Hi! ;) My name is Alma, I had the oppportunity to work here at Stardoll AB in Sweden for an intership for two days! I had two assignments:

1: An analysis of every hing ( starting out, shopping, making clothes, and making friends. Basically everything you can do here on stardoll) I went from Non- Superstar to Superstar in an hour :D

2: Write an article, as a reporter, The Making of a Stardoll Dress!

There are four different steps for the making of a Stardoll dress:

1: Research and Trends- How they decide what dresses to make and how to make them.

2: Illustration- How they illustrate a dress- technically and artistically  ...

3: Resizing and Doll file: How they prepare a dress for publicationon the site- sized, uploaded and released in a Doll File.

4: PRand Marketing of clothes- for all markets and translated for all the Stardoll languages.

1: Research and Trends

First I got to interview the Junior Project Manager.  Let's call him Melvin.  He was friendly and informative with major eyebrows ... like caterpillars on parade.

The people who work with Step 1 have to keep an eye on the latest fashions and trends. The trends for  spring and summer are what are featured on the site at the moment. They read fashion blogs, websites, all the latest magazines.

 The featured  theme this week on Stardoll is Space Glitter.

For each theme, reflecting a major runway trend for the season,  they research to find the most expressive clothes and materials. Then they interpret pictures, changing color and cut  -- and  highlight  different details,  for example, adding or removing a belt.

When the creative decisions are made they are communicated  to an illustrator either in-house, here in the HQ in Stockholm, or to other illustrators working for the company.  The Research team gives notes back and forth to the illustrators until they change the dress to exactly how they want it.

2: Illustration

For step two I spoke to an illustrator who worked for the Content Team (where they make the dresses) for several years. Let's call her Bunny.

If you are to make a totally new dress  -- one that doesen't already exist in the fabulous world of Fashion.

You also start with the same thing... RESEARCH. They make an inspiration file, there they gather images of different garment that they like -- and that Stardoll members will want.

They  follow the general idea they build up through inspiration pictures, but are free to do what they want in coming up with their own original garment, but it has to look real and CANNOT way more than 8 kb ( simple garments have few points and more detailed,  advanced garments, such as wedding gowns, have more points and weigh more, about 10 kb).  Here's an illustration.



The more points, the heavier the garment is. When you make a garment you want to have as few points as possible. The closer you look and the more zoomed in you are when look at the garment the less pretty it looks, but it is the size shown on stardoll that counts.

It is much harder than it sounds, it's difficult to make the fabric appear soft, flowy and REAL.

Sometimes during the making of garment they collaborate with real brands, they are very specific that the Stardoll garment should look EXACTLY like the real one on the Catwalk.

It's even more difficult to make dress appear as it does on the catwalk, because the model is walking and the fabrik swings -- more illustration challenges. They have to make it appear REAL when they start a garment from scratch ( how heavy it is, shading etc.).

Bunny explained  that the  first few times you make clothing on Stardoll, the lines look pointy and not so real, but  after about half a year it becomes easier.  When the illustration is done you send your garment to a resizer --- 

All that and more in the next article!