Playboy Successfully Extends Brand Second Life to Local Designers

Playboy opened up an island in Second Life back in June. It's seen steady traffic, especially for a real-world brand in Second Life, but it's no secret that native businesses and brands have almost always been more attractive to users. K Zero has experimented successfully with distributing L'Oreal-branded products through other Second Life vendors. Playboy has taken the opposite approach, inviting Second Life designers to create Playboy-branded merchandise and sell it on their island. "To be honest it wasn't that difficult," MSGiro Grosso, who works for Green Grotto, the company that designed the sim, told New World Notes. "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. It made perfect sense to create exclusive goods for the SL community independent of any real world goods. 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." [More details at New World Notes and some interesting thoughts at DigAdo]