The art of building a mainstore
I just realized that I haven´t even mentioned the new main store in the blog-o-sphere yet. For a good while now I have been thinking that CurWay needed a main store building that more reflected CurWays profile and design. Something that I had built myself from scratch.
The ones reading that run businesses in SL know the challenges of creating a good main store. The demands are very high, especially if you have been running it for a while and know what you want and need.
In my case the goals for the new store was these:
- Flexibility- to quickly adapt the store after current space and needs.
- Profile – The mainstore had to match CurWays profile and design
- Prims - less prims then the old store (and still look as good if not better)
- Size - Bigger, I needed more floorspace
- Roof height - I wanted more air into the store
- Wall space – The wall space in the old store was somewhat limited
- Store windows – I wanted a solution to the problem with store windows and the problem of making foot traffic able to see the products from the street.
The store was created in sections to make it easier to quickly rearrange walls and other parts of the store.
The old building was very nice but every time I rebuilt it it got more and more complicated. The constant rearranging of walls, floors etc had left its marks.
The new building is built into segments or modules to fit the need to quickly rearrange the building. New parcels are added and moved around constantly so I needed something that was flexible and still looked good.
The solution was to construct the store in sections. All the sections can be individually moved and rearranged.
When it came to the design of the store I wanted it to reflect the CurWay furniture. Something contemporary but still with a warm and personal feeling. The signs and signage in the store is still pretty much the same as in the old store with the exception of a few new sign formats.
New sign formats had to be created to suit the new store. Here a horisontal version with lights.
When it came down to the prims its easy to understand the importance. Prims costs money. For every prim paid the business owner needs to sell something to pay for it. The less prims contra sales the more margins for harder times. To keep the prim count down I used a mix of ordinary prims and mega prims.
The end result was 465 prims with the signage. In a way you could say that with a price of 1,4L/prim and week the store building itself costs CurWay ca 650L a week.
Whats left of the tier and prims can be used to exponate products. There might still be places to save more prims but I´m pretty much satisfied with this considering the size of the building ( 5600 sq m).
The store can be visited inworld using this SLurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Bellatrix/130/106/28/
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