This page consists of a short description of lessons that I’ve learnt whilst creating clothing. Clicking on “Tip #” will take you to a corresponding post about that lesson.

Tip #1: It’s important to make “glitch” pants for any outfit you make that has a prim skirt, as if SL is being laggy the skirt can take a while to load, and you don’t want to appear half naked in front of everyone. (That sounds like a bad dream….)

Tip #2: Avoid creating details or patterns at the waist seam if using the non-prim skirt, as it’s tricky to get a smooth finish due to the skirt not fitting seamlessly with the shirt.

Tip #3: If you rent/own a plot of land set the keywords appropriately to help people find you in a search under places in SL.

Tip #4: If you rent/own a plot of land set an image for your landmark, to make it easier for visitors to recognise they have arrived at the right place. This is very useful, if you are in an area where a teleport hub is active, as your landmark will not take people directly to your shop, but to the teleport hub instead.

Tip #5: It takes money to make money.

Tip #6: It is useful to buy any items you sell from boxes or vendors to check what permissions you have set for the next owner (whether that be any or all of Mod, Copy, Trans) and to also make sure that you are giving out the correct items.

Tip #7: It is important to give every item being placed in the hippoVEND server a unique name whether that be the item to sell, a note card or image, as it will otherwise confuse the server.

Tip #8: If you have shops in more than one sim, it is useful to have a server positioned in each sim with all the inventory items that you need to sell all of your creations. If SL is having problems and one of your servers is “inactive” for a time the vendors can still use a server in a different sim to deliver the items a customer buys.

Tip #9: Create any images (width and height) in multiples or subdivisions of 512px, as SL will otherwise resize them, and stretch them if they’re not in a 512px multiple.