3pointD.com

Reena Jana has a nice piece in Business Week updating the American Apparel story blogged here a couple of weeks ago. Some highlights:

The Los Angeles-based maker of trendy T-shirts is currently organizing a late-July soiree at its latest location: a computer-generated boutique within the parallel online universe of Second Life.

Next month, American Apparel will start hiring virtual sales clerks from among Second Life’s citizens.

The company is also planning to test-market its first line of jeans within its Second Life store this summer—two months before they hit physical stores in time for fall.

And in an effort to drive traffic to both the virtual and physical stores, anyone who buys clothes in Second Life after the grand opening party will receive a coupon for a 15% discount on merchandise bought in the real world.

That last is the most interesting, to me. That’s a substantial real-world value add for customers visiting a virtual fashion outlet. (A couple of commenters on a previous 3pointD post have mentioned similar initiatives.) All that remains, perhaps, is to ease the purchase of real-world goods from within Second Life. I’d love to be able to shop in a prim store, click on an object, and be able to purchase its real-life counterpart without having to navigate outside SL to go to a Web browser. This should be an almost trivial function, at this point, as SL already has an in-world browser to show help pages, which was easily hacked to allow it to load almost any Web page. It shouldn’t be too much trouble to add a scripting command that would allow it to load a Web page from a value embedded in or created by a script within SL. My understanding is that this hasn’t been done yet out of security concerns. But it’s coming.