eCommerce MasterPlan | 620: How Pearl Paradise Uses Livestream Shopping to Generate $100K in Sales
Jeremy Shepherd is the founder and CEO at Pearl Paradise, designers, manufacturers, and sellers of pearl jewellery. Founded in the 1990s they now sell primarily via their Shopify store and also from a showroom in Los Angeles, now turning over 8 figures a year.
Jeremy joins Chloe to share how Pearl Paradise uses its own website and email-driven livestreams to generate an average of $100,000 in sales per session. He reveals how to create a successful live shopping experience built around genuine expertise, customer trust, exclusive access, and products people can’t find anywhere else.
Hit PLAY to hear:
- 💰 How Pearl Paradise generates around $100K in sales per livestream
- 🎥 Why live video helps customers buy high-value products online
- 🤝 The surprising reason authenticity beats manufactured urgency
- 🦪 How rare pearls and special guests turn livestreams into must-watch events
- 💬 How a simple “It’s Mine” system turns viewers into buyers
- 📈 How often to livestream – and how to make each event count
Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[03:16] Starting a jewelry business on eBay
[06:45] Customizing Pearl Jewelry Orders
[11:13] Lack of pearl grading standards
[15:32] Launching deals.today.com website
[16:34] Managing eCommerce for NBC Universal
[21:22] Upcoming international travel plans
[23:47] Livestream sales format and speed
[28:57] Challenges of marketing to Univision’s audience
[32:30] Choosing show format for streams
[34:58] Setting up live streaming process
[37:19] Listen to Jeremy’s Top Tips!
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[SPEAKER_00]: authenticity beats the performance every single time.
00:04.475 –> 00:13.703
[SPEAKER_00]: If someone in the audience is thinking about doing live shoots themselves, one of the biggest tips I can give is you cannot hire for authenticity.
00:14.104 –> 00:18.428
[SPEAKER_00]: With live streaming, it comes down to trust.
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[SPEAKER_00]: People aren’t responding to, hey, this looks really beautiful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You should buy this now.
00:23.412 –> 00:24.493
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve only got three left.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No, they’re responding to authenticity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It’s not manufactured urgency.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It’s access.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it is scarcity, but it’s real scarcity and not manufactured scarcity.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Cutting through the hinder to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond, here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It’s great to have you here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now this is a bit of an epic episode.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There is an emergency siren relatively early passing by the office at some point.
01:10.810 –> 01:12.751
[SPEAKER_01]: But just but that’s not in your car.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It’s in the podcast fairly early on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, there’s been an epic long range episode where my guest is talking about his fascinating business.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But we also get deep into live streaming because
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[SPEAKER_01]: He’s built a live streaming system that they use around peak season up to four times a month hosting it on their own website.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This isn’t a TikTok thing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is a known website with sign-ups driven by email thing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And they are using it to drive $50 to $100,000 per session.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Really fascinating.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We get deep into the various strategic angles of it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you’re thinking about live shipping, if you’re tempted to do a live stream, you’re gonna learn,
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[SPEAKER_01]: huge amounts about how to make it successful in this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So really fascinating one coming up plus some great top tips, some cool books and some very cool tools and a bit of AI as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So make sure you do listen all the way to the end which I know is a long way off in this one, but you won’t regret it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And now to introduce our special guest.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Jeremy Shepherd is the founder and CEO at Pearl Paradise.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Designers, manufacturers, and sellers of Pearl Jewelry founded in the 1990s.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They now sell primarily via their Shopify store and also from a showroom in Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now turning over eight figures a year, hello Jeremy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, Chloe, thanks for having me today.
02:38.598 –> 02:45.291
[SPEAKER_01]: great to have you on the show and you are one of the few people who I get on the show who’ve been in e-commerce even longer than I have.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So how did you end up in the world of e-commerce all those years ago?
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[SPEAKER_00]: All those years ago, it’s hard to believe it’s been 30 years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I started in the newcomers in 1996, so it’s 30 years this year.
02:58.757 –> 03:06.546
[SPEAKER_00]: I was actually a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines, and I was on layover in Beijing, China.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I bought a strand of pearls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I brought it back.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I gave it to my girlfriend.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She found out what it was worth and light bulb started going off in my head.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had started other businesses when I was younger in my 20s.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I actually my teens.
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[SPEAKER_00]: small businesses, and this seemed like a home run.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I started talking to stores, jewelry stores, boutiques, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And quickly found that the jewelry industry was not an easy industry to break into, especially as a Neophyte flight attendant who do nothing about pearls, really.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And a friend of mine told me about a website that he had been selling some odds and ends on and it was eBay.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I hadn’t even heard of eBay at that point.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don’t think.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so a few months later, I launched my first auction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was a success.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I sold my first pearls immediately.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then I started going back and forth to China buying these pearl strands, not just as a flight attendant, but also my days off.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I could fly out there for
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[SPEAKER_00]: and a couple years in, I’d built my first website, which is the year 2000, and that’s where it all started.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, so it was product first.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god, the existing market is really tough.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Oh eBay.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then the rest is history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Pretty much, that’s the story, yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How mad is that because like these days, anyone’s starting a fine pearl jewelry business like you’ve built?
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[SPEAKER_01]: eBay and marketplaces would be way down the list of where we’d start.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Just shows how much the the e-commerce world has evolved in that time and how we see different channels.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So let’s talk a little bit about Pearl Paradise as it is today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Where in the world are you and where are you selling to?
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are based in Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My office is in a bank building.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It’s an old bank.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So we have a commercial vault, which is perfect.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It’s 1300 cubic feet.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it’s a big commercial vault.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we have it filled with quite literally millions of pearls from all over the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So our primary market is the United States.
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[SPEAKER_00]: About 25% of our sales, though, are international.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We sell a lot to the UK even throughout Europe, Canada, Australia, Singapore, all good markets for us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and we have a showroom here in Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We have an appointment only showroom, I should say, so we allow one visitor per day to come in and they get access to the full vault, and so a appointment’s take about two hours when we do have an in-house appointment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, everything is sold on Shopify and via virtual appointments, a big thing for us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We have a studio where we take virtual appointments three days a week and those appointments are usually booked pretty solid just about every day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, lifestrings.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, so they go completely non-ecomers for a second.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So when your appointment people come to
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[SPEAKER_01]: on, put together pearls and made jewelry items.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The vast majority of the pearls we have are loose or they’re on what we call Hanks, which is temporary strands, because when someone orders off our website, for example, they may want white gold, yellow gold, diamond clasp.
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[SPEAKER_00]: easy class to manipulate, something very small and dainty, and so almost everything is made to order.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We have people that are nodding the pearls all day every day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: you know, setting pearls and earring settings, ring settings, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So when someone comes into our office, if they’re coming in for a pendant, for example, we can show them 50 plus different styles based on what they’re looking for.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then we can bring out boxes of loose pearls, whether they’re gold pearls, black pearls, white pearls, pink pearls, lavender pearls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn’t really matter.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everything is made to order that way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I’d also say we have a,
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[SPEAKER_00]: very rare collection of extremely high pearl jewelry.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And this all came from the acquisition of A, one of the oldest pearl companies in the world actually.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so there are strands that are awards of a million dollars.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so for these types of pearls, yes, we will also sell them in virtual appointments, but very often people that are interested in those sorts of pieces,
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[SPEAKER_00]: will fly into Los Angeles and meet with us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then we can take out, you know, 10, 20 strands that are in the 500,000 to a million dollar range.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s an experience that can’t be had anywhere else literally in the world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and the virtual appointments.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How similar are they to the in-person?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, obviously, you’re doing a slightly different price point in general.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But have you found that making them as similar as possible to the real world experience works or is it more of a custom process that you found that really works online?
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[SPEAKER_00]: That’s the intention by design is to make it as close to in-person as possible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We have four cameras.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We have a studio.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It’s not just a camera on the top of a computer, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s not an iPhone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it is our livestream studio, actually.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We built a studio inside one of our offices.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We took down one wall between two offices and created a studio.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So we have studio lights, four cameras, two light boxes, a close-up camera on either the host, if it’s the live stream, or the associate, if it’s a virtual appointment, and a face-to-face camera as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: some impressive investment in it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When everyone says they do like virtually personal appointments, I always have the an image of the sales associate running around with a phone, you know, like, well, let me pull that off the shelf while you’re running back.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But it’s somewhat more sophisticated than that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It’s a bit more sophisticated than that, but, Chloe, you’re not far off.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How it started.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so everything has a starting point.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you don’t jump into something like virtual appointments in a land where we are today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It really started with COVID, believe it or not.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We, I had an idea about having these face-to-face appointments for years, but people weren’t really accustomed to getting on a Zoom or Google Meet and having a face-to-face meeting.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But after COVID, it became nearly ubiquitous and people were much more open and accepting to meeting virtually.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And now we do a lot more virtuals than we would even do telephone calls.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, so more video calls, book appointments than people phoning out to ask questions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, sure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And it may start with a video call.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it may start with a telephone call.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I’m sorry.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But when you are selecting a white strand of pearls, for example, I mean, that could be fresh water, South Sea, Aqualia could be silver over tone, pink over tone rose over tone, cream over tone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You want to see how the class goes with the strand, would you like to see someone wearing it and showing it under close up?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to see the exact pearl you’re going to receive that is either virtual appointment or a video and with pearls specifically It’s important because
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[SPEAKER_00]: There is no universal grading standard in the way that there are for other gemstones like diamonds.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What that means is that it’s impossible to compare some short pearls from company to company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even if a company says, oh, we have triple-ake-quality pearls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that in our industry is absolutely meaningless because it only means something to the company that’s selling the pearls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Every grading system is internal across the industry writ large so there are no standardizations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so when people understand that they realize that
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[SPEAKER_00]: comparison shopping is out the window.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You can’t compare one brand to another.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And even from a description, a description will always be subjective.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What does round me?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What does pink overtone me?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What does high lester me?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there’s no standardization.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So the only way to bridge that gap is through video virtual appointments.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, live stream does that as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let’s talk about live stream because I was saying to you before we hit record, I still find it insane that live stream has not taken off massively in e-commerce.
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[SPEAKER_01]: For the last few years, I’ve been saying I don’t understand why live stream hasn’t taken off massively.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You obviously have a serious, serious background in TV shopping.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us a bit about that and was that the reason why you bought live streaming to Pearl Paradise was because you had the skill set or was it for other reasons?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn’t say there’s a specific reason.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think all of it kind of played a part.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I would also challenge the assumption that livestream hasn’t taken off.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you go to Asia, for example, especially China, live stream is, for example, 2G where pearls come from in China, over 65% of the pearls sold from that city are sold via live stream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There are entire buildings dedicated to live streams.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So live stream is huge in other parts of the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It’s still growing here in the U.S.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But back to more good question.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I actually, even though I got into pearls in 1996, I’ve always been a bit of an entrepreneur.
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[SPEAKER_00]: by habit, by design, by addiction, if you will.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was invited to be on Jill’s steals and deals on NBC.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The today show in 2009.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we had one week to prepare.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We built a no date date of a shopping cart website so that our site wouldn’t crash.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We needed to be able to handle 25,000 visitors all at once.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And back in the day, websites were designed to handle that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So we did it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we were successful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We sold 33,000 units, $2.3 million in 24 hours.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And…
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[SPEAKER_00]: We of course were hosting our own site.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That’s the way the show worked at the time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We were the first brand to come on the show whose website didn’t crash.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was a huge deal for them because all the other websites were crashing and it was simply because websites weren’t designed to handle 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 checkouts at a time, which is what happened when you went on this national show.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so after the show I was asked by the booking agents if we would consider assisting other brands coming onto the show and helping them design these no database websites.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And after some convincing ID cited to do it, the reason was, of course, you know, it’s it’s always a pleasure to help people and see other people succeed as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There was also the fact that that meant that I was sort of ingrained with the team at MBC.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so over the next eight years, we were on the show as a brand probably 15 times and every time it was a huge success.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Did you become their go-to if they didn’t have a guess lined up for something and it can’t like their fallback option?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn’t say I’d go to, I would say more we started another company, the time called Pearl Collective, and we started working with designers and creating lines and brands around pearls with people, and then they would go in the show.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the big shift happened in 2018 when NBC asked me to create a website specifically for NBC, where all the brands would then be hosted on a single website.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I did it and I launched PP web pros with the name of my company at the time and built a website for NBC.
16:10.167 –> 16:19.150
[SPEAKER_00]: And so with that website, my job was to bring brands into the website, get them prepared to go on television.
16:19.791 –> 16:24.732
[SPEAKER_00]: I handled all of the transactions, credit card transactions.
16:24.832 –> 16:28.914
[SPEAKER_00]: We the last year of our contract, we did over $80 million in transactions.
16:32.622 –> 16:34.404
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we had contracts with them.
16:34.424 –> 16:35.805
[SPEAKER_00]: We’d be in Marketplace, Patel.
16:35.825 –> 16:42.790
[SPEAKER_00]: The sales tax is basically ran the entire show from the e-commerce side for NBC Universal.
16:42.950 –> 16:47.774
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was Jill Steele’s and deals and then P Cox show as well.
16:48.815 –> 16:54.339
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 2020, UNIVISHING came to me and they wanted to do the same thing.
16:55.200 –> 17:00.904
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I had one year left on my contract with NBC before I handed it over to an internal team
17:02.585 –> 17:05.986
[SPEAKER_00]: and I ran a three year contract with NBC universal.
17:06.106 –> 17:14.147
[SPEAKER_00]: They actually turned out to be three years and three months because they needed an additional three months to get their next team up to speed.
17:14.707 –> 17:19.468
[SPEAKER_00]: Before I moved completely over to Pearl Paradise and launched our live stream here.
17:19.868 –> 17:22.889
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of overlapped just like NBC and Unimissioned it.
17:23.189 –> 17:29.610
[SPEAKER_00]: I’d started it the summer before and realized that I’d spent all this time bringing people on to
17:30.450 –> 17:47.560
[SPEAKER_00]: Network television in English and in Spanish on actually the largest morning shows in the United States and these are in Show events in other words with a host with the you know the news people are always there and they often gone involved So it wasn’t like a commercial.
17:47.580 –> 17:50.001
[SPEAKER_00]: This is like live shopping on NBC and the univision
17:51.042 –> 18:11.058
[SPEAKER_00]: Pearl Paradise’s livestream had started out really strong, and it had shown some amazing legs, and so really I decided I was done with television, and I was going to build something for myself, and my company, and that was now, it’ll be three years.
18:11.498 –> 18:14.821
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, I think it’s three years this month, yeah, that we started livestreaming.
18:15.883 –> 18:16.363
[SPEAKER_01]: Very cool.
18:16.484 –> 18:20.327
[SPEAKER_01]: And what does your live stream approach?
18:20.347 –> 18:22.328
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I want to get into all different angles of the live stream.
18:22.348 –> 18:24.790
[SPEAKER_01]: But what does your live stream program look like at the moment?
18:24.830 –> 18:26.391
[SPEAKER_01]: How many times are you going live?
18:26.712 –> 18:28.013
[SPEAKER_01]: What kind of results are you seeing?
18:28.997 –> 18:35.519
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we’ll typically go live one to four times a month, and it varies throughout the year.
18:36.299 –> 18:41.721
[SPEAKER_00]: Like right now, we did a stream last month, and inordering the summer, it’ll probably be once per month.
18:42.861 –> 18:51.464
[SPEAKER_00]: The live streams generate on the low end about $50,000 in sales, the higher end, around a quarter million dollars in sales.
18:52.184 –> 18:54.945
[SPEAKER_00]: The average is right around $100,000 in sales.
18:55.785 –> 18:56.726
[SPEAKER_00]: They last,
18:57.581 –> 18:59.782
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we scheduled them for two hours.
19:00.903 –> 19:03.704
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost always they last about two and a half hours.
19:03.764 –> 19:16.190
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes up to three hours, because at the end of the livestream, everyone who has claimed items may wanna see their items again or they’ll wanna see anything that may not have sold.
19:17.511 –> 19:26.717
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of the livestreams, everything are almost everything sells, it’s, you know, a one of a kind sort of stream.
19:27.918 –> 19:35.523
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s an event and so we’re not, you know, pulling 50 items out of our vault and saying, ah, this is what we sell every day.
19:35.563 –> 19:36.584
[SPEAKER_00]: This is on our website.
19:36.604 –> 19:38.465
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we’re going to show it to you in the livestream.
19:39.445 –> 19:45.050
[SPEAKER_00]: Every one of them is an event, so it’s unique items, special access.
19:45.790 –> 19:51.435
[SPEAKER_00]: Very often on the road, we’ve recreated our studio to make it mobile as well.
19:52.075 –> 19:54.938
[SPEAKER_00]: Smaller lights, boxes we built.
19:55.638 –> 19:58.481
[SPEAKER_00]: that can be folded up and taken with us on the road.
19:58.801 –> 20:04.246
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve streamed probably a dozen times from the gem show in Hong Kong.
20:04.987 –> 20:07.609
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe ten times from Japan.
20:07.869 –> 20:10.792
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve streamed with pearl farmers in Japan.
20:11.353 –> 20:15.116
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve streamed from a pearl farm in Mexico five times.
20:16.277 –> 20:30.143
[SPEAKER_00]: we’ve streamed with designers and the wholesalers and creators, and so every time we do a live stream, and this kind of heart comes back to the TV days is that it’s in a vet, it’s a show.
20:31.243 –> 20:35.205
[SPEAKER_00]: And so every time we create an event, we create a show.
20:35.365 –> 20:38.226
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it’s not something that we could
20:41.109 –> 20:44.793
[SPEAKER_00]: In the beginning, we tried, but that’s way, way too much.
20:45.694 –> 20:53.982
[SPEAKER_00]: So during the holidays, Christmas time, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, we will do four times a month.
20:54.663 –> 20:58.527
[SPEAKER_00]: But otherwise, one to two is our more of our average.
20:59.323 –> 21:01.684
[SPEAKER_01]: So as we’re talking, it’s the tail end of August.
21:02.464 –> 21:14.448
[SPEAKER_01]: So I’m assuming, therefore, that you’ve got a pretty good production plan for what’s happening through to the end of December in terms of who your guests are, where you’re gonna be, what the products are gonna be.
21:14.928 –> 21:18.689
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that all fully set in stone by now?
21:18.729 –> 21:22.050
[SPEAKER_01]: And it’s just a case of making it happen, or does it change on the fly?
21:22.746 –> 21:24.687
[SPEAKER_00]: It definitely is not set in style.
21:25.307 –> 21:30.769
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, I am leaving for Sibjo on Tuesday of next week.
21:31.229 –> 21:32.509
[SPEAKER_00]: So Monday or Tuesday is the first.
21:32.549 –> 21:33.349
[SPEAKER_00]: So whatever day that is.
21:34.610 –> 21:40.412
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we are going to Hong Kong on the 13th of September.
21:41.772 –> 21:46.314
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we are going to be in Japan from the first of November.
21:46.374 –> 21:49.475
[SPEAKER_00]: So in this episode, airs will actually be in Japan.
21:50.702 –> 21:58.369
[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s not just buying trips, but we will also be meeting with people who will be potential collaborators.
21:58.950 –> 22:12.802
[SPEAKER_00]: And so because we’re making, because we turn this into an event, it takes a lot of meeting with people and, you know, producers, processors, designers to bring an opportunity if you will.
22:13.683 –> 22:20.947
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it may be one processor in Japan who specializes in natural color blue Akoya pearls.
22:21.168 –> 22:21.908
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s rare.
22:22.008 –> 22:24.349
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s difficult to get much of this in inventory.
22:24.770 –> 22:26.651
[SPEAKER_00]: But this is someone that’s their specialty.
22:26.891 –> 22:31.894
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when they come to our show, you know, we’ve got two hours, which means it’s 40 products.
22:32.954 –> 22:36.236
[SPEAKER_00]: And so those 40 products are that
22:37.357 –> 22:40.378
[SPEAKER_00]: collaborators best foot forward if you will.
22:40.758 –> 22:43.179
[SPEAKER_00]: So they might spend a year getting prepared.
22:43.599 –> 22:48.541
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what they’ll bring to us is a proposal to come on to this show.
22:49.401 –> 22:51.422
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason is is simple.
22:51.662 –> 22:53.843
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got an audience that’ll show up.
22:54.623 –> 22:55.803
[SPEAKER_00]: Very engaged.
22:55.983 –> 22:56.964
[SPEAKER_00]: They trust us.
22:57.144 –> 22:58.264
[SPEAKER_00]: They trust our host
23:01.930 –> 23:04.871
[SPEAKER_00]: anything that is really special, it will sell.
23:05.072 –> 23:08.013
[SPEAKER_00]: And we’re not talking $200, $300, $300 pieces.
23:09.154 –> 23:13.656
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve sold the most expensive piece was $94,000.
23:14.396 –> 23:15.056
[SPEAKER_00]: That we’ve sold.
23:15.177 –> 23:19.899
[SPEAKER_00]: And every show we have pieces in the 10 to $50,000 range.
23:20.939 –> 23:26.782
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would say probably every show, we sell pieces in the 10 to $50,000.
23:26.802 –> 23:28.363
[SPEAKER_00]: I can’t think of a show where we haven’t anyway.
23:29.170 –> 23:44.181
[SPEAKER_01]: When you were talking about, and I was talking about the price points of the items, but also when you were talking about bringing the story into the show and the guests, I was thinking it was quite a slow-paced live stream, but you said 40 products within two hours.
23:44.501 –> 23:46.383
[SPEAKER_01]: That’s still very fast-paced.
23:47.290 –> 24:02.890
[SPEAKER_00]: It is, and as part of the reason why two hours is sometimes a little short, but the way our life shims work, we call it its mind, which basically means the first person that claim the item is the person who gets the opportunity to buy it.
24:04.118 –> 24:22.560
[SPEAKER_00]: And when we are in the $1,000 under category, which of course it has to take up a good part of the show because we want to make it accessible for everyone, those items will often sell within seconds or almost instantly as soon as the camera goes on them.
24:23.541 –> 24:31.885
[SPEAKER_00]: and so we do try to move more quickly through parts of it and then we’ll slow down especially with the higher-rank pieces.
24:32.365 –> 24:39.808
[SPEAKER_00]: But that’s also why the segments tend to take a lot longer is because at the end of it, people will want to see all the pieces they bid for, for example.
24:40.888 –> 24:58.163
[SPEAKER_00]: And some shows, like we did a show at like Cossuming Aura and Japan in April, April of this year, we did two days of life streaming with the very last freshwater pearl farmer in Japan on Lake Cossuming Aura.
24:58.764 –> 25:05.529
[SPEAKER_00]: The only one who exists, he’s 70 years old, he has one harvest a year, and it’s a handful of pearls, just a few kilos.
25:06.530 –> 25:15.852
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, over the course of two days, we offered, you know, 40 items per day, or 40 sets, and, you know, we mix it up a course.
25:15.912 –> 25:17.172
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s not just individual pearls.
25:18.572 –> 25:28.074
[SPEAKER_00]: Every item for the entire show sold, but not only did every item sell, but many pearls had 15, 20 people that were buying for it.
25:28.574 –> 25:33.855
[SPEAKER_00]: So it gets very exciting and it’s very active.
25:34.770 –> 25:44.399
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, what it kind of leads into one thing that’s so specific about live stream that we couldn’t accomplish with TV, with TV, it’s a broadcast, it’s one way.
25:45.479 –> 25:48.882
[SPEAKER_00]: And with live streaming, it’s an interaction.
25:49.463 –> 25:55.788
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the audience will very often direct the way the show goes.
25:56.589 –> 26:02.074
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we will often have more products available than we actually show.
26:02.454 –> 26:03.675
[SPEAKER_00]: And I’m sitting in the back.
26:03.775 –> 26:04.516
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m the director.
26:05.216 –> 26:06.317
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess you could call it that.
26:07.258 –> 26:12.922
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am sending messages to the studio, which is across the hall.
26:13.463 –> 26:18.667
[SPEAKER_00]: If we’re going to be skipping this block of products at the excitement, it wasn’t so great about this type of multi-color.
26:18.687 –> 26:20.488
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, we’ve got another four coming up.
26:20.769 –> 26:21.910
[SPEAKER_00]: Let’s push those back.
26:22.030 –> 26:23.231
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, we’re running out of time.
26:23.271 –> 26:24.211
[SPEAKER_00]: Skip these last three.
26:26.474 –> 26:28.907
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it’s, it’s, it’s live.
26:31.279 –> 26:49.445
[SPEAKER_00]: it’s absolutely live and you know that of course is different from television with television it’s very scripted you know exactly how long it’s going to take you know exactly what the talking points are but that’s also what makes it better it’s it’s much more exciting and I
26:59.749 –> 27:23.675
[SPEAKER_00]: and has an amazing audience that thrives on the excitement of the group on almost mentality and I’m using an old term which people don’t really, you know, talk about it anymore, but that’s sort of where the idea was born for them originally in 2009 was this limited time, limited inventory opportunity, sort of this urgency, if you will.
27:24.515 –> 27:26.736
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, that worked for a time.
27:27.516 –> 27:34.658
[SPEAKER_00]: But by the time I stepped away from television, that was no longer really working very well.
27:34.799 –> 27:42.641
[SPEAKER_00]: People started to learn that this manufactured urgency wasn’t real, it wasn’t authentic.
27:43.482 –> 27:46.683
[SPEAKER_00]: During my last year with Univision, we saw that
27:47.963 –> 27:50.466
[SPEAKER_00]: audience starting to slip away, if you will.
27:51.327 –> 27:58.734
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we tried something different, tried something new, and this really led into what I do now at pro paradise.
27:59.555 –> 28:07.322
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is, we started bringing the brand founders on the show.
28:08.487 –> 28:27.482
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I went out and I found founders of brands who were first generation typically or immigrant from Central America, Mexico, or even Caribbean where they speak Spanish, we would fly them into Miami and then they would go on the show.
28:28.724 –> 28:45.444
[SPEAKER_00]: And what we found instantly is that expertise, authentic knowledge of the product, authentic passion was such a different, stronger, selling point than say manufactured urgency.
28:46.658 –> 28:50.621
[SPEAKER_00]: And with NBC, there was so much of the host, oh, it’s the best deal ever.
28:50.681 –> 28:55.164
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s 85% off, you know, we only have 1,500 of these once they’re gone.
28:55.184 –> 29:08.333
[SPEAKER_00]: They’re gone versus, which by the way, did not work very well at all for a very discerning protective of their wallet audience, which is what Univision had.
29:09.173 –> 29:25.383
[SPEAKER_00]: a Univisions audience is Spanish is the first language mostly for generation or immigrant and so they are accustomed to walking down the street these markets where people are yelling at them to buy products that does did not work with that audience and what I saw though was
29:26.123 –> 29:35.950
[SPEAKER_00]: just a black and white difference between the way the audience engaged, the audience reacted, how happy the audience was and the buyers were with the product.
29:36.550 –> 29:47.857
[SPEAKER_00]: And also the brand itself, how well the brands did who came on personally versus sending their products to a television show and saying these are my talking points, have the host go on and sell them.
29:48.478 –> 29:49.959
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we took that
29:55.782 –> 30:00.349
[SPEAKER_00]: authenticity beats the performance every single time.
30:01.311 –> 30:07.480
[SPEAKER_00]: And going into like, if someone in the audience is thinking about doing live shoots themselves,
30:08.674 –> 30:13.615
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the biggest tips I can give is you cannot hire for authenticity.
30:14.375 –> 30:20.677
[SPEAKER_00]: You can’t say we’re going to start doing live streams now, so we need to have a host.
30:21.117 –> 30:25.118
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s how you would look at it if you were looking at it from a television perspective.
30:25.438 –> 30:26.478
[SPEAKER_00]: You start with a host.
30:26.538 –> 30:32.840
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this host going to engage with the audience or they are not engaged, but resonate with the audience.
30:33.400 –> 30:36.841
[SPEAKER_00]: Are they believable, do they have the right?
30:38.081 –> 30:40.664
[SPEAKER_00]: excitement, the attitude, the personality.
30:42.286 –> 30:48.353
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, with live streaming, it comes down to trust.
30:49.094 –> 30:51.156
[SPEAKER_00]: It comes down to authenticity.
30:51.977 –> 30:55.721
[SPEAKER_00]: People aren’t responding to, hey, this looks really beautiful.
30:55.781 –> 30:56.602
[SPEAKER_00]: You should buy this now.
30:56.622 –> 30:57.703
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve only got three left.
30:58.604 –> 31:12.572
[SPEAKER_00]: No, they’re responding to Hesano, who is our host, my wife, who has 20 years of hands-on pearl buying experience, who knows all the farmers, who is an absolute world-class expert in pearls.
31:13.272 –> 31:15.353
[SPEAKER_00]: They are hearing her judgment.
31:15.513 –> 31:17.074
[SPEAKER_00]: What makes this pearl special?
31:17.494 –> 31:26.639
[SPEAKER_00]: And her showing it under the light, turning it, seeing the color change, explaining Lester, explaining Dev, explaining why this pearl
31:28.420 –> 31:40.970
[SPEAKER_00]: So it’s, it’s authenticity, it’s not manufactured urgency, it’s access and it is scarcity, but it’s real scarcity and not manufactured scarcity.
31:41.970 –> 31:54.900
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, Jeremy, a couple of slightly quick-fire technical questions for you then on the live stream’s first off, are you doing this on your own site or are you doing this on TikTok or Instagram or somewhere else?
31:56.036 –> 32:12.541
[SPEAKER_00]: So we’ve tried a lot of things we’ve been doing this for three years and in the beginning, we went straight to Facebook and then we started including YouTube and we did that for about the first year and then we moved it to our website and piked it out to Facebook and YouTube.
32:13.761 –> 32:17.562
[SPEAKER_00]: Our website is by far the best place for us to do it.
32:18.342 –> 32:22.123
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that said there are other platforms.
32:22.243 –> 32:23.164
[SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned TikTok.
32:23.264 –> 32:24.204
[SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned Instagram.
32:24.663 –> 32:29.704
[SPEAKER_00]: And we’ve tried Instagram, Instagram is vertical only.
32:30.725 –> 32:36.386
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve tried vertical only, our audience loud and clear.
32:36.906 –> 32:43.348
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted horizontal, even though in Asia, for example, they only do vertical and they’re completely sold on that concept.
32:45.069 –> 32:53.571
[SPEAKER_00]: Instagram is only vertical, so we’ve tried it once piping out to Instagram at the same time we do YouTube Facebook and the website.
32:54.371 –> 33:00.258
[SPEAKER_00]: but what we found is this that we are operating a show where we need that space.
33:01.159 –> 33:13.112
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when we do want Instagram now, it’s typically at behind the scenes, and we’ll do it for the first 15 minutes of the show, and that’s one person on our team who is in the studio with a film.
33:13.793 –> 33:18.655
[SPEAKER_00]: and our audience actually really loves that because they get to see what’s actually happening behind the scenes.
33:18.955 –> 33:25.338
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, from the hosts do, seeing all the cameras, seeing all the product getting ready to go live, etc.
33:25.918 –> 33:34.802
[SPEAKER_00]: So it’s more of a teaser that happens during the livestream, but we’re not actively selling via Instagram.
33:34.822 –> 33:36.263
[SPEAKER_00]: And no, we haven’t tried TikTok at all.
33:36.836 –> 33:37.236
[SPEAKER_01]: Got you.
33:37.276 –> 33:58.272
[SPEAKER_01]: Then the other question is going to be about the team because I’m assuming you’ve got the host used the director someone keeping an eye on who’s claiming what so you can email them their link to buy afterwards and making sure the right person gets it so imagine that can get quite feisty if that went wrong and then how many I mean is that right and then how many other people
34:01.820 –> 34:02.341
[SPEAKER_00]: I love this clue.
34:02.361 –> 34:02.983
[SPEAKER_00]: You already get it.
34:03.243 –> 34:04.806
[SPEAKER_00]: So you’re right.
34:05.748 –> 34:06.731
[SPEAKER_00]: You’re not far off at all.
34:06.911 –> 34:08.194
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are five of us.
34:09.412 –> 34:33.314
[SPEAKER_00]: And that’s now typically when we travel it’s for, but we’ll often have someone online in our home office while we’re streaming even overseas because there are a lot of questions that may come in that aren’t questions that we would want, he saw no to address during the life stream questions that are not relevant to what he’s talking about.
34:34.154 –> 34:39.935
[SPEAKER_00]: or not even technical, a little more about procedural in paying for things and shipping, et cetera.
34:40.976 –> 34:49.678
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yes, we absolutely need someone there who can communicate with all the people who have bought pieces as well and claimed pieces.
34:50.378 –> 34:52.438
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of that happens after the show.
34:53.179 –> 34:54.779
[SPEAKER_00]: What will send them the links to buy?
34:55.579 –> 34:58.320
[SPEAKER_00]: And if they don’t, then it goes on to the next person.
35:04.221 –> 35:18.905
[SPEAKER_00]: We also have a videographer who is working the cameras and this person will be zooming in when she’s under the macro lens or pulling back or zooming in when she’s putting a strand on.
35:18.925 –> 35:27.847
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, there’s five of us that typically work and we are all incredibly busy the entire time.
35:28.687 –> 35:30.388
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s gotten a lot better.
35:31.468 –> 35:46.395
[SPEAKER_00]: Since we figured out how to bring everything into the same platform and what I mean by that is I’ve tried many different platforms over the course of three years and as you mentioned at the start of the show
35:47.575 –> 35:49.878
[SPEAKER_00]: live streaming is not a huge thing here yet.
35:50.498 –> 35:58.947
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there is no playbook that’s one size fits all for every company to just jump into live streaming.
35:59.368 –> 36:05.114
[SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of what we’ve learned, it’s trial and error, and it’s iteration and improvement, right?
36:05.954 –> 36:18.504
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, for the longest time, we had Facebook and YouTube on one thing, our website on another thing, and so the comments had to be monitored independently.
36:18.584 –> 36:24.388
[SPEAKER_00]: So we had to determine who was the first one, oh, was somebody on YouTube, oh, was somebody on Facebook, oh, was somebody on the website.
36:25.129 –> 36:30.173
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you have the problem of Facebook receiving the signal and being three seconds behind YouTube.
36:31.113 –> 36:32.074
[SPEAKER_00]: It was really difficult.
36:32.394 –> 36:38.218
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we use something called StreamYard and believe it or not, we don’t use their live stream.
36:38.238 –> 36:52.767
[SPEAKER_00]: We use their webinar because it enables question-and-answer commenting on the website where they’re streaming only allows question-and-answer on YouTube and Facebook and not on your own site, which is crazy to me.
36:52.807 –> 36:57.190
[SPEAKER_00]: And I’ve tried to get them to change that, but I can’t get past their AI.
36:58.610 –> 37:14.037
[SPEAKER_00]: I got some or service to get to get something built, but yeah, the webinar works the exact same way and so when we go live, we have a new theme that we publish specifically for that livestream.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it takes over our entire homepage.
37:31.965 –> 37:34.146
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s time for the top tips you’re out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I love this section because me and I’ll list us some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Jeremy are you ready for the top tips?
37:44.328 –> 37:44.628
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the book top tip.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If everyone this thing to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
37:54.341 –> 38:21.347
[SPEAKER_00]: So for me, and I thought about this, I thought about this quite a bit yesterday because there were two books that I think are both really strong and if it is about live streaming that influence with Robert Chaudini, really the book is more of a defense manual, but at the same time, understanding all the points of reciprocity, social proof, authority, scarcity,
38:24.808 –> 38:39.840
[SPEAKER_00]: is really the core of what a successful life stream is, but for me personally, I have this mantra that I’ve repeated it myself for years now and it’s, it’s B do have.
38:41.527 –> 38:46.734
[SPEAKER_00]: And there’s a book, it’s a by Kesha Michael Roach, it’s called The Diamond Cutter.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there’s a lot of Buddhist philosophy inside the book, but there’s also some really strong takeaways that tie into very much that B do have.
38:59.249 –> 39:26.713
[SPEAKER_00]: and, you know, not to get too deep into it, but it’s really about intentionally being doing whether you’re, you know, uh, it’s planting seeds, it’s helping, and and yes, there’s a lot of things about karma that are in the book and some people may not resonate with that, like I said, the Buddhist philosophy, but it ties into things that we have really gotten into on this show about my background.
39:27.293 –> 39:36.979
[SPEAKER_00]: creating a school about pearls creating pearlguide.com, which is a social community that I’ve involved in every day answering questions for consumers.
39:37.500 –> 39:46.205
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m the president of the Pearl Association of America and my job is to promote the entire industry and all Pearl sellers who are in the industry.
39:47.066 –> 39:49.787
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that seed planting,
39:50.928 –> 40:09.740
[SPEAKER_00]: even though it’s not an immediate gratification or an immediate response from what I do, it is that intentional doing every day that creates the have of what it is because.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Nice, awesome two books there, traffic top tip then, which marketing method do you
40:19.064 –> 40:23.851
[SPEAKER_00]: So for live stream, it is absolutely email.
40:24.031 –> 40:26.755
[SPEAKER_00]: Email and mobile, mobile SMS is great as well.
40:26.915 –> 40:28.657
[SPEAKER_00]: Notifying people when we go live.
40:29.565 –> 40:46.536
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, social is great for promoting the live stream, but getting it on people’s calendar, sending out emails with the ability to add the date and time directly to their calendar, is what really drives the traffic.
40:46.716 –> 40:52.280
[SPEAKER_00]: We can put out ads and, you know, upcoming videos, like sneak peeks, if you will.
40:53.727 –> 41:03.252
[SPEAKER_00]: But really, we’re focused primarily on our own core audience, making sure everybody is aware and they keep seeing it so they remember it.
41:03.732 –> 41:09.455
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, it generates new traffic to the livestreams and one other tip.
41:09.595 –> 41:11.016
[SPEAKER_00]: And this took me a while to find.
41:11.937 –> 41:15.058
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is another reason why going live on Facebook is great.
41:15.198 –> 41:18.060
[SPEAKER_00]: I know people might say, well, Facebook is kind of like, yesterday year.
41:18.140 –> 41:19.801
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s not as popular as it is.
41:20.581 –> 41:27.547
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it gives you the ability to boost your live stream while your life, and that’s huge.
41:28.388 –> 41:35.333
[SPEAKER_00]: You can’t do that on other platforms, but if you have, for example, we have, I believe 116,000 followers on Facebook.
41:38.906 –> 41:54.484
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when we go live, we can boost that live stream, of course, to all of our followers, to all of our customers for X number of years, all of our visitors on our website the last 180 days to look alike audiences, etc.
41:55.625 –> 42:12.971
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, all boosts a live stream for several thousand dollars, and bring in tens of thousands of new people, granted the vast majority of them are seeing it in their feed, and they may or may not stop the engagement isn’t as strong as it is with our core audience, of course.
42:13.511 –> 42:25.015
[SPEAKER_00]: But every time we do that, we bring new people into our live stream ecosystem, and they experience what we’re actually doing instead of seeing it at.
42:25.880 –> 42:28.522
[SPEAKER_01]: nice, clever, top, top, top tip there.
42:29.062 –> 42:40.190
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the tall top tip, maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plugin, a phone up, or just a way of working, is there a cool little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?
42:41.011 –> 42:50.558
[SPEAKER_00]: Well since we’re talking about live streaming, I’ll start with one piece of equipment that is such a no-brainer and it’s called
42:52.776 –> 43:04.680
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s a black magic item design and a black magic item mini and the reason this is so important is because you can connect four cameras.
43:05.140 –> 43:06.340
[SPEAKER_00]: You can connect two cameras.
43:06.400 –> 43:17.404
[SPEAKER_00]: You can connect three cameras and I’ve seen people with live streams with a single camera and they’re trying to show the product or they’re turning the camera to to show the product on a table or a bus to have
43:18.924 –> 43:20.446
[SPEAKER_00]: And that really kind of breaks it.
43:20.486 –> 43:28.775
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you could just push a button and already have a camera set up to showcase exactly what you’re trying to show on the show.
43:30.428 –> 43:36.152
[SPEAKER_00]: that makes it so much easier and it’s so easy for the host to switch back and forth.
43:36.673 –> 43:46.760
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would say the black magic is my number one tool tip and for collaboration what makes the company work so much better.
43:47.680 –> 43:53.845
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s different, it’s not, it’s sort of unrelated, but it’s my favorite tip in the last month because I recently discovered it.
43:54.878 –> 44:00.284
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is Claude AI connects directly to Shopify.
44:00.504 –> 44:16.042
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have spent so many long hours, especially on the weekend, doing reconcilations going through analytics, you know, polling numbers trying to decide whether a poll lines, change lines, make decisions.
44:16.742 –> 44:28.792
[SPEAKER_00]: And now, I just have a conversation with Claude and all the numbers, any concepts of theories I have, it flushes that out immediately, and it has been such an absolute game changer for me.
44:29.426 –> 44:53.482
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it’s so powerful when you really connect these AI things together isn’t it that what it can do if you say love love both of those and I’m going to say a personal shout out to stream yard such a good platform such a good platform I could I could spend the next half hour just evangelizing it with you, but let’s not do that the carbon top tip what’s your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store.
44:54.656 –> 45:08.425
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is a big subject of course in the Pearl industry because we often say that the oysters are the canary of the coal mine and environmental concerns are huge.
45:08.965 –> 45:13.128
[SPEAKER_00]: Many farms, especially with El Niño happening right now, one of our
45:13.975 –> 45:20.600
[SPEAKER_00]: closest collaborators in Mexico, you know, they’re unable to grow pearls this year and they have been able to raise shells.
45:21.420 –> 45:29.485
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it’s always, I mean, it’s a subject we could talk about for hours that you do an entire show and multiple, of course.
45:30.406 –> 45:31.067
[SPEAKER_00]: But for us,
45:32.127 –> 45:39.730
[SPEAKER_00]: The best way we found to reduce a carbon footprint is to reduce returns.
45:40.630 –> 45:42.811
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s where most of our boxes are used.
45:42.931 –> 45:46.792
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s where, you know, it’s not just, you know, there’s shipping costs.
45:46.852 –> 45:48.953
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s everything that’s involved in shipping.
45:49.433 –> 45:51.554
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, flying packages around the world.
45:52.314 –> 45:53.615
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s not just financial.
45:53.735 –> 46:01.418
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s planetary as well, but there are very specific ways to reduce returns.
46:01.918 –> 46:04.079
[SPEAKER_00]: And that goes through for us.
46:04.359 –> 46:07.400
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s videos, especially with a product like ours.
46:08.100 –> 46:09.781
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the virtual appointments.
46:10.161 –> 46:12.302
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the educating the
46:14.583 –> 46:24.448
[SPEAKER_00]: that they know exactly what they’re getting as close to it as possible and addressing all the concerns that they may have before a product arrives.
46:25.349 –> 46:34.033
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if we’re doing, you know, 50,000 packages a year and we have a return rate of 20%.
46:34.113 –> 46:36.515
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that’s 10,000 wasted shipments.
46:36.595 –> 46:36.975
[SPEAKER_00]: If we can
46:41.605 –> 46:41.865
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
46:41.925 –> 46:44.747
[SPEAKER_01]: Returns is such a big one in every, every industry.
46:44.787 –> 46:46.708
[SPEAKER_01]: So love, love that tip.
46:46.748 –> 46:51.190
[SPEAKER_01]: Jeremy, it has been an absolute pleasure getting to chat with you about all of this.
46:51.210 –> 46:59.535
[SPEAKER_01]: But before we say goodbye, for those who want to check out what you’re doing, maybe come and check out one of your live streams, where do they find you and your business on the web and social please?
47:00.437 –> 47:04.399
[SPEAKER_00]: PearlParadise.com, that’s the primary website.
47:04.700 –> 47:10.443
[SPEAKER_00]: You’ll also find it’s PearlParadise official on Instagram, PearlParadise, Facebook.
47:11.023 –> 47:12.404
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s across the board, PearlParadise.
47:13.465 –> 47:15.126
[SPEAKER_00]: And I’m also on LinkedIn.
47:15.206 –> 47:17.567
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m always happy to connect with people on LinkedIn.
47:18.068 –> 47:20.069
[SPEAKER_00]: And that’s just Jeremy Shepherd.
47:20.749 –> 47:25.312
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can find me just by searching Jeremy Shepherd and PearlParadise on LinkedIn as well.
47:25.856 –> 47:32.426
[SPEAKER_01]: It was Jeremy Leica said, thank you so much for being on the show and enlightening us all about what it takes to run great live streams.
47:33.207 –> 47:34.589
[SPEAKER_01]: Really, really fascinating stuff.
47:34.609 –> 47:35.710
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for being here.
47:36.491 –> 47:37.293
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much, Gloy.
47:37.333 –> 47:38.154
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve really appreciate it.
47:43.910 –> 47:44.270
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
47:45.111 –> 47:54.076
[SPEAKER_01]: I have to say, I took quite a lot for me to stop and go to the top tip because I could have carried on talking about live stream strategy with Jeremy for several hours longer.
47:54.476 –> 48:00.800
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you do want more on live streaming, then please let me know and we’ll see if we get Jeremy back on the show in the new year.
48:01.781 –> 48:05.383
[SPEAKER_01]: Really, for me, the key things which are coming out of that are
48:06.463 –> 48:11.804
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to make the content engaging for the customer, the urgency play is not going to work.
48:12.425 –> 48:15.725
[SPEAKER_01]: You need to have a reason for each live stream.
48:15.745 –> 48:16.666
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they’re doing it.
48:17.686 –> 48:26.848
[SPEAKER_01]: As he said, we know, they did the two days of live streaming with the last freshwater pearl guy in that lake in Japan about just those pearls.
48:26.868 –> 48:30.489
[SPEAKER_01]: There’s a reason, there’s an excitement, there’s a reason, there’s a scarcity.
48:30.949 –> 48:34.210
[SPEAKER_01]: If a real scarcity, there’s a story behind it.
48:34.850 –> 48:42.493
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, getting the technical setup so as it’s nice and easy as well is clearly, clearly a good move.
48:43.194 –> 48:46.335
[SPEAKER_01]: Lots to absorb from that, when I know I’m going to think about this one for a little while yet.
48:46.655 –> 48:50.397
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope you found it interesting, definitely something to be looking out for next year.
48:51.457 –> 48:54.619
[SPEAKER_01]: huge opportunity and plus the fact they’re not doing the TikTok thing for them.
48:54.639 –> 49:06.744
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s a website first play, website first play to drive those sales and that’s she’s she’s she’s still thinking about it and that Facebook ad boosting tip genius.
49:07.425 –> 49:07.765
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
49:08.645 –> 49:21.988
[SPEAKER_01]: You can get your hands on the notes from this episode, including those top tips, the links to what we mentioned and the full transcript by heading over to ecommercemasterpland.com, ECMP.info, that’s the number of the episode we’ll get you there as well.
49:22.408 –> 49:25.989
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you get to the website, you can also add yourself to our email list.
49:26.069 –> 49:29.650
[SPEAKER_01]: So you don’t miss out on any of the other things we share to help you improve your business.
49:30.250 –> 49:37.052
[SPEAKER_01]: If you liked this episode, then make sure you check out Episode 355, which is another jewelry success story.
49:37.192 –> 49:43.634
[SPEAKER_01]: I’m chatting with Larissa Loden about how she built her jewelry business from craft fairs to over $2 million a year.
49:44.154 –> 49:51.636
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can find all our jewelry related content on the fashion page of the website, which is at ECMP.info for such fashion.
49:52.136 –> 49:56.639
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for tuning in to this and every episode of the e-commerce master plan podcast.
49:56.999 –> 50:09.446
[SPEAKER_01]: We bring you a new interview every week because we want to inspire and help e-commerce business owners like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses, including encouraging businesses and consumers to make more sustainable buying decisions.
50:10.226 –> 50:15.769
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the e-commerce master plan podcast.
50:15.789 –> 50:18.331
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope you have a great week and don’t forget to keep
50:22.288 –> 50:25.653
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for listening to the e-commerce Master Plan podcast.
50:26.053 –> 50:30.920
[SPEAKER_02]: Find out more at e-commercemasterplanned.com slash podcast.