Frustrations #1: "New" brands that do better than yours

I posted a few days ago about store groups and how hard it is to build them up. Today in my Facebook feed I saw an announcement about another store celebrating their 3000th group member in-world—and as it happens, that store/brand is only a few years old. I remember when they launched, and it was years after I launched Salacity (in fact, years after I'd begun to make earnest progress with Salacity).

This is a perfect example of one of the many frustrations that came my way (and probably will come your way as well) in SL: there will be brands that are introduced and seem to have an uncanny amount of success, while you're busting your ass to gain even half of the success that they've had seemingly drop into their laps.

In this particular case, the brand is a collaboration of two designers who were well-established already, and when they launched out they brought with them a lot of connections and experience. In addition, they are talented designers who have worked very hard in building this new brand. The frustration is certainly not aimed at them in particular, nor are they in any way deserving of disdain or shade.

This sort of thing goes much deeper than experience, hard work, or networking, though. There's a lot of "right time, right place" luck in SL store promotion and advancement, to be sure. But there's also a convoluted sort of "good ol' boy" network that favors those people (and their brands) that have made the "right" connections and kissed the right asses to get ahead. And there are rain-makers who play favorites ruthlessly, and if you're not one of their chosen peeps, you will not get the advantages that these fortunate few get.

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