Interview with Allie Munro (Grumble Grumble)

I took a year-long hiatus from Second Life, right after my now RL husband had come over to meet me. We met on Second Life and now are very happily married 🙂  To cut a long story short, we came back online to SL in November 2009 and realized how many things had changed. We managed clubs, danced etc and wanted something more.  Our very dear friend and family member Serenity Quar had been working on making shoes and neko items and so we decided to open a very small business in a mall location. We opened it at Bad Girls and started out with shoes, tails and gestures which my husband Skar Scorpio made. He had DeeJayed in RL and SL for over 8 years. The place had a completely different theme and look at that time. We had an old 2-story warehouse with a club out back with an old subway car inside that you could dance on.

I have my Masters in Graphic Design and have had a long career doing everything from entertainment at Disney World, CNN, Sports Illustrated and nationally recognized talk shows, so that the creative streak in me was ready to go and see what we could come up with.

Grumble opened on December 12, 2009.  About six months later, after starting to participate in some hunts, we decided to change our look to a more modern, clean-lined feel as it was the trend at the time and revamped our brand.

Six months later we realized we needed more space and purchased the Grumble sim, redesigning its look once again.

We also added Club Chrome at the same time as the sim.

In May of 2011 we redesigned the sim, removing the mall and went to a 8 building theme where each department had its own space, (the current layout of the sim).  We are again full so you never know, you may see a Grumble 2 sometime in the near future.

I remember it being terrible when I joined SL, having no clue on how to do anything. The information centre was not nearly as informative and there really was no significant help.  We all wanted to be a familiar name in SL, offering good quality items for you and your home at low prices.  With today’s economy, people do not have the same in-world money as they used to spend . We therefore operate on the idea that the better pricing you have on your designs, the more people will buy them (because they are a great deal and good quality). We like to offer a lot of gift cards to help assist people with their purchases. It tends to give you repeat customers when they know they can spend their money at Grumble and come away with a lot more product for it.

We aim at everyone. We offer everything from men’s and women’s apparel, accessories, shoes, neko, home-store, kids-store, gestures, and seasonal/holiday store. We have a Bridal Boutique and also our Eversong Weddings sim that includes sugar-bakery and Cobble Rose Florist. We have moved our pet store and breedables from the Grumble sim to the Silver Pine Stables sim.

My main inspiration? If I told you the truth you would think I was crazy, but all in all we wanted to be different, to stand out, and to help people enjoy SL.  We love making people happy. We love hearing how much they love something. Believe me, we put up with a lot of negativity and screaming every day, people griefing the sim and such, but we love what we do.  I get bored easily and one day I will decide to do a bridal boutique or build a bakery. Fasten your seat belts. Who knows what comes next?  Serenity would say it is because I like to torture her. She is our builder for all 4 sims and we keep her extremely busy.What would Grumble customers do without her?

For the newbie population? We have campers, lucky chairs and mini mania boards. They have gift cards from 25-100L. There are approximately 6-10 hunts/month, sim-wide Grumble hints and weekends with full outfits for only $10L. We think that we have quite a bit to offer the new SL population as they can find almost everything they need right here at Grumble for a fraction of the cost.