Older product add-on and enhancement suggestions

sriesch

For content creators who already have good quality products in the store but wish to increase their sales of those products by creating additional add-on products for them or use them as a mostly-completed base for new products, here are some random ideas to get started; with a bit of thought, you'll probably come up with additional or better ones than I have. I encourage other customers who read this thread to add to this list.
The idea for this thread is for add-on products or enhanced versions of the product that make use of an existing product, not brand new products (although of course if you want to make this as a brand new product, that's fine too, although presumably it will be more work that way.)

Do your market research before taking these suggestions; while I'd love to see some of these things in the store, others are just random ideas and at the time of this posting I'm unemployed and thus not your target customer at the moment anyway. Feel free to ignore them if they are bad ideas. This is intended just as a brainstorming starting point.

For boots or shoes: additional laces (tied or untied). bows. sock tops. heels on boots that don't have them yet. Some boots for earlier generation figures can't be fit to Genesis without distorting, but can still be dragged into position and parented with the feet hidden and used, but that's a lot of fiddly work; perhaps fits would be of value. Same thing with boots for different figures.
For hair: any kind of hair ornament; bows, ribbons, combs, sticks, feathers. The same fit issue for earlier generation figures described above, possibly including miniscule changes to x,y,z size. Perhaps additional material zones and opacity to hide ornaments already there that are currently required to be visible. Morphs to make the figure more versatile. Maybe hair doesn't blow in the wind, but it would be easy to make it bend to the side and still fit.
Repurpose items. wristbands, armbands, legbands, anklebands, collars, etc. can easily be retextured (and possibly have transparency modified) to become jewelry, perhaps with the addition of minor raised detail. Perhaps also as components of leather armor, with the addition of buckles and rivets, maybe gloves could be modified the same way. A hair bow or flower could easily be moved to be used as an ornament on some article of clothing. A 3D letter 'I' or 'T' or 'L' could be stretched, textured, and turned into a rusty I-beam, angle bracket, etc. for a construction site or architectural component. I've used a tabletop mirror as a spotlight, a bundt pan as the housing for a piece of equipment, a modern cellphone as a wall-mounted computer monitor, and a crab embedded in another object with just the legs visible to create a walking robotic item.. Perhaps organic or toon objects could be deformed or combined and retextured to create alien plants or creatures if there is a market for that.
low-resolution objects: Items that are low resolution and don't compete as well with more detailed versions of the same objects from competitors might be able to be retextured, modified slightly, and sold as toon items. Or they could remain unchanged but have the description updated to advertise that they are low-poly and thus work great for distant objects, crowd scenes, etc. with less overhead and memory requirements if indeed that is true.
For sci-fi or perhaps modern items: Add hoses or cables that can be connected to the object at one end, and posed into various shapes (taut, lying on floor, hanging in a curve, blown loose, draped across something, held by a character, etc.
for plants: possibly it would be easy to chop grasses, shrubs, and trees up a bit or flatten or deform them and release a version that has been trampled by the passage of creatures to create a path in the middle of a field of the original, non-deformed plants, or run over by a car, or showing the aftermath of storm or battle damage, or bent by characters peeking through them

Change themes in the add-on product. A stone architectural set could be retextured and have accessories such as hoses, buttons, screens, keypads, etc. added to them to make the new product combination a sci-fi item. A modern vase could be retextured as an ancient clay pot. A firearm could have fins and rings added to make it a Buck Rodgers style item. Clothing could have tears and loose bits added to convert it into a zombie appocolypse item. Take a medieval armor suit, add sealed joints, hoses, and equipment, retexture, include a sci-fi firearm, and make it a space marine or powered armor.
Frills, extra layers, pockets, buttons, belts, buckles, etc. could be offered along with retexturing to complement and convert a more plain set of clothing item into one with more detail.
Create a theme by retexturing existing previously unrelated items. Maybe you have a vehicle, a building, clothing from various sets, horse accessories, statues, flowerpots, streetlamps, clocks, etc. that are a mix of modern and antique items that could be retextured to become a matching steampunk, or sci-fi, or abandoned, or burned, or muddy, or moss-covered, or glowing tron style, or ghostly, or submerged and covered with barnacles, or covered with ivy or something.

Separate pieces. Maybe you have a great car. Cut a while off and make it a second item, add a material zone to allow the tire to be hidden, add new detail where the tire would have mounted, and include a car jack. Maybe you have a great robot. piece it out and include some robot factory assembly accessories.