Notorious Beam Team

American Apparel is taking the lead with their immersion into the online, virtual reality game, Second Life. They are getting great kudos from the online community.

Second Life design guru, Aimee Weber, has created an in world virtual store where visitors can buy clothers for their virtual characters as well as order the clothes in real life.

They have created their own island called Lerappa (Apparel backwards)to host the store which is receiving fantastic feedback both from the online community and from serious business journals such as Forbes.



To see what the fuss is all about have a look at these images and check out the blog entries below.









The below is taken from 3PointD.com:

Popular Second Life architect and content-creator Aimee Weber of in-world brand *PREEN* sends news that she’s just designed and built an in-world showroom for real-world fashion brand American Apparel. The store, located on a private island in Second Life, is set to open as soon as this weekend. The news has SL residents considering what it means that the first real-world fashion brand has made an entrance to Second Life. Fashion is one of the virtual world’s biggest industries, and the fashion business in SL is extremely competitive. So it’s not a surprise that the first real-world retail brand to set up shop in SL is a fashion retailer.

The fashions themselves are patterned after American Apparel’s real-world clothes, and were designed by several designers, including Aimee, though she wouldn’t say who else was involved. The clothing will be priced “high-priced reasonable” compared to other SL fashions, Aimee says. No comment either on where the revenue from clothing sales will go — which leads me to believe it will go to the designers as part of their compensation. Notably for Aimee, who herself has become a wildly popular brand in Second Life, the project is not one from a virtual world services company like Millions of Us, whom Aimee has worked with before, but was generated when an American Apparel marketing rep approached her about establishing a presence in SL.

According to Aimee, its boxlike structure is based on the American Apparel store in Tokyo, by the company’s request. One unusual feature of the site is that the lighting is scripted to change when virtual darkness falls across the land (which happens every six hours or so in SL, if I remember correctly).

Check out Adverlab's post on this here.

Check out what Aimee Weber's site here.

Check out the Forbes article here.