REVOSA - A 6 Month Milestone (Taking a look back)

Today, since I created a simpler product that didn't take me eight hours to complete (lol), I wanted to post here on my blog a written history of where my Second Life business REVOSA originally started, and how I got to the point of selling nearly over a hundred different products in a myriad of categories, a three story mainstore on my own land and franchises all over the grid in a period of six months.

Back toward the middle and end of 2014, when I was still super active in the furry community and sporting a fennec avatar, all under the name of FoxyMeryl, I was an avid club-goer, dancer and club host for ::FRISSON:: with a house in the sky that I paid for mostly out-of-pocket. During this time, I had no idea that I could really make any kind of actual money in Second Life. For me it was just something to do in my free time to, you know, kill time.

That was until I was forced to stop hosting due to unfortunate circumstances, but one day when I was exploring one of the many furry sims, I saw a store and an ad for "custom tuners" and I was intrigued. Up until that point, I hadn't heard of anything like this in Second Life.

So of course I ordered myself a custom car, and met the person who was building. We grew close to

each other and eventually ended up in a Second Life relationship, which is right around the time that I made myself a little company called "Greasfox," where I took empty car shells and built them into tuners (as I learned how to do so, in-part to my partner at the time and her help) and then sold them on the marketplace.

Occasionally, I'd get custom car requests. This made me a small amount of money on a weekly basis. We're talking small amount of lindens, and then what I made I spent on clothing or furry stuff.

Greasfox moved from a parcel and a cheap garage to my partner's Homestead sim where I setup shop, but Greasfox only lasted for about a month or so, before my partner and I decided to merge our existing businesses into one that would be called Full Carbon.

Full Carbon started in the same way that both of our businesses were being run. We built cars from empty shells and took custom requests, eventually moving from the homestead to a private parcel with a house and a garage.

This particular phase lasted for a month or so while we made a little more money than, at least, I was used to making.

I think this was around the time that I saw the real potential that Second Life had, and what I could possibly do in order to support myself and my real life endeavors.

Having made enough money to move from our cheaper place, we bought a third of a sim and built a space station that became quite popular among the drift (a form of racing) team we'd started, which is called Moxie Drift Team, still, to this day (as is Full Carbon, a now registered trademark).

The idea was that we'd build cars on this station where we'd setup a mainstore and a scifi roleplay hangout area. We attracted more visitors than we were used to, but this was lucrative for our business at the time.

The station, though, the Infinitum SR2, this was something that I held dearly (and am tentatively rebuilding on my own to sell as a mesh skybox). It was my dream in Second Life, at that moment in time, to virtually live on a station in space and run my own roleplay community. Unfortunately though, like many things, this station's life came to an eventual end, as did my relationship with my partner after six months, a third iteration of the space station itself and an attempt to fix what we had, which was far beyond repair. As it turns out, mixing business and romance is a recipe for disaster.

On the days that followed the end of our relationship, I lost my ties to Full Carbon, Full Carbon Auto and Moxie Drift Team altogether, but that's okay, because I was starting something new, anyway.

After revamping my marketplace store to be less reflective of the previous business I'd been involved with and something new that I was cooking up, I rented a small parcel and setup a garage type loft apartment. Here I began work on, once again, custom tuner cars that I would slap inside of boxes and sell on a table outside of my apartment (which I also listed in the SL search database haha).

This business of mine came to be called REVosa, which was around the same point in time that I abandoned the idea of using furry avatars and silently removed myself from that community (mostly, besides the friends that I still have within it) due to many different personal reasons.

As I built my new business, which would only have direct ties to myself (in order to ensure that I

would never lose the rights to my work again), I met a new friend (wink, wink) who would help me both with my personal parcel and a fledgling mainstore in the Pisces region (where it still exists today). Getting quite exhausted with making cars, I opened up Blender one day earlier this year and began to screw around with shapes, which morphed into a month of teaching myself (with a little help from friends) how to use this particular 3D modeling software and what I could do with it.

From that point in May, 2015, up to where we are now, I filled my store with many different nick-nacks and fun little things, learned how to design clothing and learned how to weight paint and rig clothing for Second Life.

By the time we hit September 2015, I'd have sold enough products to fund my shop without real world influence (besides my skill in Blender and my aforementioned friend, now also business partner) and have managed to seed many very small shops in the name of my business, through 40% profit affiliate vendors. I even have my own streaming radio spot running! (Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/lulavauss/revosa-ad1)

It's been six months since I started REVOSA, and although my shop, my business aren't as big as some of the others out there that have been running for a much longer period of time, I know that REVOSA will lead the way. What an interesting time it's been in what, only a year ago, was what I considered to be a pretty dull virtual world without much in the way of things to do (I was wrong, very wrong).

And, even though the Infinitum SR2 and SR3 are gone, for now, there's always Afterlife, club, bar and hangout, a brand new place that I manage (and am currently attempting to drive traffic into).

But that's it for now. REV it up, baby.

-ℒula ℒaValette  (merylimperil)

Marketplace store: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/165186

Inworld store: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Pisces/172/239/29