch strikes a pose in KO Designs' Playboy bustier

With regular events and a staff of gregarious, frequently dancing Bunnies, Playboy's official Second Life presence, a tropical island club developed by Boston's Green Grotto Studios, is one of the few real world company sites boasting steady visitor traffic.  (Direct SLURL teleport at this link.) And unless I missed a previous announcement, it can now claim another title: the first major company to link its brand with Second Life-only brands.  In this case, Playboy-branded fashion sold on the official island, but created and promoted by SL designers who are an integral part of the label; among them, KO Designs, Alpha Male, Sharkture, and Simply Spoiled.

"Initially we approached retail by creating replica versions of real clothing that is sold at playboystore.com," Green Grotto's MSGiro Grosso tells me.  "Over time we decided that we would make that a smaller portion of the retail experience and engage some of the top designers in SL to create exclusive SL-only Playboy collections as well as provide them with the opportunity to re-sell some of their existing clothing line and expand their brand."  It's a bold move, considering how sensitive and protective corporations are with their labels and trademarks (even Linden Lab themselves)-- especially Playboy, one of the most well-known brands on the planet. 

According to Grosso, however, it wasn't hard to convince executives in Hefner's empire to experiment.

"To be honest it wasn't that difficult," he says. "The initial concept behind retail was to utilize the virtual versions of real goods to drive sales of those goods online, but those sales weren't as high as expected." Instead, he argues, "it made perfect sense to create exclusive goods for the SL community independent of any real world goods."  He was able to convince Playboy of this, he says, in a single meeting. "Although we are still mixing in real world goods you can generate a good amount of buzz and excitement around specific items that users cannot get anywhere else but our sim."

Most of their items sell for L$150-300 or so, a US dollar or two.  "Honestly the sales strategy is 'How do we get one person to spend one dollar?'," says Grosso, "Which probably raises a few eyebrows, but I think sometimes we forget that we're dealing in a world of micropayments and that requires mass consumption to create significant revenue."

I should add a full disclosure and mention Playboy briefly advertised on this blog when it launched in Second Life early last year.  However, the real bias is my own: I've long advocated the idea of real companies working with existing brands and entrepreneurs in Second Life to "re-imagine their brands merged to existing SL-based brands which have already proved themselves in a world of infinite possibility."  I hope to see more of this collaboration, in fashion and beyond.

Comments

[Chez Nabob]

I've long wondered why more RL companies didn't try with more regularity.

Success in SL means constant updating and refreshing of whatever you're offering. How many RL brands have come in, set up shop and then walked away only to wonder why no one came to see them after the initial crush of curiosity passed? Duh...once I've seen what you have to offer, I'm not going to keep coming back if it's the same stuff every time I'm there.

The truth is RL companies don't have the time to devote to refreshing their lineup in SL, and if they did it just means devoting more employees to the effort which drives up their costs. For them SL is a marketing effort, not a money-making effort. Why not enlist the help of SL-based content creators who will refresh the content on a regular basis and just let them keep the revenues (or the bulk of the revenues anyway) on the items sold? It costs the RL company next to nothing even if they paid the content creator some kind of retainer (certainly less than they'd have to pay a full-time employee), and they get people coming back to see what new product/service, etc. has been introduced.

I believe this is the model for success for RL companies in SL, and have thought so for a long time.

[Ann Otoole]

Ya think?

Of course this is the right thinking.

I've been curious as to why nobody thinks correctly along these lines in the first place.
(interestingly this topic came up during interviews with some university students during the last 48 hours. Very interesting indeed)

Isn't like this is original thinking either. This was thought of and worked on as far back as 1996 (I was there) but the graphics stunk so it was a dead horse till now.

But since I'm now a one celled animal in a ocean of big fish nobody has cared much about what I think.

There is a formula that will work. Too bad I don't have the rl name/brand/funding to make a go of making it happen.

Oh well. I'll just sit on the sideline watching most people try wrong thinking as I struggle to eck out a living the hard way.

It is refreshing to see there are still some savvy business thinkers after all.

[Caterin Semyorka]

Who the hell wants a crummy playboy outift?

[MSGiro Grosso]

Really? That's it Caterin? That's all you could say? Care to elaborate on your comment? Otherwise it's just hate. It may not be for you, but for others it is. That's what needs to be embraced within the community; the ability to be and do what you want. You choose to wear a latex Union Jack. Others prefer a shirt designed by Shakture. No harm. No foul.

Ann, you are right that it's not original thinking, but a thought is useless without action. At least we acted on it. There are lots of great ideas not being acted upon and more bad ones being acted upon. It's up to people like you (if you ditch the self-deprecation your cell may experience some osmosis) to scream and shout at the top of their lungs over and over again until "they" start to listen.

Chez, the corps won't succeed until they realize the rules they play by within more traditional interactive mediums need to be thrown out, re-written and adopted by a certain amount of people for it to be considered "cool" to do. Most prefer to play it safe and not take risks. It's natural. With the Playboy sim we are constantly experimenting and refreshing to see what works. Thanks to the internal support we have the freedom and willingness (that's key here) to do it and not just execute another marketing campaign.