INTERVIEW WITH A LEGEND Poulet Koenkamp

Yhishara Cerise

We wanted to make magic.” This was the mindset of Poulet Koenkamp and her design partner in 2009 when they first started Purplemoon Creations. To say things took off is an understatement. “Customers were shopping, items were flying out of the marketplace… It was surreal how much PM grew so quickly.” Though her partner had to bow out due to time restraints, Poulet carried on, taking on the role of design lead for the brand. Having sole creative control, “my main focus was formalwear and a few fantasy outfits.” From there, she sought to improve the brand further by accepting opportunities to dress pageant contestants, hosting in-house styling contests such as “Miss Essence of Purplemoon,” and hiring live models to work at the Purplemoon main store to both showcase new releases and act as customer service representatives. But perhaps the best advertisement and sign that she had “made it” as a designer was simply that “in all the ballrooms, you could see ladies dancing with my dresses.”

However, no matter how successful a brand becomes in Second Life, we all live by the adage of “Real life comes first.” For Poulet, it was a combination of factors that caused her to re-examine the future of Purplemoon Creations. Having a newborn daughter to take care of, seeing the massive upheavals in Second Life with the changeover to mesh, and an irrefusable job offer in real life prompted her to step back and then ultimately close Purplemoon’s doors in 2019.

Then, in November of 2021, the news broke that Poulet was returning to do a limited-time, holidaythemed event— something she was well known for. “The response was insane. I was getting messages all the time, I still do, from customers from way back then delighted to see me back. Encouraging me to go at it again.” But once the event was over, she found, “I couldn’t let it go again.” It simply wasn’t enough to come back temporarily.

“I slowly started to test the waters in 2022 to see if there was actually room for me in SL.” To be successful, she knows it’s important to have the loyalty and support of her past customers. But she is also looking at her new residents, as well, and so far “they seem to appreciate my work, so here I am once again.”

Poulet has also seen the differences between the SL of 2009 and the SL of 2023. Mesh itself has undergone an evolution from the basic Standard sizes and mesh body part “add-ons” to whole bodies and the resurgence of system layers in the form of Bakes on Mesh. Even the way businesses are run is different now.

She’s noticed that designing has become more “exclusive” to those who have the tools and the technical knowledge and that it takes a higher financial investment to be successful. It’s no longer just creative ability that will make a successful brand here. “I noticed many of the big brands these days have multiple owners; they have teams of people working behind the scenes doing marketing, social media, rigging, designing, customer service, etc. I have always been the one doing all that, so in order to strive, I need to build a big team or keep it small. So far it has been small, but it is changing.” One of the things she did recently was hire a new blogging team to help promote her releases; she also rebranded slightly by shortening the name to simply “PM”.

She has also noticed that the demographic has changed. It’s a “different decade, with different