Tailor Archive

last think i want to do is offend a bria twi'lek.... but still coming in here and full out attacking some one do to thier newness is jsut down right wrong...

yes... there are different philosophies to running a business... we all have to find our own niche... but lets try to be creative and help one another then resort to " NOOB you dont know jack"

re read that post .. edit it if you feel you must... but maybe you should have just explained how his theory was lacking instead of dismissing him as easily as you did... and still even in this reply you accuse him of " showing no respect" hell i hope you dont ever raise a child... they will fear you and not respect you if you continue to come across like this... try showing respect to your other posters/game players and youll find life is a lot better for all involved...

DeuceX wrote: clothing....serves no real purpose.

Disagree. It serves a psychological purpose which makes it's draw very poignant, and thus, serving a very important purpose. The success of any well-run tailor shop is a clear example of this.

DeuceX wrote: If we want clothing to become more important to players, make it cheap enough that it is an impulse purchase for even the newest player.

Disagree. By lessening the price, youwill:

• cheapen the value ofyour product


• cause your work load to increase to an undesireable degree


• work increase vs. revenue = marginal at best.

How many tailor shops have you investigated? On my server, there are very few tailorshops who sell at 'below cost'. Their vendor's never seem to move the product. Why? Return to the concept of 'clothing is a psycological draw'. The player will in fact *not* purchase the item because there is no true 'worth' placed on it by the individual selling it. Go to your bazaar. There are TONS of items for 100cr of the same type/color that get passed over for items of a more costly price tag.Median range prices are always the best way to go.

DeuceX wrote: Since it most clothing serves no useful purpose in the game and can still be worn even when it has fully deteriorated, we need to make it so that players consider new clothing an inexpensive impulse buy for wearing around town.

Quandry: I have no problem with people dropping 20k at a time at my shop. I'm still oblivious as to the goal of your post. Is it becauseyou are having difficulty marketing yourself? I'm trying to understand why you seem to see a 'problem' with Master Tailors who are selling their items at fair and reasonable prices.

DeuceX wrote: Food has a use, it provides enhancement to stats and skills so that is still a more marketable profession than tailor.

Disagree strongly: Upon further absorbing your post, it does seem that you, infact, seem to be having a bad run of luck, and are transfering your experiences to the bulk of the Tailor trade.

Ways to EASILY market yourself in the Tailoring Profession:

• buy a small ormedium [better] house


• set up 'manniquens' of your clothing outfit ideas around your shop


• decorate your shop with cheaply purchased items from your local bazzar or do easy 'theme park' missions to pick up rare, decorative loot to display in partnership with your outfits


• outfit example: a fish, a bikini top, hot pants, short open vest & fishing pole


• make original, fun and creative macros for hawking in town. Keep your shouts to a minimum..one per minute at most. Rotate your macro's so people don't get sick of hearing the same one.


• market yourself [most important] always be friendly, courteous and willing to spend a few moments answering questions

Duece X wrote: clothing is the candy isle of the SWG crafted items. We must sell it as such. Keep prices down, especially on items that take high skill (such as metal bikinis). Provide an abundance of low cost “Disposable” clothing items that will keep newbie and expert alike buying to update their look.

Disagree so strongly I feel a blood vessel ready to burst: Master Tailoring takes work. It costs money. It takes time, investment and dedication. We didn't pick this profession to make tons of money, we picked it because we like it. Master Tailoring, as a profession, is notthe cheap norfrivilous professionyour post seems to ascribe to.It is not a biodegradable profession that you use like a recyclable styrafoam cup. Master Tailors work extrodinarily hard to keep their shops in tip-top shape. I completely understand the insult felt by my fellow Tailors here in your unintented whoreization of the Tailoring profession. I hope that in time, after you have established yourself enough to truly live as a Master Tailor with a shop, you will gain a fuller understanding and a deeper appreciation to the 'candy stripers' of SWG.

Regardless, good luck to you, what ever you do.

You begin from the belief that clothing = candy.

Firstly, in the middle ages candy was considereda luxury item becauseit requiredsugar cane that was costly to procure. This made candy and sweets available only to the wealthy, because of its expense. In time, we learned to use sugar beets, thereby giving us a cheap alternatives to cane production. With the development of machines to mass produce them, penny candies were being produced by more than 380 american factories in the mid 19th century. By the end of the 19th centurey, a new "sugar boiler" changed the industry, allowing it to flourish.

I am afraid DeuceX has missed a few salient points.

This is a game, not a business, therefore I run my virtual business to have fun, not to make bucketloads of profit vs costs, nor to follow the tenets of any economics course I took in college or used in the real world marketplace. I play a Tailor because I wanted to, since beta and on into launch. Socializing, role playingand crafting. With a little gunbunny on the side for variety. I did not suddenly decide to pick up tailor from a holo or because I got all in a twist over the "unrealistic" prices for clothing. If I wanted to make more money than God, I'd be a weapon or armorsmith. As it is, I make just enough to stay afloat and buy a few pretties.

Game. Fun. Casual. No macro-grinding, no guild support in resources or money when I started and no saved up bank to buy resources from my on-hold combat profession while I hurry up and macro-grind tailor,no grinding for endless hours in practice mode until I could show a master tailor title and then flood the bazaar with undercutter-priced master items.Nope, none of that. I just played a Tailor, a poor tailor, and made my slow plodding way to master selling one outfit at a time. Which was fun. And left me lots of time to explore all the worlds I could survive three steps off the shuttlepad. It was the fun part. Personal "fitting sessions" and socializing with my customers isthe fun part. Setting up a creative and attractive tailor shop is the fun part. Making clothes for people that makes them happy is the fun part.

Running the vendors, gauging the hot sellers and market prices and stocking 6 vendors with my standard 500-700+ items per vendor, rollovers and relisting, the mails, the tell hell before I am even done loading in game, the multi-planetary resource gathering and the expenses for heavy harvesters and power and maintenances, the factory micro-managing, the lot swaps just to have enough storage buildings, the bulk orders for chefs and armorsmiths that want me to sell them crates below my cost to make them -- or even worse -- GIVE them free schematics, the newbs that beg for free stuff, the holo-tailors that are rude, and ask me how to do what an artisan who "played" tailor at Domestic Arts 1 would know how to do, and don't even say thanks when you train them, and then steal your customers right out of your shop in front of your face by giving away free clothes... all that is not fun.

New to gaming or not, new to this game or not -- playstyle is the choice of the player. I am here to have fun. Not have a virtual job. My prices are market level for my server per dedicated and long standing tailors and per the costs of running my business the way I want to, at a level I can manage -- and still have fun doing it.

I learned how to do all this by reading this forum since day one. And getting to know "Tailor Etiquette." The etiquette here in the forum and in the game. And contributing to discussions here, or simply just reading what there is to learn about being a tailor, playing a tailor and the technical game mechanics, bugs, workarounds, etc. We are a friendly and helpful group here. We don't normally flame even the habitual trolls that wander in here. But when you open your thread with a statement about how worthless what we do is, and how we are gouging the community with our pricing on our worthless and useless items... you invited the reactions you got here, with your arms wide open. You are welcome to your opinion. And we are welcome to ours. We just happen to conflict on an epic scale. However, I know a brick wall when I see one. *walks away*

You know, it's sad when people feel they must be right because they were first. I don't presume to force change apon you. If you like the way you do business, stick with it. You are too busy feeling hurt about a business model that comes from someone who hasn't "been in this game from beta." Yes, i did macro grind, i did it because it is a nice, mellow, focusing close to a nights gaming. If you think macro grinding makes me less of a tailor, um, you arent a tailor either.... you are someone who plays a game and chooses to play paper dolls in the game. There is no real creativity here. We are all just trying to get dolls to wear our favorite color and drawing. Just like me. Now, I hear "It's only a game" well you are right. I choose to play a macro-economic game instead of a micro-economic game.

See, I am playing a game, just not your game.

quote:

I learned how to do all this by reading this forum since day one. And getting to know "Tailor Etiquette." The etiquette here in the forum and in the game. And contributing to discussions here, or simply just reading what there is to learn about being a tailor, playing a tailor and the technical game mechanics, bugs, workarounds, etc. We are a friendly and helpful group here. We don't normally flame even the habitual trolls that wander in here. But when you open your thread with a statement about how worthless what we do is, and how we are gouging the community with our pricing on our worthless and useless items... you invited the reactions you got here, with your arms wide open. You are welcome to your opinion. And we are welcome to ours. We just happen to conflict on an epic scale. However, I know a brick wall when I see one. *walks away*

Lets see now, first of all, i proposed an idea that went against the established train of thought. Was this breach of etiquette? I read the forums for 2 months without a peep, Was this a breach of etiquette? I chose to become active on the message boards by making a statement instead of rubbing egos. Is that a breach of etiquette? My first post was almost completly ignored in favor of attacking my second and less serious post. Was that friendly? Did i say tailoring was worthless? Well i love quoting my self so here goes:

Clothing is a luxury item. It serves no real purpose. Players will happily wear armor to dress functions and strip down to their BVDs to get wounds and BF healed quickly (I know I'm a master dancer too).

worthless?... no not there. it does say that it provides no statistical benefit to the players statistical model. Wait what is this that comes next:

I became a tailor because I hated the stuff I started with and couldn’t find anything reasonably priced that I liked to replace it, so I made my own. If we want clothing to become more important to players, make it cheap enough that it is an impulse purchase for even the newest player. When newbie’s hit the bazaar after their first couple of missions we want them to say "I'll buy this gun, ooh and this cool shirt too!"

OOOOOhhh that's where the worth.... no it's not there either, it doesn't even say lower the prices on ALL clothes.... hmmmmmm.

wait wait here's the meaty part... the truely damming evidence:

Since it most clothing serves no useful purpose in the game and can still be worn even when it has fully deteriorated, we need to make it so that players consider new clothing an inexpensive impulse buy for wearing around town. All of the clothes horses I know (and in some cases, have created) have no problem destroying clothing in their inventory to make room for more. They are usually rich from resource mining or get their clothing for free from me. I'm sure all you other tailors have seen that when you give stuff to friends. (If you don’t give stuff to friends, you should start. call it market research or advertising and a cost of doing business). That's the reaction we want from customers.

yes that's it... the part where i say "it serves no useful prupose" IE it provides no stat modification unless it is spedialized with bio but that isn't what I was talking about in this post. I believe I was talking about regular clothes whose primary function was style!

yes... it says that style based clothing is expensive and indestructable... kinda limits the lower class repeat customer from what i see.

My solution? Provide stylish, mass produced clothing cheap and get people used to destroying their own clothing because that part of the game is busted and won't do it like it does with armor and weapons. You dont have to take time from your thriving in game businesses to do it. Get someone working their way up the profession to make it for you and then give them the profits from their sales to help them get to master too.

Friendly?... try again... and dont feel so hurt when someone expresses an opinion other than your own. Of course you are right there is a brick wall.... or maybe it's a glass ceiling.

I hear what you're saying Deuce, but you're coming to the suppliers and telling them we have to sell more stuff to the people.... the people are not buying more, they are buying specific. We can't factory out 30 crates of shirts and have them sell. We have to make each individual shirt like the shoemakers did 300 years ago like the tailors and seamstresses of that age. If the clothes we sold could be recoloured like composite armour, then we would be able to do this. But it is far easier to make 4 varied colours of alot of items, and 8 or 10 of more popular items, and put those on our vendors.

When clothing is destroyed at 0 condition, this might change too, but the only way your model becomes effective is to have every player (or a large congingent) believe in the idea of disposable clothing. In fact, it's the opposite. Most people believe that clothing should never ever decay, and the evil tailoring community imposed this evil upon them. They would like to buy one shirt, and then never changing it, like the clothing of a shanghai beggar in the backstreets of the opium dens.

Argh! My post must be less than 2000 character's long so I'll have to chop this up.

Duece: If you think your shop is successfull try closing it and marketing your clothing wholesale to dedicated merchants

You're not just marketing your clothes, you are marketing the experience of buying clothes. If you want to sell one or two items to a player and have them never return, that's your deal. You want a repeat customer, that takes more of a hook than some boring 'mall' gig vendor.

Duece: If clothing was as important as armor... you would see players going out to fight in tailored camos...

People buy clothes more often then armor because they wish to achieve various looks and styles. Your whole argument based on the fact that people only wear one set of clothes and when they get tired, they 'destroy' it to buy another.I know of no one who 'destroys' clothes, or only wants one look at a time.

DueceX : you will increase your market share by making it more accessable to those who dont wish to play the commodities or ninja looting games

"Ninja looting" is specific to npc mob drop items, not tailoring, lol. As far as commodities 'games'? All anyone has to do is run a few recon missions and in an hour they'll have enough money for an outfit.

Duece: if you automate and sell to people who are interested in mass marketing your product instead of running a small solo operation you will be able to work less and generate more revenue

Maybe I'm wrong, but I dont' think tailors want to be involved with a 'cookie cutter'vendor where everyone looks the same. I'm not surecustomers want that, either. Otherwise people would always just buy fromthe bazaar.

Deuce: actually work decreases, revenue increases

You still need to harvest your resources, hides etc. If you are mass producing then obviously you will need to increase how much resources you use.

Deuce: on my server, the cheaper it is the faster it sells out. Perhaps that is just the merchants buying it and jacking up the price.

You would see a different name under the 'made by' and 'owner' if that was the case, which it is not.

Deuce: Hey the bazaar is a great place to find 50to 100 ribbed shirts, all blue and yellow.

Not on my server.

I have no problem with people dropping 20k at a time in my shop.

Duece: how many timesdo you get that 200cr purchace?There will always be a lot more people with a lot less money.That is the market that has the most potential.

So, to make up for that 20k loss, by your thinking, I'd have to sell 1,000 items of clothing at 200cr each. The problem with that is no one wants to fill up their inventory storage, bank safe deposit, back pack, or house with that much stuff.

I'm still oblivious as to the goal of your post. Is it becauseyou are having difficulty marketing yourself?

Duece: Don't lay your issues on me, i generatebetween 600k and 1m credits a week from the resource consortium i am part of.

I'm not 'laying my issues' on you at all. Again, it goes back to why you expect tailors to sell their stuff for nothing and turn it in to a cookie-cutter business? I am not the one who has issues with the tailoring profession or the way Master Tailors run their shops/businesses.

The prices are neither fair nor reasonable. Why not?

They are exclusionary and overly inflated. How?

A 100% markup is questionable but most tailors mark their merchandise 5-600% above cost. Sure it sells but it only sells to people like me who don't care about money in the game anymore.

Maybe this would be clearer if you can give an example of an article of clothing and the name of the server/tailor so I'd have a better understanding of what you consider a 600% mark up. There will always be a few tailors around who have insane prices, but luckily it's not a common practice.

For the record, let's take my highest selling item: a Robe of Honor, which I sell for 10k.

Why 10k? First of all, that is a Master Tailor item. It's like the finest of wines. It takes a lot ofresources/time [for those who didn't macro grind like me, doh] to get to be MT. Why should a robe of honor cost the same as a novice item?RoH alos takes a lot of resources and components. RoH, in my shop, is the most expensive item I sell. Everything else is 6k and under. Not to mention,it 'is' calleda Robe of Honor. You shouldn't be seeing every tom, **edit** and harry running around in one.It's the same reasoning as'why should I see all the newbies running around in composite'?

I hardly consider this 'over charging', not when you got a crate of 8 vasarian brandy selling for 6k that lasts for only 42 minutes...or doctors buffs that last for a few hours and poof at 6k a set. Clothing lasts forever.

Deuce: You strongly disagree because i am an unhappy person?... argumentum ad homonym. nuff said

I didn't say you were an unhappy person but your post surely seems disillusioned with the whole tailoring profession. You want tailors to mass produce and you expect them to dump their prices. That's the whole theme of your post.

buy a small ormedium [better] house

Deuce: nice to live in but limits the earning potential for the business.

Ahouse gives the customer the ability to view your outfits, what goes good with what, to get ideas on how to coordinate. Not everyone knows how to put an outfit together, and not everyone wants a black shirt with black pants. This harkens back to your 'impulse buying' topic. Just like those candy displays at your grocery store at the checkout line.

• set up 'manniquens' of your clothing outfit ideas around your shop
  
• once again, a waste of time, standardizing color combonations and marking them clearly as matching during production should be sufficient.

Again, 'impulse purchases'. Then clearly you would/should agree that seeing various pieces of clothing together does add to the imagination and thus will tip the scales towards the possible purchase of seeing an outfit together in front of their face instead of trying to picture it in their mind.

• decorate your shop with cheaply purchased items from your local bazzar or do easy 'theme park' missions to pick up rare, decorative loot to display in partnership with your outfits


• once again takes away from earning potential by wasting time doing things not necessary to the trade.

This is not a waste of time and has worked wonders for many Master Tailors. You are establishing an atmosphere to encourage people's imaginations.As with outfits, it's called'merchandising'. This is also not a waste of time because once your items are in place, you don't need to worry about them anymore. Your point is null.

How do you expect a merchant to know a thing about clothing unless he's a master tailor? How will he answer a /tell 'Can I wear uniform gloves witha jacket?' 'Can I make the hood of my robe go up' 'Can I as a male wear a grand healer's robe?' 'What kind of head gear can a male twi'lek wear'?

Seriously, I don't see how you expect to compete if you take yourself out of the one-on-one equation with your customer base.

It costs money. It takes time, yup, both should be frugally spent and not wasted on distracting endevors such as harvesting and maintaining venders and a storefront.

When you enjoy what you do,it isn't considered a 'waste'.

We didn't pick this profession to make tons of money, we picked it because we like it. hence the 2 month burnout rate of master tailors so commonly mentioned.

People burn out on many professions. I was goingto be an architect before I started tailoring. Soto single out Tailoringas if it is the only tradewith a 2 month burn out ratean innacurate depiction.

Master Tailoring, as a profession, is notthe cheap norfrivilous professionyour post seems to ascribe to.Ah yes, now it starts to come out,instead of reading my post asthe begining of an alternate business model, you felt threatened by someone who looks at it as a business.Tailoring is a blast, not a serious endevor taken by people dedicated to high prices and exclusivity.Perhaps you have MMO Myopia... you do know this is a game and meant to be fun right?

I'm not threaten at all.More like flabbergasted at your countlesscommentssuggest that all tailors over charge people for'worthless' items.

It is not a biodegradable profession that you use like a recyclable styrafoam cup.styrofoam cups arent recyclable or biodegradable.

I'll give you the not biodegradable, but they are recyclable: http://corporateedge.promocan.com/LineNames.htm?CD=7043

Master Tailors work extrodinarily hard to keep their shops in tip-top shape.and getburned out or grumpybecause they spend so much time doing what they dont like- selling- than what they do like-designinglooks and styles-

I can't argue if that has been your experience on your server. Out of the master tailors on my server, we're all still happy doing what we do. For the record, I've been MT for over three months.

I completely understand the insult felt by my fellow Tailors here in your unintented whoreization of the Tailoring profession.good lord, the last time i heard stuff like that was from some guyhiding in caves inAfganistan. Call me the evil empire if you will but ibet i have more fun in this game than you do.Bet Ihave a higher in game income too... all hail capitalism.

I'm sorry you feel that way.I hardly think your bank account would determine that you are any better a master tailor than any other master tailor on this forum. I thinkpassion for the profession would have much more to do with it than how much money you make.

I hope that in time, after you have established yourself enough to truly live as a Master Tailor with a shop, you will gain a fuller understanding and a deeper appreciation to the 'candy stripers' of SWG. The only thing i hope is that even with your myopia you will still be interested in buying synthetic cloth, fiberplast and reenforced fiberplast panels, trim and shoe soles in bulk at wholesale rates from me and then turn around and pass those savings on to your customers.... or don't as long as i get my money.

Tailoring is far more than making money, but that is all you seem to be interested in here, so I'll rest my case.

Regardless, good luck to you, what ever you do and do you, may your business flourish beyond the cottage industry stage and allow you to bring yourpersonal vision andstyle to as many people as think it is beautiful.

My 'cottage industry stage' shop kicks booty. Come see it some time.

"You're not just marketing your clothes, you are marketing the experience of buying clothes. If you want to sell one or two items to a player and have them never return, that's your deal. You want a repeat customer, that takes more of a hook than some boring 'mall' gig vendor."

I think this really sums it up - all the other arguments are sort of interesting, but not terribly important compared to this one.

Tailoring is, at its heart, a *service* profession that happens to involve some crafting, not a *crafting* profession that involves a little bit of customer service.

I think this is the key thing that *nobody* quite understands outside our profession. The "Pure Merchant Mafia" thinks we should just be commodity producers that sell them stuff wholesale like all those other crafting professions, and that we're getting uppity by wanting to run our own shops and do business the way we like instead of the way they like. And other crafters and customers don't understand the way we're different from other crafters on the "making" side.

We're really a lot closer to Image Designers than we are to Architects and Weaponsmiths. There's tons of stuff we can make, but the real *value* of our profession isn't in the stuff itself as much as having people come in, and say "make me look good," and doing it.

---

SueDenim wrote:
"You're not just marketing your clothes, you are marketing the experience of buying clothes. If you want to sell one or two items to a player and have them never return, that's your deal. You want a repeat customer, that takes more of a hook than some boring 'mall' gig vendor."

I think this really sums it up - all the other arguments are sort of interesting, but not terribly important compared to this one.

Tailoring is, at its heart, a *service* profession that happens to involve some crafting, not a *crafting* profession that involves a little bit of customer service.

I think this is the key thing that *nobody* quite understands outside our profession. The "Pure Merchant Mafia" thinks we should just be commodity producers that sell them stuff wholesale like all those other crafting professions, and that we're getting uppity by wanting to run our own shops and do business the way we like instead of the way they like. And other crafters and customers don't understand the way we're different from other crafters on the "making" side.

We're really a lot closer to Image Designers than we are to Architects and Weaponsmiths. There's tons of stuff we can make, but the real *value* of our profession isn't in the stuff itself as much as having people come in, and say "make me look good," and doing it.

---

I wish you had posted this before I tried to rebut that monstrosity of a post I made at the top of page two. =(

Totally on-spot, SueDenim. Thanks for taking the time to say 'simply' what took me chapters to reply with.

Playing the role of wholesaler and selling for very low profit and very high quantities is is one business model. I am sure that if I decided to make 5000 pairs of identical camos in a factory and sell them to a merchant for a profit of 10-50 credits a piece I could make some money for awhile. The problems are 1) clothing does not wear out. The only thing that would keep people coming back is variety and mass production and variety don't mix....not even in real life. The other problem 2) is that this is a game and not a real business. Very few of us have decided to become tailors because we thought we would get rich doing it. Most of us don't *want* to babysit our factories while they churn out endless black muscle shirts. Most of us like to interact with customers and create clothing that we are proud to make and that the customer is proud to wear. Most of us *love* it when the customer puts on her new outfit and can only give an almost speechless "wow!" for a few seconds. This takes time and work and can't be done in massive wholesale quantities. If you want to become a wholesaler and sell lots of clothes as cheaply as you can manage, go ahead! I warn you that most people who try get bored of it very quickly and move on to other things and that most customers who care enough to change their look would rather go to someone who is going to take the time to make something they really like, even if it is a lot more expensive.