Online Collector

The site also provides incentives to create new designs as opposed to buying existing brands, since the creation of one’s own design costs more time than money. The principal financial investment comes in the form of acquiring retail space with virtual dollars to make the product available to other users in Second Life.Branding is a key element to the Second Life concept. One user who is an advertising executive in New York noted that the “real draw” of Second Life is the “creative driven process” of developing, marketing and selling one’s own brand in the virtual world. Second Life blogs abound and the site has even created its own version of Wikipedia, where users have lauded the site as “a new platform for creative and entrepreneurial expression” that might otherwise be unavailable due to real world spatial or financial constraints.5 Real world owners of valuable marks such as Reebok, Lacoste and BMW have also penetrated the Second Life market by setting up shop in the virtual world. One user described that the virtual stores where these goods are sold usually allow users to customize the established mark owner’s goods within the owner’s established parameters, the equivalent of mail ordering customized M&M candies.

Try resale! Most resale shops are personalized, warm places. Whether you’re just browsing or seriously shopping, you’ll get the service you thought was extinct. Can’t find anyone to take your money in a department store? Hate standing in check-out lines at discounters? Tired of trying to put together a look without someone helping you?

Add to that the fact that you’re cutting down on the waste stream: now don’t you feel good about saving that Gucci designer item from the land fill? Besides, you’ll have to work less yourself when you shop resale, which has its own savings to contribute to the environment!Imagine the cost to the environment for new items: depleting the soil, adding fertilizers to the watershed, increasing air pollution with shipping by truck or boat.