The Second Life News Network raised a most interesting question recently about the rise of Armidi and their ability to suck the grid's talent pool of clothing and hair designers.
What triggered their question was the recruiting of designers from Savvy?, Sand Shack Surf Co. and Tres Blah in their staff while putting their personal projects on hold. The risks of an Armidi monopoly would be homogenized fashion and a lack of personal style in new clothing.
While this and other usual problems related to monopolies, are genuine questions, there might be a case to favor a bigger Armidi stranglehold on SL fashion.
For starters, quality and decent prices are the name of the game if you care in any way about the image you project with your avatar. And this is where Armidi shines. With the number of designers who do clothing in SL, a bit of fashion consolidation might just be a great way to reinforce creativity.
Too many people design clothing that looks amazing (such as trench coats) on their vendor signs, but that end up disappointing buyers because their flexi features are not good. Yet Armidi's clothing often looks better on us than it looks in their store because of attention to detail. Even for something as hard to produce as a trench coat, the quality level is very high.
Let's take one of the most important examples of a virtual monopoly to establish a comparison: Google. Their importance in Web search has not prevented others from creating search engines that are as efficient... it actually forced them to do so! Before Google, Web searching was a bit of a mess. Now, do your searches either at Google, Yahoo or Microsoft's Live.com and you will get plenty of revelant results.
Great creations inspire competitors. It's about time that a big player has that effect on others in SL. That's in addition to the impact that Armidi will have on the creators it recruits. The day they decide to give a new life to their personal projects, their time at Armidi will have been an amazing learning experience. Because let's face it: some of the people they hired have potential but their earlier creations could have used some polish. I won't point to specific names to avoid making it a personal affair. But I bought clothes from one of Armidi's newly-recruited creators before and I saw room for improvement.
And in defense of any company that ends up gaining importance, not all market-hogging players are bad for business. The impact of an important presence depends on the values of the people behind it. To me, it sounds like fashion is too fragmented in Second Life to come up with the monopoly word. It also sounds early to think that Armidi would be acting, say, just like a Microsoft of SL clothing.
It's not time to cry wolf yet. Besides, the "slutty looks" are way too popular around the grid to think that Armidi's clothing will be forced down everyones's throat ;-)
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