Britanyj Crimson earned 34,000 dollars last month online through the sale of jewelry she designed and created herself. That doesn’t include what her shop took in as donations for Relay For Life. Not bad for a business that didn’t exist before February 2007.
Britanyj is selling her wares on Second Life, and those Linden dollars translate to only about $120 in US dollars at current market rates. But for Dana Jones, the first world Web developer behind Second Mirage (the name of the jewelry shop), that revenue covers the expenses of what has become a rather pricey hobby. She projects that it could become a sideline business for her by the end of the year if she continues having sales growth akin to what she saw in April. (Full disclosure: Jones is the wife of WWD contributor Mike Gunderloy.)
Those of us who haven’t joined the 6.7 million residents of Second Life may marvel at the US$50 million spent for real during a given month in this virtual world. But people like Jones considers her online life a “natural for those of us who spend a lot of time on the Internet.”
Although the media has given great visibility to people doing land speculation, by buying an entire SIM and breaking it into pieces and selling or renting them, “You have to hold onto a parcel a good, long time to make money that way,” Jones said.
What drove her into retail — and jewelry, more specifically — was self-serving. She couldn’t find the accessories she wanted to go with the outfits she was buying on the site to clothe her virtual persona. Her initial efforts were quite crude, she said. But tutorials from Lumiere Noir’s Ivory Tower of Primitives taught her the basics of manipulating primitives and microprims, the basic building blocks of objects in Second Life. From there she set up a tiny jewelry store and has been expanding her collection ever since.

Marketing takes place in the same ways it happens in first life. Word of mouth generates the biggest sales. “I have a few customers who are really loyal,” Jones said. “They’ll hand out my landmark [a kind of Second Life business card]. People get it and click on it and they can go right to my store.”
She sells through two online catalogs SLboutique and SLExchange; participates in a list, Fashion Consolidated, where new additions to the collection will be broadcast to members; and provides her collection to Second Life fashion blog, LindenLifestyles.com, in the hopes of garnering favorable reviews. In September she’ll join SLJewelry Exposition, which, as one promotion states, will be a “week-long showcase of some of Second Life’s jewelry designers.” That will include classes, meets and greets, a treasure hunt and a charity auction — all online.
Jones tries to update her collection weekly with new pieces, constantly promotes traffic to her shop by offering free pieces for a limited time, and does custom work. Her biggest commission to date — a set of collars — took a week to piece together and earned her 18,000 Linden Dollars — about USD$63.
In other words, she runs her Second Life business with all the energy and attention of a First Life endeavor.
All is not easy money in this parallel universe. Jones complains about lag time, the lack of a truly useful mentor program and lousy neighbors. “We had a nice SIM for a long time,” she said, referencing the computer her island was hosted on. “Quiet neighbors. A building style fairly similar to ours. Realistic colors. Parks. Then we had neighbors moving in and building clubs and theme parks — garish and noisy with used particles all over.”
So, after finding out that their “nasty, particle-spewing neighbors” had purchased more land, “planning to do God-knows-what with it,” over Memorial Day weekend, she and husband Gunderloy bought their own island, a USD$1,675 purchase. Like many aspiring shopkeepers, she dreams of expanding her store.
Are you raking in the Linden Dollars on Second Life? We’d like to hear your advice for simulated entrepreneurs.
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