Thursday, August 30, 2007

New Releases at Cattiva!

We've had a lot of people asking when new releases will be happening and I'm happy to say: It's happening now! Check out the new releases at the main store on WolfWalk.

New Releases for Cattiva:
Butterfly Kisses Formal in Lipstick, Sapphire and Amethyst or as a MultiPak for all three. Individual dresses priced at $L350, MultiPak is priced at $L1000.

The Cattiva Clubkini in Cherry. Priced at $L30.

Butterfly Kisses Lingerie in Black. Priced at $L100.

The Foldover Business Suit in Aged Ivory and Navy. Includes printed Cami. Priced at $L200.

The Peasant Girl Long Sleeved Blouse. Includes Printed Cami. Priced at $40. This is the same blouse that comes with the Peasant Girl Dress. Many people wanted it separately so we have obliged!

The Sideswipe Salsa Dress in Black. Priced at $L250. Sexy and Flexi for a night out dancing!

Ripped Blues Hipster Jeans in Standard Issue Blue, Faded Blue, Sun Bleached, Wine, Olive, Indigo and Midnight. Priced at $60 individually or $L400 in a MultiPak that includes all seven colors. We believe that these jeans are not only sexy (nice little peek-a-boo for your thong!) but also that they are some of the most detailed jeans in Second Life. Check them out for yourselves!

Look for new men's items coming within the next week! We will be including some new ad boards with Combo Fashions for guys who aren't sure what to wear and they look great!

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Les Belles Isle

I have a feeling that at this point there are designers out there who don't read my blog. But if they did... they would read this post. I was contacted by a model from Les Belles Isle asking if I would be willing to sell some of my work there.

The idea is simple: Offer your product at Les Belles Isle and they take a percentage of the sale, but within the board, your notecard and LM reside. So, traffic is driven to your main store. Secondarily, Les Belles wants to be a one stop shopping area for new avatars where they can find quality designs. Personally, I love this concept and think that it would be foolish as a designer to pass it up.

If you are a designer and you're reading this... check it out and send the owner, Nikolai Fellini, an IM. They are also actively seeking models. And no, I'm not getting paid anything, Lindens or US$ to promote them. I just think they have a great strategy and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all works out!

SLURL to Les Belles Isle
Lissa

Friday, August 10, 2007

Good Night... show stuff will be up, hopefully by Monday

Ahh... the show is over. The weight has been lifted and the nerves are gone. Wow... what an experience. I am extremely grateful to all who came. All of the wonderful reviewers, you know who you are! It was wonderful to see all of you there. And now, I want to take a couple of days to rest and then back to the grindstone... new designs will be coming out and I think you're really going to like them!

Lissa

More Blog Features and Show Tonight!

Invitations have been sent... Group Notices as well... now let's hope this fashion show doesn't send us straight to hell. ;)

Today is the day and we'll see how things go. I wanted to start off by saying thank you to everyone who has blogged about Cattiva and Cattivo! Ben Vanguard has added a review to his blog, SL Men He features the Leather Biker Jacket, the white dress shirt (no tie) and Khakis (which haven't been boxed for sale yet. ;)

So... big thank you to Ben for his kind words!

After the show, I will definitely have pictures posted. We will be doing on site picture boards during the show. So any reviewers reading this that shoot photos... please... stop by the boards (they are located right outside the main store and you just drop the textures onto the polaroid looking things... )

Any reviewers who did not receive invitations... I promise... it wasn't intentional. IM me and I will send you an invitation to the show or IM me later in the evening and I will TP you if at all possible.

Well, I'm off to finish off some things... I promise to update after the show.

Lissa

Thursday, August 9, 2007

SL... not wicked. :(

Okay, I'm not feeling good about things at this point. SL is being naughty and I'm getting more and more nervous. Someone reassure me! *L*

Lissa

On with the show!

Good morning! Well, we've had a few set backs, lost a couple of models and of course yesterday's SL puke. But the show will go on. I just want to take a moment to wish Thadicus Caligari and Katrina Pugilist, two of the models slated for tomorrow's show, well. I care about you guys and you will be missed tomorrow night!

Last night before I went to sleep, I was thinking about some comments I saw on another blog. In a way, I understood the blogists point of view, but in another way I was slightly disheartened. Overall, there was a central theme of not ripping off other designers, either RL or SL. And while I completely agree that you shouldn't rip of a design or a concept, I do believe you should look at what other designers are doing, copy them if you have to (we all have to learn somewhere) and learn from them. I look at what's going on in the fashion-world all of the time in both RL and SL. My designs are influenced by them and I learn things from them. I buy things that I think are cool and I try to take them apart to see how they were put together. It's the way we learn. Many of the great masters of painting were once apprentices to the great painters of their time and they learned by copying. In major art schools, the same story... it's about technique and the how to of it all.

As a graphic designer in RL, I spend a lot of time looking at things. Everything from industrial design to functional stuff like door knobs. I know, sounds nuts... but I think if you took a poll, you'd find that many other designers do the same thing. I'm always experimenting and if I see a design that I think is just wicked as hell, I copy it so that I can figure out why/how the artist did it. Why does this work? How come it looks good? What is the function of this part vs. the other part? Does it have a message and if so, does the message communicate?

I didn't mean to turn this into a rant about design or how I do it... my point is that just because a designer may be copying someone else... it's not necessarily a bad thing. BUT... there is a huge caveat; Don't go copying someone else's design and then sell it as your own! And I think that's what the point of the blog was. People, SL and RL, make money by selling things that they claim as their own.

And while I'm on the topic of selling things that aren't your own. I hate re-sell items. I have some... I bought some prim stilettos that are full copy/mod/resell, etc. I haven't sold them... haven't copied them... in fact, they're in my inventory right now gathering dust. The reason that I bought them is so that I could learn from them. I want to make shoes. I want to be able to have complete outfits that have things that go together and look good. But what I'm trying to say is that I think it's sad that talented people are out there creating these items and then selling them to other people to re-sell. I know not everyone can make things and everyone wants to find ways to make money in SL, but it just doesn't seem right. Yes... I know... capitalism is awesome and in Real Life companies like Levi Strauss make jeans and sell them wholesale to retailers who re-sell them to consumers like us. But here's the difference... the retailers can't make unlimited copies of one pair of jeans. They sell the inventory that they buy wholesale and then they go buy more from the Levi Strauss Co.

Perhaps that's my issue. You buy these items one time in SL and you can make as many copies as you want and re-sell them as many times as you want without so much as a percentage going to the original designer. All the original designer gets is the initial purchase price. Granted, sometimes those prices are quite high for full mod/copy items... but I only paid $300L for the pack of stilettos I bought. And I think I got like 6 pair!

Let's think about this... perhaps some scripting genius could create a script that limits the number of copies. That way, the original designer could have the option of placing the script with the item or not. I don't want to limit people, I just think the idea of unlimited copies after purchasing the item once so you can re-sell it is hurtful to designers. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.

Please comment on this, I'm interested in hearing your opinions!

As always, have fun!

Lissa

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Fashion Blogs... Lissa loves you!

At this point, I am so thankful to so many of the blogs for reviewing the clothes that we have at Cattiva/Cattivo.
In no particular order...
Ana Lutetia at analutetia.blogspot.com
MODA Fashion
And Honey at FashCon

I would also like to give a huge thanks to Justine Babii and Celebrity Trollop over at Second Style for listing this lowly little blog over here! Thanks you two!
See you guys at the show!!!

Love Lissa

SL just sucks sometimes...

Okay, so SL is down because of connectivity issues. Well, why not. That's great because it gives me an opportunity to work on a few more items for the show and all that good stuff... but then of course I want to see how these things look and I can't. Then I remember I have something flexi I need to create... and I can't... and then I remember that I need to do the model notecards for the show order... and I can't... 

So much for getting anything done. It sucks how much I rely on SL!

Lissa

Fashion Show Jitters!

Okay, folks. It's two days until the show and I'm a nervous wreck! Everything that I think could go wrong keeps going through my head. I'm worried about the models, I'm worried about lag, I'm worried that the Fashionistas will hate my work. Aaaaahhhh! I can't even imagine how it must feel to do this in real life. Things go wrong... infamous "wardrobe malfunctions" happen. Photogrpahers snap photos of wayward breasts that end up on celebrity porn sites...

Hmmm... guess maybe I don't have that much to worry about after all. ;) I mean... we've all seen avatars naked, right?

On an extremely happy note, Honey Fairweather of FashCon (Fashion Consolidated)spent some time talking with me about fashion and design and all the fun stuff yesterday. She invited me to join fashcon, which I was honored to do! 

And another extremely happy note... Cattiva and Cattivo have been featured on the MODA Fashion Blog! Huge thank yous to Licentious Maladay and Makeda Cole (Makeda did the wonderful write up and modeled some of the styles for the blog... she's gorgeous, btw!) for helping to put Cattiva and Cattivo on the SL map. They're the first blog to feature my designs and I'm extremely grateful. So, thank you to Licentious and Makeda for taking my 'blog feature' virginity! LOL. 

Alright everyone... have fun!

Lissa

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Cattiva and Cattivo Fashion Show, August 10, 6pm SL Time!

Cattiva and Cattivo will be on the catwalk, on the catwalk, we'll do our little turn on the catwalk... okay, sorry... it's just that every time I hear the word "catwalk" I think of the I'm too sexy song by Right Said Fred. Anyway... We will be having our first ever fashion show at Wolf Walk. This show commemorates two things: The grand opening of Cattiva/Cattivo and the grand opening of Wolf Walk Island. 

I'm excited about the opportunity to share my fashion styles with everyone in SL and hopefully as many people as possible will come. If we crash the sim... well... we crash it and we'll know that it was a good party!

There will be some good suprises there, too. I've contacted all of the Fashionistas I could google and if I missed any of you, I sincerely apologize! You're ALL invited. If you have a blog, IM me or notecard me with the blog web address and whether you're a reviewer, writer, designer, etc. And I'll drop some items for your review on your profile. 

Anyway, August 10 at 6pm SL time... be there or be... uncool. Ha! You thought I was gonna' say square, dincha'?



Welcome, Howdy, Bienvenuto, etc...

Welcome to the Cattiva and Cattivo blog, created by none other than lil' ol' me, Lissa Maertens. Obviously, this blog is a blatant attempt at marketing my clothing line (did I mention Cattiva and Cattivo, you can find them doing an in-world search for women's clothing, men's clothing, cattiva, cattivo, etc... ).  But beyond that blatant attempt at marketing, I also hope I can put together some letters, words and sentences that make sense to people and will also be helpful. I think SL is a great avenue for starting a business. It's hard, yes, and it takes up a lot of time, but I'm hopeful that in the end it'll be worth it. 

I'll post more, but I want to leave you with this... SL is supposed to be fun. When it stops being fun, stop doing it.