Thursday 30 October 2008

Zanzo at the [haco?] festival

We recently received our first invitation to a fashion event. [haco?] is a Japanese-based project that gives highly touted up-and-coming designers a chance to show a sampling of their goods. But it is also a challenge to the designers - they are given a small "[haco?]" (3x3x3 box) and 9 prims in which to express their creativity. The title of the event is "GUYS, HERE COMES CHRISTMAS! 2008" and it has a "Christmas comes early" type theme.

Many fashion events in Second Life are female dominated. Well, Second Life fashion at large is female dominated, simply because they are the biggest shopping demographic. But there are many guys out there who love to shop too, and this festival is more aimed at them (but they are urged to bring their girlfriends along).

We were offered not one, but two boxes to go side-by-side. On the left is our main Zanzo box, and we chose to exhibit our "Bishonen" skin range (and a couple of shapes optimized to it) in there, as we think that "Bishonen" and the new "Frat Boy" series are our highest quality skins yet (even if "Androgyny", which we're also proud of, is our best-seller by far). We had set our box up before we finished the new "Frat Boy" skins, or we may have had a debate on which to showcase.

On the right hand side is one of our sub-brands, Pink Bubble. We sub-branded stuff at our main store to not only be creative and make the store less factory-like, but also to make navigating the place a lot easier for newcomers. Even though the festival is male-dominated, they do expect female visitors, so wanted some female or unisex boxes. We put our four Harajuku inspired outfits in the Pink Bubble box, along with some of our popular "Hands On" decorations, and a dollarbie outfit called "Sink Pink" that we originally made for the launch of our satellite store at Juicy Bella Plaza.

With more time, we would have liked to produce 100% original goods for the event, but since we're still an upstart brand with lots of projects ongoing, we're struggling to find the time for that sort of stuff yet.

Please check out the [haco?] exhibition, as there are tons of awesome designers there. It is at the Thisbe sim in-world, but here is a SLurl so you can get there quickly. They also have a blog in English that you can find by clicking here. The event runs from 11/1 to 11/9, so there is plenty of time to check it out and take your friends along for a peek. We're awfully proud to be part of it and hope we can take part in many other events like this in future.