[201-400] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 217: Small Job

Ves left the job of establishing contact to his publicist. Gavin worked efficiently and contacted the Fireflies for a sponsorship offer.

To Gavin's surprise, Jarle expressed interest in obtaining a custom virtual mech. That left the door open to negotiations, which Gavin and Jarle's agent quickly hammered out.

Since the deal did not require much formality, the two sides came to a simple understanding.

In absolute terms, Ves provided Jarle with an exclusive customized virtual DarkSpear. He'd design the unique machine after a talk with Jarle over the comm and after he received a list of specifications.

Since they wanted to get this done as quickly as possible before the new duelling season began, Ves would not take more than a few days to complete the custom design.

Once Ves had done his part, Jarle would pilot his custom job and promote the DarkSpear model for a certain number of hours per week. The mech athlete and streamer would continue to pimp the DarkSpear model for a month.

The actual contract looked a lot more complicated, but put simply, Ves got his first spokesperson for the huge and largely untapped Bentheim market.

Gavin visited the workshop to brief Ves on the contract and get him to sign a few documents. He also had a lot of questions about the deal.

"Isn't it premature to expand your brand presence in Bentheim? I thought we already agreed on our marketing strategy. Diverting too much attention on the virtual market makes no sense. The real and virtual markets are too different from each other. Even if you spend a lot of effort on your virtual models, your actual earnings won't increase by all that much."

Ves understood Gavin's doubts, but he had to grow his ability to earn lots of DP. "I don't entirely agree with you on that point. Marcella tells me that many of my customers who bought the Mark II became convinced of its craftsmanship after trying out some of my virtual models. In addition, higher sales figures of my virtual product lines will also translate to confidence in the quality of my real mechs."

"It will be a blip in the ocean. Jarle is hardly the most popular celebrity from Bentheim. Without a constant media presence, your brand will quickly fall into obscurity."

His words rang true. As the local mecca of mech production and export, Bentheim was saturated with thousands of brands. At the LMC's current scale, it had no hopes of competing with these long-established household names.

Still, Ves didn't need to put in a lot of effort to cobble up a custom virtual DarkSpear, and he got plenty of short-term benefits out of the weeks-long promotion. As long as his sales for his latest virtual mech surpassed ten thousand units, he'd earn 100,000 DP in total. Ves needed the huge sum to shore up his skills and attributes to design a decent original mech.

Despite Gavin's skepticism, Ves still went through with his plans. Before Gavin left, he wanted to ask a question that had been burning in his mind for a while.

"Boss? I'd like you to clear something up for me."

"Yes?"

"Well, it's like this. I've been analyzing the sales patterns of your virtual mechs and compared them to your peers. One pattern happened to stand out like a sore thumb. Your customer retention is off the charts. Anyone who buys one of your virtual mechs is several times more likely to buy another mech designed by you. This usually doesn't happen to newcomers in the market."

Consumers never really paid attention to the mech designer when they purchased a product from the low-end of the virtual market. They only cared about specs and their personal feelings about the mech.