vdbv.designs: January 2009

The title of the post may look funny of misleading but we are trying to give you a real life analogy of what happened to vdbv.designs in Second Life. To continue with the analogy, imagine walking in a Wrangler jeans store and seeing that on the ad displays on the walls, the models are obviously wearing the 501 jeans by Levi's!

Would this ever happen in the real world? Most probably it wouldn't. Not because it is illegal but mainly because, first, Wrangler wouldn't have wanted to undermine their own line of jeans by showing the Levi's ones and second, because Levi's will not be very happy knowing that Wrangler tries to promote their jeans line by showing the 501s on the ad displays.

Well most certainly the above scenario cannot happen in real world but it can very much happen in Second Life. After a tip from a customer, we discovered a former tattoo-only store that decided to expand to the body hair business. No problem with that, on the contrary. Competition is a valuable and good thing, since it makes us work harder in order to improve our designs.
However, his 3 released body hair items are next to his 70+ tattoo items which show a model wearing one of our most recognizable and top selling body hair set, the {Morpheus}. The {Morpheus} Body Hair set is not only displayed on the tattoo items, it is everywhere you look. On the freebie box, the landmark giver display, even the sign and the classified image for the store!

We have absolutely no problem with showing our body hair items on anyone's stores. There are numerous stores in-world (clothing, underwear, accessories etc) that use our body hair items on their displays, and we are very pleased when we see those. However, the problem arises when someone tries to sell a certain type of product when at the same time uses a similar product of another merchant everywhere in his store!

It is more than obvious that there is a conflict or at least bad style, isn't it? Well, probably not for the merchant in question who seems that he is unable to grasp what is wrong with that. Or, to be precise, he is very able to understand what the issue is, but probably he is too lazy to update his store displays or just move the body hair in another floor. Or he just like this kind of false advertising, thinking that it will increase his profits. Unfortunately, this cannot be any further from the truth.