On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Jeremy Shepherd. Jeremy Shepherd is the founder and CEO of one of the largest pearl brands in the world, pearlparadise.com. We talk about remaining fully involved in your business, creating effective platforms from the get-go, integrating different marketing efforts to succeed, and so much more!
Jeremy Shepherd is a leader, innovator, and a disruptor. From an early age, he struck out on his own to satisfy his fierce independence, need for adventure, and a more satisfying way of life.
In a sector dominated by generations-old family businesses, Jeremy endeavored to become a first generation, self-taught pearl importer, dealer, and Internet seller.
Over the past 20 years, he has traveled to pearl-producing areas all over the world, creating relationships with pearl producers, exporters, and people dedicated to supporting the pearl industry.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Jeremy Shepherd
Moving over the website, it was just a natural progression. It's really from basically joining somebody else's garage sale to having your own boutique is really the difference.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today I'm welcoming to the show Jeremy Shepherd.
Jeremy is the founder and CEO of one of the largest pearl brands in the world, pearlparadise.com.
Jeremy, welcome to the show.
Jeremy Shepherd
Thank you, Chase. It's great to be here. And good morning.
Chase Clymer
Oh, absolutely.
So though it sounds obvious, can you let the audience know the products you guys are currently selling online?
Jeremy Shepherd
Sure. We sell pearls.
Pearls, loose pearls, pearl jewelry, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, all types of pearls.
There are several genres of pearls. Saltwater, freshwater, and within those genres, there are quite a few different types of pearls and we carry all of them. So the full gambit.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Now...Take me back in time. One doesn't wake up one morning as a child and go, I want to sell pearls as an adult. Where'd this come from?
Jeremy Shepherd
You know, I kind of hopped into it. It was not intentional, of course.
I was a flight attendant. I was a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines. And I was always sort of a serial entrepreneur growing up. I had several small businesses.
But as a flight attendant, I traveled a lot. And obviously, I had layovers in Asia and Japan, Tokyo and China, specifically Beijing. And I had these layovers because I speak Japanese.
I speak a couple of different languages, which is why I got the job as a flight attendant, but that put me on these routes to Asia a lot.
And one day on a layover in Beijing, China, I went to a place called Hongqiao Tianhuan, this market, if you will, where they sold everything from your knockoff North Face jackets to electronics and an entire floor of pearls.
And I bought a strand of pearls for my girlfriend at the time, didn't know anything about pearls. And this is in the late 1990s.
And I brought them back to the States. She got them appraised after I gave them to her as a gift and they appraised for about $600. And I had paid about $25 for that strand of pearls.
And so, of course, light bulbs started going off in my head. Like I said, I was a bit of a serial entrepreneur. And I thought, okay, there's got to be a way to build a business around this.
Not knowing anything about the jewelry industry, pearl industry or jewelry industry in general, I started knocking on doors, you know, talking to jewelry shop owners, talking to boutique owners.
I had this idea in my head that as a flight attendant, I flew around the US every day, several days a week and I could literally go to store, to store, to store to sell these pearls. I thought it was going to be super easy, right?
But I didn't realize that the jewelry industry is a bit insular and the stores, the brick and mortar stores that are all over the United States are typically generational type stores.
Their parents owned it or the parents before them owned it or they’re stores that have multiple locations.
And they have a very set supply chain, if you will. They don't just sell pearls. They sell diamonds, rubies, emeralds, you name it.
And so they get their products from companies primarily on consignment, most of them. And this new guy coming in, this flight attendant with a flight bag full of pearls, just got nowhere with these guys.
So I was feeling a little bit down thinking I had this great idea that looked great on paper that wasn't really gonna work out. And a friend of mine called me and he told me, “Jeremy, I think I know where you can sell these pearls.”
And he told me about this website that he'd been selling some pearls on. And at this time, I didn't even have a laptop computer. So the Internet was beyond my comprehension.
He was selling stuff on eBay. I'd never heard of eBay before. And so I said, “Okay, this is something I can do. I'll put these products up on eBay and see what happens.”
So I did, I put up an auction, I put up a Dutch auction for the exact same strand of pearls that I had bought from my girlfriend.
When I say the exact same strand of pearls, I'm talking about the appraisal. Remember, I didn't really know anything about pearls.
So I'm like, “Okay, this is what I have here. And this is the value and I'm offering it for,” I think I offered it for $60 or $65 a strand, and it was a Dutch auction. So I had about 50 of them in stock.
Cashed my paycheck, took all the cash I could out of my credit card, went to the airport, jumped on a jump seat back to Beijing, because as a flight attendant, you can fly for free on your days off on the jump seats.
Went back to Beijing, went back to the parole market, went back to the same woman that I bought that first strand of pearls from and said, “Okay, you remember me from a couple of months ago? This is what I bought from you. I need to buy as many of this exact same color, quality, size as I can with this amount of money.”
And by the time I got back to the US, the Dutch auction had closed and 100% of what I had listed had sold.
So for the next couple of years, I started putting auctions weekly on Amazon and on eBay. Back in the day, Amazon had Amazon auctions similar to eBay and then they went to zShops and then they did the whole, you know, what they're doing today.
But that was my business for the first couple of years, just Amazon and eBay, before I built a site in 1999-2000.
Chase Clymer
Oh, that's amazing. Now, obviously, you're offering a product on eBay for a 10th of the appraised value.
Did you start to raise the rates on that as you started to see these sell-throughs?
Jeremy Shepherd
Well, first, I would say that that original appraisal... I don't think it was very accurate.
I think the value is probably more along the lines of $300 or $400 or something like that because of course, I started selling it. I saw other retailers selling similar products and I realized the original appraisal I got was a bit high.
But there was still a big delta between where I was, what I was paying, and what I was able to sell them for.
So no, I didn't raise the price. And part of the reason I didn't was because it was really successful.
And it may seem like a lot to go all the way to Asia, buy the pearls, bring them all the way back and have a margin of $40, $35, $40 per piece. But I was flying for free.
And I was staying in hotels in Beijing for basically free because I had interline crew rates and I was doing that every month.
So it was like… I was my own importer. I was my own buyer. There was nobody else involved.
And as a flight attendant, I went from making a paycheck after taxes of maybe $800 to $1,000 every 2 weeks to start selling pearls and selling thousands and thousands of dollars a month.
I was more than satisfied at the time.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Alright. So let's walk me through where pearlparadise.com comes from.
Was that the first name in the business? The first .com?
Jeremy Shepherd
That was the first .com. So my brother started selling pearls as well. He had more of an IT background. He's a computer software engineer.
And so I started buying pearls for him to sell as well. And he was selling a little bit on Amazon and eBay.
And then he built a little website. And it was just a one page website. And for me, that would be almost like building a rocket engine or something like that today.
I had no idea how to do this, right?
And so he built this website, this one page website, and then he added a link in his Amazon auctions to his website.
And the first day he put up an auction, a featured auction, he got almost a thousand visitors to his website.
And that's where I realized, okay, I need to have a website here so I can do the same thing. So Pearl Paradise was born at the end of ‘99, beginning of 2000, somewhere right around that time.
And believe it or not, I used a platform similar to Shopify today and only similar and that is very easy to use.
In other words, it was sort of point and click. I got to build it myself by moving the blocks around. I had a film camera.
I would actually take pictures of the pearls then I would take the film, I would get it developed. I took the pictures over to Kinko's, scanned them onto a floppy disk, brought the disk back to my house and that's how I built the site.
So it took me about two weeks to build the site. And if you ever looked at Internet Archive, Archive.org to see what the site looked like in 1999, 2000, you would look at it and say, “How in the world did anybody ever buy anything from you?”
Well, back then, you know, you were just cool if you had a website, right?
Because back then, there were even books called The Internet Yellow Pages. I don't know if you remember that, but you could buy these books that had all the websites in the world, basically.
And then there was volume two. Well, this was, you know, 1990s 2000.
So it was like, if you did build a website, yes, people did beat a path to your door. Doesn't work that way anymore.
So in 2000, it, it, it, um, 1999, 2000, I think right around the new year. So that's why I can't remember exactly when it actually went live.
It went live and, um, about two weeks later, um, I, I had the first sale on the site.
And a couple months later, things really started to gain some traction. So I stopped posting auctions on Amazon and eBay.
And for the last 23 years now, I've strictly been selling on pearlparadise.com and in our showroom here in Los Angeles.
Chase Clymer
Alright. So with pearl starting to move on your own website, what was the reason behind going all in there and abandoning these other proven marketplaces?
Jeremy Shepherd
Well, it was a lot easier. There's no constant uploading of the auctions. And we just started selling more.
I just started selling more on the site than I was in the auctions. The auctions were starting to lose their luster, for lack of a better term.
And that when I first went on eBay and Amazon, I was the only one doing.
And after I started having success with it a year or so later, there started becoming a lot of other sellers and then it opened up internationally and it just got overrun.
And so, you know, I could no longer post an auction that would sell 50 to a hundred units at a time and generate the kind of traffic that it did just a couple of years prior.
And so moving over to the website was just the natural progression of this. It's from basically joining somebody else's garage sale to having your own boutique is really the difference.
Chase Clymer
Oh, absolutely. So you have this website built in the early 2000s and you're selling pearls online.
Tell me... Try to compress 20 years of selling online into some highlights for us as the Internet evolves, as digital marketing evolves, as commerce in general evolves?
What are some of the highlights from this amazing journey?
Jeremy Shepherd
Well, one of my favorite phrases is, innovate or disintegrate. And I would say that it pretty much would be the title of my career, really, for Pearl Paradise.
Technology has changed so dramatically in the last 20, 25 years, as everyone knows. And so keeping up with that technology...Keeping up with SEO, keeping up with digital marketing is a constant job.
And so what I did in 2005 versus what I'm doing now in 2023, there's really almost no correlation.
In 2005, for example, SEO was really about getting links to your website.
So I would spend hours and hours every day finding these other websites that I thought were related to mine and trying to get keywords in place.
I remember one of my biggest successes was getting number one ranking on Google for the term ‘pearl jewelry’.
That took me months, contacting probably 100 plus websites and using the anchor text pearl jewelry to get there.
The biggest shift though that happened was in 2005 and I'm looking at my wall so I can see the article. 2005, The Wall Street Journal profiled me, profiled what I was doing.
And I was on the front section of the Marketplace, the front page of the Marketplace section of The Wall Street Journal.
And the moment that hit the newsstands, we went from being a company that was doing maybe three or $400,000 a year, to several million instantly overnight.
So PR has been the biggest boon to the business. And after that, I interviewed with New York Times, USA Today, Entrepreneur magazine twice, Inc Magazine, Fortune Magazine.
I took a photographer and a writer from the Financial Times to a pearl farm in the Philippines.
So really I built my business by putting myself out there. And with publications, you know.
And I also built the business by creating an educational website.
And since I've actually created two now so far, the first one was called Pearl Guide, pearl-guide.com. It's Pearl Guide news and forums.
I built this in 2004. And that was the year that the term ‘social media’ was coined in 2004. And that's when I built my first social site.
So Pearl Guide today, it still has about 10,000 members, about maybe a quarter million different pages of content on it. And it's active every day, there are probably 100 people that are on there, posting and interacting every single day.
And the next educational site I built was called Pearls as One, which was basically an online Pearl specialist certification course. And I partnered with the Culture Pearl Association of America to build it.
I built it in 2016. I hired a team of translators, we translated it into 10 languages. And as of today, we have about 93,000 students that have taken the course around the world.
So really, I built this business on PR, education, and building an authentic trust relationship with our customers and the general public.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And not to mention, SEO from all this content is really driving a lot of that organic growth.
Now I have to ask, that Wall Street Journal article drops and 10X is the business. What breaks?
Jeremy Shepherd
The website. The website broke that day.
The website broke the day the Wall Street Journal, you know, people don't really realize this probably, but back in, maybe just even 10 years ago, not even 10 years before Shopify.
If you get too much traffic on your website or too many people trying to check out at once, your website crashes.
So our website crashed probably in the first 30 minutes to an hour, but we were able to get it back up. And...I don't know how much we sold on that first day, but it was probably a few hundred thousand dollars, probably as much as we had sold the year prior.
Basically it wiped us out of everything. But again, not a big deal, because all I had to do was get on an airplane, go back to China and restock the pearls and bring them right back.
So yeah, I would say one other thing almost broke and that was our credit card processing. Our credit card processor reached out and said, “Hey, why are you processing so many credit cards right now? This looks like fraud.”
And I had to convince them that this article that just happened in the Wall Street Journal was a big enough PR piece to actually create that amount of traffic on the website, because they came on pretty aggressively saying, “Hey, we are going to hold your funds for up to 365 days because we believe this might be fraud.”
So those are probably the two biggest things. But I was able to work my way through both of those.
I got the funds released, we got the website back up. So nothing catastrophic happened.
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Chase Clymer
And now, when did you stop being the person to fly to China and get the product?
Jeremy Shepherd
Are you kidding, Chase? That's the best part of this job.
Well, I don't fly to China so much anymore. So back in... The first time I went there, I think it was 1996, when I bought a strand of pearls for her.
That was Christmas in ‘96. So I started selling in 97.
China is just where freshwater pearls come from. But as I mentioned, we have South Sea pearls, Tahitian pearls, Akoya pearls, Fijian pearls, Mexican pearls. And so it required travel all over the world.
I'm actually leaving for Hong Kong. My wife and I are leaving in just over two weeks on the 16th.
So it slowed down quite a bit during the pandemic. But really for the past 20 plus years, I've been traveling three to five times a year, I would say internationally.
And so I don't manage the operations so much anymore. I mean, I have a team here that manages the operations, all the fulfillment, a team of stringers, a team of designers.
I still get involved in the virtual appointments, especially for the really special pieces. And when I say special pieces, we had a set of strands that ranged in price from about 150,000 to just about $1.6 million.
And there were only seven of these strands. These are museum grade, giant, Wilma Flintstone South Sea strands. So for those sorts of appointments, I'm always, either my wife and I are the ones who are taking those appointments.
But I love what I do. And so I'm still fully, fully involved.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Still sourcing the product yourself, still traveling, making connections, setting it up and then letting your team deal with the continuance of the relationship.
Jeremy Shepherd
It really has to be me. Like I mentioned before, I speak Japanese. I was Mandarin. I was Burlitz trained in Mandarin Chinese.
And all the people we work with... These are relationships, you know, that I built over the years.
And so when I do go to Hong Kong in two weeks, it's not to source pearls from a company in Hong Kong, there's a big international show. So we have pearl producers coming from Tahiti, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia.
I mean, all over the pearl producing areas of the world, they congregate in Hong Kong three times a year.
So during that week we're in Hong Kong, we are going to be having dinners every single night, probably lunches several times during the week. And these are with the suppliers.
And so maintaining that relationship is really important. And you can't very easily hire someone to become a buyer and travel in place of you to maintain and hold those relationships that I've built over the past 25 years.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And you can hear your passion. It's like, that's actually the thing I like to do.
And so it seems you've almost delegated everything else off your plate now to the thing that you are obviously built to do. This is the number one thing that you... The value you bring to the business.
Jeremy Shepherd
100%. With Pearls, there is no grading scale. And I'm saying it this way because if you look at our website, you'll see a grading scale. You'll see a page about grading. But what most people don't understand is that it is 100% subjective with pearls.
You've got diamonds. Diamonds can be graded by GIA, they can be graded by EGL, you get a certificate that tells you the cut, the clarity, the, you know, all the quality attributes of that diamond.
Then you match those quality attributes against a list like the rapid port price list, and you know, approximately what the wholesale price is, the cash wholesale prices of that stone.
And then it really just comes down to how much you're going to pay as a margin. Okay, these are people that really know how to buy diamonds. That's the way you buy diamonds.
And when friends of mine come to me and say they want to get engaged, I help them buy diamonds this way.
But no, I'm not in the diamond business. So please don't contact me for diamonds.
You can't do that with pearls. And when I say you can't do that with pearls, what I mean is that there is no set grading criteria.
So what one person could call a A-AAA Pearl, for example, which is the highest grade we carry, could literally be the lowest grade at another company because the grades themselves only mean something to the people that are selling them.
Comparing two companies grade side by side is completely apples to oranges. And so you cannot shop by price and grade alone, you have to actually shop by the person doing the sourcing.
In other words, it all comes down to the way the pearls are sourced.
And because I've been doing it for 25 years, when I look at a surround of pearls, I can gauge the shape, I can gauge the percentage of the roundness, I can gauge the luster, I can gauge the surface quality, I can gauge the color, I can gauge the tightness of the nacre.
And my wife travels with me as well, and she's been a professional pearl buyer for 15 years now. She started buying with me 15 years ago.
And this is something that… we are two of the top experts in the world at.
And so really, it would be impossible for us to train anyone else to do this because they would literally have to know the product as well as we do in order to make the selections and do the buying when they're traveling.
Chase Clymer
Let's talk about how things are today. What is the typical month for you as far as marketing initiatives?
What are the big items on the to-do list?
Jeremy Shepherd
So I always have a lot of projects. And there are small projects and there are big projects.
In terms of marketing, we do a lot with email marketing. We have a big presence on Instagram, a big presence on Facebook.
We do a lot of Facebook ads. We do a lot of Google ads, traditional marketing, and we put a lot of focus on conversion rate optimization on the website.
The biggest shift that we've had, well, before this call, I was telling you about a pretty big shift that we had in May when we basically did a revamp of the entire site.
We tested out some new navigation, new landing pages, new educational pages, and we launched that in May, and it's been amazingly successful.
Our conversion rate has jumped pretty significantly and our sales have increased nearly 50% year over year for that time period made to today.
The biggest change, however, was really something that happened because of the pandemic. And I'm sure you're probably hearing this in a lot of stories that, you know, when the pandemic hit, you know, these plans that we originally had or the way we were doing things before kind of shifted because the market shifted.
And again, you innovate or you disintegrate, right?
And so during the pandemic, we had to shut down our showroom in Los Angeles. And the showroom was really just for local people or people who were buying very high end pieces.
They would sometimes fly in to visit our showroom. We didn't advertise in Los Angeles.
The sign outside is really small. It's only on the outside of our door within the building, it's not on the outside of the building itself, because we don't want people coming into our showroom because we're primarily an e-commerce company, so we're shipping products all day long.
Well, people could no longer come into our showrooms, so we started getting calls from people that said, “Hey, can you meet with me the way you and I are meeting right now, face to face over video?”
And that had never happened before. Now it's something that I, it was in the back of my mind for years thinking, gosh, if there was just some way we could make this experience almost like a face-to-face in a jewelry store experience, it would change everything, right?
It would be such a better experience for the customers and it would eliminate that whole, “Well I don't know if they're for real, is there somebody behind that website? Will I get the product that I'm ordering if I walk down my credit card and place this order?”
Well, during the pandemic, there was a shift in the way people in general communicate.
And five years ago, nobody really knew how to do video chats. Nobody knew what Google Meet was, what Zoom was, what, you know, all these other video chat platforms that are currently available today, they were either non-existent or they were used just for business meetings.
But during the pandemic, that's how families communicate face to face.
And so last year at the beginning of Q4, we invested in a virtual showroom. And when I say invested in a virtual showroom, we contracted a team from Samy's Camera in Los Angeles.
If you're familiar with Sammy's Camera, they do all the Hollywood studios, et cetera, in Los Angeles. They're big, a big supplier of cameras and camera equipment.
They set up a virtual appointment studio in our office and we launched this in Q4.
And it has almost completely taken over our business. We have virtual appointments scheduled all day, every day. And we are getting close to almost half of our business coming from virtual appointments now, instead of people just ordering directly off the website.
And this wouldn't have been possible five years ago because nobody would have really understood how to even do a Google Meet.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, are these meetings for more of the higher end products? Is there an inflection point?
Jeremy Shepherd
No. People can buy a $100 pair of earrings or a $10,000 patience drown. It doesn't matter.
Chase Clymer
And obviously, those conversations, those versus just a general purchaser online without the meeting, those conversions are through the roof.
Jeremy Shepherd
Oh yeah. Yeah. Tuesday of last week, we had a 100% conversion day.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Jeremy Shepherd
Yeah. So...Our website, if we have a 2.5% conversion day, we consider that a win. But 100% conversion with every single virtual appointment selling was the first.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Jeremy, you shared so much with us. I'm sure we could keep chatting about things.
But if there's anything that I didn't ask you about, is there anything that sticks out that you think would resonate with our audience?
Jeremy Shepherd
Anything you didn't ask me about that might resonate with the audience?
Biggest secret. Sign up for HARO.
Chase Clymer
Can you explain what that is for the listeners that haven't heard that before?
Jeremy Shepherd
And I'm saying this at the end because listeners would have to get all the way through this to hear this. helpareporter.com. HARO. helpareporter.com.
That is my number one business secret. Are you familiar with Helpareporter, Chase?
Chase Clymer
Oh yeah, I'm very familiar with it.
So for those that don't know, this is basically seeking sources for interviews and the magic sauce behind this is if you'll get an email, you'll sign up.
I think these days you can even trickle down on what your specialty is or whatnot. And you'll just get emailed, I think it's once a day, maybe even twice a day now. Three times a day.
Jeremy Shepherd
Yep.
Chase Clymer
You'll get an email and it's like, “Here are all the reporters that are asking these questions, do you have answers to these questions basically?”
And if you do, you just email the reporter like, “Hey, I'm so-and-so. Here's my bio. Here's my answer to your question.”
Now if they like your answer...This is the magic. Tell them what happens, Jeremy.
Jeremy Shepherd
If they like your answer, then they call you up and say, “Hey, come down to the Fox News studios. We want to interview you,” or “Hey, I'm from Ink Magazine and we're doing a profile. We'd like to include your quotes or we'd like to profile you.”
I say it's my biggest secret because I have about a 25-30% hit rate when I respond to those. But this is where the Wall Street Journal comes from. This is where the Financial Times comes from. This is where the New York Times articles have come from USA Today.
And so it is, it's not super easy. You know, it does take some practice to get your pitch, I would almost call it your elevator pitch, crafted in just the right way to get people to respond.
But once you do, I mean, there's your SEO, there's your PR, there's your traffic generation, and it's free.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And from the SEO perspective, oftentimes, these are just articles that are going to end up on news outlets. But you're still going to get a backlink to your site.
And Jeremy already shared this before. That's like one of the main components of SEO is getting links back to your site from other websites that are obviously going to be higher with domain rankings.
This isn't an episode about SEO, but there's a little bit of secret sauce. Backlinks are good. Yeah.
Jeremy Shepherd
Yeah, backlinks are really, really good, especially high authority backlinks. And a lot of these are high authority backlinks.
So I don't respond to every one that I can. I always check out what the company is. Sometimes they're anonymous or what the publication is and decide whether or not it's one that makes sense for me to respond to or not.
But I do read them every day, three times a day. The first one comes out at 2 a.m. So I read it at about 5 a.m. when I got up.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing, Jeremy. Now, we've talked all episode long about these amazing pearls.
If I'm listening and that's something that's on my to-do list is to purchase pearls for someone that I love, where should I go?
Jeremy Shepherd
pearlparadise.com. Take a look.
If you want to set up an appointment, you can book a virtual appointment directly from the website there. And we'll be happy to help you out.
Chase Clymer
Jeremy, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of that amazing insights about your business.
Jeremy Shepherd
I appreciate it, Chase. Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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