Salacity History (longform)

Like so many designers, my beginnings as a creator of content for Second Life were humble and somewhat accidental: my first creations were a few gestures (probably the easiest thing to make in SL) that some friends thought were cute enough to list in the Marketplace. Believe it or not, I actually had the nerve to charge L$5 for these gestures at first. (Now they are freebies, and yes, people actually get them sometimes.)

Also, spurred on by a couple of crazy designer friends who regaled me with tales of big earnings, I soon began to dabble with making tattoo appliers. I had a few ideas initially, and quickly was offered more ideas from friends for more. All of the tattoos were a little bawdy and adult-themed, and priced at the tongue-in-cheek pricepoint of L$69. 

The original Salacity logo

Salacity, my store and brand, was launched with these. Why "Salacity"? I wanted a word that suggested the more adult-natured themes of the work I was doing, but I also wanted something that was a bit more high-brow and, yes, maybe that people had to look up.

I adopted the tagline from a blog I had been keeping on and off for years (it's still out there in the blogosphere), since it too seemed fitting: "Purveyor of Fine Smut." 

Branching Out

While making tattoos and thinking that might be the extent of my creative endeavors in SL, I bought some animations that I wanted to add into a bed that I owned. Little did I know this would be a major shift in creativity for me.

Looking back, I'm sure there was a misunderstanding along the way: the maker of the poses I bought sold them with full-permissions as well as "copy only" (the latter is really only useful for the purpose I intended, to add to something existing). Yet, when I asked for help in knowing how to do this, she told me I needed to be in their designer's group to do what I wanted, which required that I create a simple example of furniture that I was able to build.

I found an inexpensive full-perm chair and a few free sitting animations, and then I bit the bullet and bought AvSitter (back when you still had to pay full price for it). Borrowing on my limited texturing ability from making tattoos, I cobbled it together and got approval for the designer's group.

Salacity's first furniture release!

Now I knew how to "make" furniture in SL—and so I began to work with it more and more, quickly building up a library of animations and buying full-perm mesh models when I could afford them. My first chair eventually became a kinky adult chair with multiple texture options, and it's still something I'm proud of (and sell in my MP store).

Narrowing Down

Over the coming months after learning how to use AvSitter, texture mesh objects, and configure scripts and animations, I dabbled in just about everything. I think most designers go through this phase, and I certainly jumped in with both feet.

I had a line of sassy t-shirts I called "Salaci-Tees." I put together a line of jewelry called "Bijoux by Salacity." I made gag gifts and jokes under the label "Salacity Silly Stuff."

My first static pose set

And I tried making static poses and photo props. These, actually, became a major side-focus for me over the years, not least because so many of my friends in SL at the time were photographers and bloggers, and they seemed to be constantly hungry for some new poses and props to use. Maybe in a future post I will expand a bit on how static poses are created—it can be pretty fun.

Eventually, however, I settled into making furniture and decor almost exclusively. These became my passion and absorbed 95% of my attention for the next half-decade.

Setting Up Shop

Many friends urged me to set up an in-world store. "You NEED a store," they said, "So that people can demo your furniture and see whether they want to buy it."

This made a lot of sense—but also looked like it would cost me a lot of money. Fortunately, I had a secret weapon that very few in SL have the benefit of: a benefactor who, in support of me and my creative efforts, offered to underwrite the cost of rent for my store. Scotty was the first (but, gratefully, not the last) person to see potential in what I was trying to do and make.

Scotty and me in front of my first shop!

A friend of mine had recently featured a quaint, lovely shopping district on her blog, and on her recommendation I inquired about their rates. We made arrangements and Greg fronted me the rent—an investment he would go on to make for more than a year, which frankly made possible what otherwise would have been out of reach, cost-wise.

Learning about Promotional Groups

In that quaint little shopping district called Mode St. Andres, I not only had my first-ever in-world store—I also made my first professional acquaintances. I'd had friends who were designers already, but these were the first friends I made through my store and designing. (A big shout-out to Phedre and Alex is called for here.)

One major piece of advice that these two ladies gave me, regarding growing my store and brand: joining groups that allowed you to promote through them. It seemed like both of them were in over a dozen active groups that generated a good bit of traffic to their stores, and they urged me to seek out groups appropriate for home and garden wares and do what it took to get into them.

I found a few, and some allowed me to join right away. Others had requirements, some of which I could meet and others I couldn't. Some were simply inactive, or at least the people that managed the group were (making it impossible to get into). What these groups enable you to do is promote items, new releases, and sales in your store through their group—which means that (depending on the group's membership) potentially thousands of users will receive your notice. Some groups are way more effective than others, but for a beginning designer then any group is more promotion than I had been receiving so far.

I really learned a lot from my peers in Mode St. Andres, including...

Introduction to Sales Events

Somehow, an event organizer (/me waves to Yuna) found my little store and thought highly enough of my builds to invite Salacity to her event. The Virtual Secrets Sales Room (no relation at all to the website which commandeered that name a couple of years later) was my first sales event!

For reasons that pass understanding at this point, I opted to focus on static poses and photo props at that event, rather than furniture. Probably because these were fairly new for me—I'd only been making my own static poses for a month or so at that point. And because most of the event focused on fashion, so I presumed that the shoppers wouldn't be so interested in home and garden (but maybe they would be photographers and/or bloggers). 

I had been to FaMESHed and Shiny Shabby, but otherwise I was very unfamiliar with the events scene in SL at that point. I know now that my reasons above make little sense in the reality of it all, and I may have done even better with furniture at Virtual Secrets. There is a LOT to say about events in SL, which will be saved for future posts, but the truth is that there is no set, reliable strategy that works well for every designer at every event.

Salacity was a regular feature at VSSR for the next six months or so—and along with that came invitations to other smaller events. I tried them all, and as long as I earned my registration fee back I stuck with them for at least a few rounds. 

New Stores, and Foot Traffic

Even though I adored my little shop in the Mode St. Andres shopping district, I outgrew it quickly—not hard to do when furniture is the main thing you're making. So I made arrangements with the two owners of the district to take over a larger shop just up the street.

As delightful as Mode St. Andres was—and frankly, it was a more photogenic setting than almost any other shopping district I've seen—the only traffic my store got was generated from events or groups. There just wasn't much foot traffic in the shopping district. Slowly I figured out that the days of gaining shoppers and sales via "foot traffic" in a shopping district were largely behind us.

And so, some months later when we were informed that Mode St. Andres would be closing, two friends and I decided that we didn't need an established shopping district at all. Why not set up in our own space, create a "shopping district" of our own?

Which is exactly what we did. We rented a large parcel on an established sim, what amounted to roughly 1/9th of the sim, and figured out how to fit three stores on it. These were women I also shared a residential parcel with, and we'd named our residence "The Island of Misfit Toys"—so our shopping district became the "Misfits Shopping District" (which seemed oddly fitting). 

More firsts! My first foray into renting commercial land directly; my first commercial building purchased; my first branching out into management of property... So much more was to come.

Moving Forward, Moving Up

That new store setup and location served Salacity well for over a year, and we slowly grew and added on to our little Misfits shopping district. Eventually we got the parcel next to ours as well, and expanded to include stores for another couple of friends.

The only problem was that those who occupied the neighboring sims were not always good neighbors. One operated a club that was consistently annoying customers in our shops with group invitations and spam about their DJs. Another raised breedables and they consumed a ton of resources, often creating lag. Something was going to have to change, and soon. (And it did—details in a future post!)

Meanwhile, though, Salacity's inventory continued to grow, and little by little I received invitations to more and better events. But the next major change was that, through events, Salacity got exposure to the vast community of SL bloggers—some of whom contacted me about blogging for Salacity directly!

I'd heard about how blogging could be a boost for promotion in SL, and had even dipped my toe into those unknown waters through events and an in-world group focused on connecting designers and bloggers. But this was the first time I'd had bloggers who actually wanted to blog MY stuff directly. I started small, with an in-world group for distribution and a very loosely organized approach. Soon, though, this expanded into something much bigger. 

Sim Ownership: A Beast of Its Own

The occasional tensions and frustrations with our sim neighbors at the original Misfits shopping district continued to be a problem. The solution? Why not buy/lease a whole sim for ourselves?

(To be clear: it's not possible in SL to fully own land outright. Even if you buy land directly from Linden Lab, there will always be fees and maintenance costs that essentially amount to Linden Lab still "owning" the rights to the land. Unless they set up some system where people can host their own sims 100% free of charge, real estate in SL will always be, at most, a leasing agreement.)

There are many companies in SL that broker real estate; you can "buy" parcels of all sizes, homesteads, and full sims. Buying a sim means that you have total control over everything about the sim: all of the rights and settings are up to you, and whomever you designate as co-owners or property managers. 

We managed to find a full sim with 20K prims allowed (not the max, which saved us some Lindens) for a very reasonable price—not all that much more than we were already paying for the four parcels we already had for commercial and residential use. So we divided the sim into fourths, with ¼ sim devoted to our new shopping district (and the rest set up to be residential space for the co-owners). The Misfits Shopping District now had a (HUGE) new home, with plenty of space for new stores to rent if they wanted to.

What an exciting turn of events! Of course, with it came more responsibilities. We needed to sub-let those new store spaces, or we were stuck covering the difference in cost ourselves. But with the space we had, we could eventually end up paying less for this sim than we had for the parcels we were leasing before. A win for everyone.

Bloggers, Bloggers Everywhere!

As I mentioned before, I began to have bloggers approaching me about working directly with Salacity to promote my creations. I was familiar with the idea of have a team of bloggers, but I knew nothing about how to do it. I started off with a small in-world group to manage them, using it for distribution of new releases as well as communications.

Soon, though, it became clear that I needed help with it—at very least because I had no idea what "managing bloggers" was supposed to entail. I decided to advertise for a blogger manager, and my friend Scotty, who (in addition to being a patron of sorts, and a silent partner) functioned as something of a business advisor to me, and we interviewed the applicants together.

Two of them stood out, for very different reasons, and in the end we hired both! But for very different jobs. Lawrence D. Pryce, who has gone on to do great things in the world of SL, was my very first blogger manager for Salacity. Unfortunately, he didn't last too long in that role because of some miscommunications and tensions with other members of the Salacity team. In retrospect, I regret that things ended with Law the way that they did.

The other candidate that we'd hired (to function in more of a promotional and developmental role), Quiggles, took over blogger management soon after Law left the team. She managed our bloggers for about six months, before RL demands forced her to step away from all responsibilities with Salacity.

With that I was at a loss! I didn't know what to do about it, so I turned to one of our bloggers—with whom I had begun to develop a friendship—who also happened to work with some other brands and groups as a blogger manager, asking for advice. I'd hoped she might give me the name of another good candidate for the job, but as we talked then it soon became clear to both of us that she would be ideal for the position! LauraGenia Viper took over immediately as Salacity's blogger manager, and held that role until I shut it down in April 2020.

Making My Own Mesh

From the earliest days of Salacity's existence, one thing was clear: the brands that could claim to make their own mesh models outranked those who used prefabricated "templates" for their creations.

I understand why this higher status for genuinely original mesh makers has arisen, and it makes sense in some ways. But it has also created problems (which I will address in a future post) and, in most cases, the customers don't really care.

Nevertheless, this was another glass ceiling demanding to be broken through—not least because it was the deciding factor for the next level up in events that I wanted to participate in. When an event has said they only accept original mesh makers, full-stop, then there's not really much choice to it.

I had been dabbling with Blender for a while, then once I got over my initial discomfort with simply opening the application and staring at all of the many menus and buttons I took on some very simple projects. Gradually, over many months, I became comfortable enough with working in Blender to start to make some things worth uploading into SL.

Many more months later, I was finally making my own mesh for projects I wanted to complete in-world. By summer of 2018, I was making all of the mesh that I needed for the new releases I offered.

I am still proud of the work I did using "template" mesh, and there are a few items that I think are some of my best texturing work on top of pre-fab mesh models. But breaking through into making my own mesh definitely was a "level up" moment for me, and for Salacity.

Improvements Come Slowly

As I had hoped, I saw some important changes due to my efforts to learn to make my own mesh. Slowly but surely things were improving.

For one thing, revenues increased while costs dropped. I no longer had to pay substantial prices to buy mesh from others; I only had to pay the upload fees for my own mesh—so the cost of production for each project dropped, sometimes substantially. At the same time, the perception that "original mesh" is more valuable (because, theoretically, it cannot be bought from any other store) allowed for a slight increase in prices.

Another improvement was that one more obstacle was removed from my path, on the way to the events I aspired to be part of. In a few cases, this paid off quickly; my applications for some events were accepted and I was invited to participate. In other cases, there were other (unknown) obstacles preventing me from grasping those brass rings. Nevertheless, I was grateful to become part of the group of designers that were known for "original mesh." 

At the same time, I began to recognize what a dubious distinction that actually is. The claim of "original mesh" is a vague, ambiguous label, and discussing how this matters in SL is worth at least one other post of its own. Suffice it to say here, it's not always all that it is cracked up to be.

Growing Ambitions

The more events you are in, the more designers you meet and become friends—or at least professional acquaintances—with. And my list of fellow designer-friends was growing steadily. As it grew, I found more and more of my social experiences in SL were focused on talking shop. 

One of the things that happens when you talk shop with other designers is you begin to feel insignificant, unaccomplished, and inept. At least, that was MY experience, quite regularly. When my friends would talk about the events they were in, or the amount of lindens they were bringing in from new releases, I often questioned whether what I was doing was worth the time I put into it. It was tempting to feel jealous or even envious of them.

Yet, through those conversations there were hints of encouragement too. The same friends wouldn't let me compare myself to them unfavorably, but would respond with hope. "You'll get there," they often said. 

I began to wonder whether that was true, in an ambitious way. Could I reach the level that I wanted for my store and brand? I began to dream, cautiously, about what that would look like.

I decided on a couple of benchmarks that, I thought, represented a level of accomplishment and breaking through to the next level for Salacity. One was that I become a regular designer for two or three events that were consistent earners—no more breaking even, I needed events to produce worthwhile revenues for the time I was putting into them. Another was that I would have income from Salacity that was sufficient enough to support "cashing out" on a regular basis in amounts that would equal real money in RL.

Over the months to come after determining these goals, I would try many different ways to reach them...