Friday, May 23, 2008

A brief history........

It's been a pretty fun trip so far. About fifteen months ago, I was trying to start my first SL business and happened upon what I originally though was a good idea :X I had started off purchasing clothes and a variety of items to fill up a lot that I had purchased. In that time, I also bought into an Afantasy Wholesale package. I think I purchased around 15 sets of shoes (times 10)

Well...........when I discovered that the BIABs were a device to move stolen content and freebies, I wacked the entire inventory and was left with about 150 pairs of shoes. Going through all of the items I started taking a look at the full perms shoes. Well for some reason, I decided that I could make better designs. I stumbled through a pair and just didn't get it. Although, they weren''t that bad in form -- the execution just sucked.

After trying quite a few avenues of business, I settled into my Grab and Go camping systems and developed a full sim camper that campers had to wear and object to register -- but the shoes were always in the back of my mind :) Grab and Go launched June of '07 with a full product line and was a significant success. That summer, the concept for a complete marketing system was already in the works -- knowing that camping would be a limited venture -- the Grab and Go Object Camping system was born with support for a Gift Card system (heehee)

In that time, something clicked. I would have shoes!I originally reverse engineered a pair of full perms shoes to see what was going on and the light shown down! I immediately made 5 pairs with different styles which are still available at the store and are generally considered free (when using the Grab and Go giftcard ;) The pinnacle moment of my amateur cobbling was the creation of the Gold and Strappy shoes -- my friends went nuts over then -- the Strappy series to this day remain one of the most popular in my store. Well through natural evolution, I built my business to more than 140 pair in different colors and styles. The last phase being sculpted products, I originally contracted a couple of pair from a very talented 3d artist. Since then, I have cracked Blender and have been modeling the latest and greatest releases for Shoe Fly. Blender does give me fits from time to time but the learning experience has been very satisfying. Expect to see more sculpted products each month as this whole process has tickled my creativity bone and I can say I honestly love what I do.

Thanks to special peeps along the way that helped the business become what it is -- Soda and Jeremy of Bubblefish, Cerrie Janus of Fashion Ascension, Fashcon, My sweetie, Marybeth Undercroft (who pushes me to the limits of design and inspires me regularly) , my friends and affiliates, and finally ----- my Awesome Customers who proudly where the 'Shoe Fly Rocks! hat ;)

Cheers

CC

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Inspiring story. Love your designs :)

CCTV Giant said...

Oh you're just partial -- where ya been stranger?