December 2012
0 posts
2013!
Sorry for dropping off the face but, once I raised money for Plukka, it became impossible to keep on blogging in tell-all mode, what with actual and would-be investors reading the blog. The fact that I’m writing after such a long hiatus means that there are other redeeming imperatives at play — namely, the importance of WRITING — and, indeed, of thinking, expression, creativity...
July 2012
2 posts
A day well-spent (in Manhattan)
I haven’t been writing because in New York and running around like a chicken with its head cut off. YAY!
Last night, I had the good fortune to be invited to a private dinner and viewing of Christian Marclay’s The Clock before it opened to the public at Lincoln Center today. Although a casual stand-up affair, it was like zeroing into the epicenter of Manhattan’s YOUNG art scene....
What comes around will definitely go around
Just two days ago, one of our investors was sent a malicious “spam” email. The sender of the email clearly intended to discredit our site and dissuade the recipient from investing in Plukka. Although the email seemed to be a mass spam email, we checked with several people on our usual mailing list and none of them had received it, allowing us to conclude that this was an isolated...
June 2012
2 posts
Hunkering down (in the office? in a silo? in the...
Today, I read an awesome follow-on from the Ross Douthat op-ed I posted this past week, by Anand Giridharadas about how the best online services and sites are “lightweight social utilities that affect the way you interact with the physical world”, rather than addictive, quicksand experiences which suck the humanity and aestheticism out of our daily lives. Dovetailing with Giridharadas’...
I'm back (for real this time!)
Re-emerging once again, after a very draining two months of fundraising now that the lion’s share of money hit our bank account on Friday. HALLEF@!#$%^LEUIAH! I’ve been congratulated far and wide for a very very fast fund-raising process — but, god, it kicked the stuffing out of me and siphoned off loads of energy better spent on nurturing the core business. My lieutenants say,...
May 2012
2 posts
The Future of Retail Value & Traditional Brands
For those of you who didn’t have the misfortune to see my TEDx talk in October 2010, I happened to be involved in an interesting email exchange this morning. I have directly copied and pasted the contents of what I wrote in three emails on my blackberry this morning, here. Yes, that’s how and what I write on the fly — and that’s why, without a smartphone, I may as well be...
It's only just begun now.... the hourglass was...
A LOT has happened since my last blog entry. Most importantly, and explaining my absence in recent days, we’ve nailed down commitments for ¾ of this round’s fundraising for a valuation higher than what we’d hoped for. The main investor is now just waiting for our closing documents, which I’ve asked our US lawyer to prepare post-haste. (I can’t reveal much about this investor except to say that...
April 2012
7 posts
Are we there yet?
Wasn’t sure what to entitle this post. The other alternative was, what God giveth, he taketh away with the other hand.
Ten days ago, a hideous personal family catastrophe befell our lead developer in India — he, whose employment visa we were obtaining from Hong Kong immigration — such that, he will have to drop EVERYTHING and move to the countryside, where there’s no...
Best VC "interview" ever
The person who interviewed me is one of the most respected ecommerce experts in the industry who, himself, has been part of 3 companies which all ended up with valuations over $250M. Not that I was daunted of course :)
The objective of the interview was to determine if I possess the insane, even pathological, commitment to Plukka to make it succeed —
……
Question: “How...
What friends are for (continued)
So, I was too touched FOR WORDS that my last blog post actually led people to reach out to me and say, criticism is par for the course, even if unsolicited and from unwonted quarters, keep on, stay the course and remain true to your vision.
As I made clear in the post, my CEO-friend’s advice contained important kernels of wisdom, but his delivery was a bit ham-fisted. He reads my blog...
What friends are for
Sometimes you have friends who really make you feel like losers. I think we all have them, but it’s all a question of magnitude. A couple of my friends are well on their way to becoming billionaires. For example, I was having dinner with one of them who’s recently moved to Switzerland, to become a tax refugee, before she sells her company for at least a billion dollars (“$300M in...
At the mercy of luddite septuagenarians
On Friday, I woke up at 5:30 am to check on the transmission of our latest email newsletter which was queued to go out at 5 am our time, i.e., 5 pm EST, only to discover that there was nothing in my inbox. Knowing that something was amiss, I opened my spam folder and saw an email from Amazon entitled “EC2 Abuse Report”. “Oh GAWD,” I groaned, “what the hell have...
You make your own luck
I’m about to go into a new phase of startup life. FUND RAISING! Hardly a reason to yell from the mountaintops. But, unlike a lot of entrepreneurs, I feel unexpectedly exhilarated by the prospect of switching gears and SELLING — in this case, MYSELF and our team, rather than products. My unexpectedly good humour is also due to the preliminary discussions I’ve had with several...
I'm back! (Part One of possibly many)
Not having posted an update for a while, I’m writing this post with some difficulty, just as I took a jog for the first time in two years this past week and pulled a muscle in my calf. Lactic acid, thank god, doesn’t build up in the brain as one types, thank god!
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I’m going to keep this entry succinct (at least, for me) and punchy as possible, an adumbration of...
March 2012
12 posts
Learning on the fly and learning how (not) to fly
PHEW! The Facebook competition is about to come to a close after 10 days and I can say, goddammit, we did a good job - and made major progress on many fronts. Like everything related to doing a startup, there were many unknowns which made prediction, by definition, impossible, even for experts. But, as I mentioned in my earlier blog post at the beginning of PlukkaLOVES, every single piece of...
A quickie... before my hand gets chopped off
I’m dashing off a quick post while my husband takes a nap. Otherwise, he WOULD cut my hand off. Blogging is part discipline, part addiction, part duty to myself.
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The good news: on Monday, PlukkaLOVES took off! PRAISE GOD! ALLELEUIAH! This was due in no small part to the joint encomium of the following blog posts, which began lighting up the blogosphere from that day onwards...
Cardinal Rule #1: Let yourself off the f@#$%^&...
I’m presently in the UK typing in a car stuck in gridlocked traffic on the M25 on the way to Heathrow trying to go on vacation. In comparison to being manacled to my desk at the Plukka office in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong, suffering from open-ended anxiety, this is comparatively relaxing, so much so that I yanked my laptop out of my bag and began typing on the highway!
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I spent my first weekend in...
Losing the forest for the trees
One of the most disturbing but also comforting realizations of the past two months has been the fact that, evidently, our customers aren’t THAT concerned about price. The question then becomes, how important is our patented shopping mechanism? After all, what is driving customer purchases? It seems like the top-line driver is definitely the creativity of our designs, not the pricing achieved...
"Obsessed!"
I just changed my Facebook profile cover image to this. It really says it all!
Living, breathing, thinking for the next ten days will be about THIS! So, I have to ask, HAVE YOU PLAYED YET? If I have managed to engage, provoke or elicit sympathy from you in this blog, it’s hopefully so that I can ask you to log on to Facebook and support what I do - even if you’re an autistically...
Perception & Reality
I’ve been in Bali these past two days not relaxing, but working my a—off instead, while trying to catch up with a friend of more than 20 years after a long hiatus.
My partner called and yelled at me for “going on vacation” but nothing could be farther from the truth, unfortunately. I put on sunscreen ONCE and carried a swimsuit in my beach bag, mostly as a symbolic talisman of hope that, at some...
Sheep Suck
I’m now at the Hong Kong International Airport, undoubtedly the world’s most efficient, however, also a reminder of how anonymous and remorselessly efficient modern life is. There is nothing uplifting here at all, except the slick convenience of having every single luxury brand conveniently ranged before me should I decide that I suddenly “need” a new handbag. The airport is the best and worst of...
Things are looking up -- and up
It’s been a busy week and things are getting more hectic, but in a good way which makes me thank my lucky stars every day. Right now, I continue to personally respond to tweets, facebook posts and customer service requests whenever I’m awake. I don’t just respond. I respond within less than ten minutes, even if it means having to pull over on the side of the highway to measure a...
First off, at 6:30 am, I called our marketing consultant in NYC to demand an explanation for his company’s unbelievable slow-assedness in implementing our marketing plan. Here are examples of emails I’ve taken to writing this person in the hope lighting a fire under his a—-
[TWO days ago]
[LAST NIGHT, responding to M’s suggestion that we explore a new ad network called...
Patchwork
WARNING: This post is so-called because it’s a lazy confection of various missives cobbled together to create an ostensibly legit post :((
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Social Media 101 for a well-known journalist (aka free advice to you, social media neophyte, if you need it), copied and pasted from my email to him yesterday
Dear X,
1) You need a Hootsuite account to manage several accounts...
Whiplash
So, I was in a great mood on Thursday and Friday because we received a flurry of orders which led me to muse, as usual, “Things are building — obviously.” This time, though, I’m braced for WHIPLASH, meaning I expect to go into a period of existential doldrums after the inevitable fall-off in excitement and activity. On the other hand, I think things actually ARE building,...
I’m in a good mood today, after a long spell of being in the dumps. I’m pathologically optimistic and exuberant, so, once in a while, I’m entitled to wallow in caca for a spell…
Interest in Plukka is building and it’s becoming more obvious all the time, with many many more inquiries coming in every day. Only yesterday, we took one order via Twitter - through a series...
February 2012
15 posts
Today was a Foxconn day
After 8 hours of data entry of 300 products into an excel spreadsheet spanning a width of 35 columns, I can now understand why Chinese factory workers tend to become zombies and end up losing their hands inside the machinery. (I hope you’ve all read The China Price, the seminal work of good friend, Alex Harney, who was the first to examine the human toll exacted on Chinese migrant workers by...
Lightbulbs and pivots
[After my very public stigmata session of the last two posts, don’t expect me to share TOO much information with y’all again. That was a good experience but I was really toeing the line there - in terms of violating even my own comfort zone….]
This morning, it hit me like a ton of bricks: we’ve got to get more products on to Plukka.com, as a matter of urgency. This was...
Why I tell the truth in this blog
Witness this Facebook exchange and the kind words of encouragement from my friends —
Before I wrote my last post, I had a talk with myself: come clean or do not write. I hope I’ll be able to read that post one day and laugh at it. On the other hand, as I said to my partner yesterday, YOU have 12 other businesses, literally, I ONLY have this one — now. My ass is out there,...
No relief -- yet
Wow, what an exhausting, unrelenting week. Sales are still poor. I LOST MY BET, even though my recent epiphany remains invaluable and rightfully triggered a new round of soul searching :( On the bright side, though, we have had some good telephone inquiries come in, with people clearly interested to buy, but, UGH, unable to find the item on the site. There’s a good reason for that: we...
MYOPIA
As in all businesses, the first thing to go is your ability to see with fresh eyes every day. So, today, for the first time in a while, I looked at our sales newsletter and realized that we had utterly failed to clearly communicate HOW DEEP our value proposition is. For example, our upcoming sale features sapphire bangles containing SEVEN CARATS of sapphires, with a set of two priced at the...
Good excuses
I know I broke my promise and didn’t blog EVERY day, but there have been good reasons! First and foremost, yesterday, for example, was the last day of the jewelry fair, meaning we had to canvass the remainder of the show at light speed. As luck would have it, we found our best resource at the 11th hour, literally, as the show was closing up. At 4 pm, instead of packing up like the...
I’ve caught up with Mandatory Relaxation today and read at least 10 old IHTs. That will permit me to write at least ten “meaningful” social media posts. The cartoon below encapsulates my feelings perfectly —
On the other hand, I’m not really complaining. I like the hamster wheel…
When participating in a Social Media Week panel discussion last week, I did...
A LONG week...
I broke the cardinal rule of blogging this week by only posting ONCE! But, EXCUSE ME PLEASE, there was just too much going on. I promise to wear a hairshirt this week and blog every day, so help me God!
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This week was insane for the simple reason that it contained BOTH the jewelry fair AND Social Media Week. For the latter, I more than redeemed myself by appearing at the press...
Life is much more than Plukka....
What a crazy week! Before speaking at the semi-appalling Social Media Week press conference yesterday, I actually gave a talk at City University to students of Communication Management. I cobbled some new slides on to my SCAD preso from a few weeks ago and attempted to address the key issues raised by the professor: How do you name a brand? How do you communicate a brand vision and philosophy? How...
What I'm going to talk about tmo (aka The Lazy...
I’ve been severely backlogged on old issues of the IHT which I continue to subscribe to in, EGAD, paper form! About 15 copies seemed to have piled up recently, for the simple reason that I haven’t been going to the gym, where I customarily read on the stairmaster. Well, today, I hit the gym for the first time since my imagined heart attack nearly three weeks ago and started to get...
Our Facebook advertising by Convert Simply is KILLING Google Adwords in terms of ROI based on email signups. So far, our conversions cost half as much and I expect that price to drop as CS’ bucketing becomes more precise. Time to drop Google. I actually emailed CS immediately after looking at their results and asked, can we put much more money behind the campaign or is there insufficient...
A day in the life...
So, after yelling at the emarketer in nyc about being SLOW, I wrote him a quick note destined to arrive first thing in his mailbox Monday morning, saying, apologies for being snappish. I DO hope we can get going soon. Not unexpectedly, I heard nothing back. He doesn’t reply with alacrity as a general rule. Instead, I chalked it up to the slowness of middle age. YES, I said that. I’m...
Phantasmagoria has a place in marketing strategy
From time to time, I experience a severe attack of anxiety and ask myself, am I throwing away a perfectly good — indeed, illustrious - career in conventional marketing to DO THIS? Last weekend, for example, I was reading the FT Art and Home sections and came across three articles featuring friends of mine, Hung Huang (the most famous Chinese woman in media), John Hardy (the eponymous jewelry...
DIY: Sow's ear = Silk purse
Today is my first day in a while not totally utterly backlogged with stuff. I’m also slightly hung over and still massively sleep deprived. Leaving BKK today - finally. It’s been a momentous, massively stressful trip. But well worth it.
Yesterday, I composed this photo in 10 minutes in our designer’s hotel room. You’ll be seeing it on our site soon enough —
That...
Tutti Frutti in the Kitchen Sink
Two days ago, our unsubscribes were nearly as many as our subscribes. I couldn’t stop mulling over it all day! It’s a telling sign that either we’re targeting too broadly, irritating already overcommitted first-time subscribers or simply don’t sell enough product to justify the mailbox intrusion on a daily basis. Phenomena 2 and 3 are the inverse of each other. But I...
January 2012
29 posts
Busy as a bee in Bangkok
I’m busy again — the way that makes me feel like I’m back in my real skin -neuraesthenically perched between a nervous breakdown and hyperproductivity.
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Our critical path comprises three strategic activities: #1 driving traffic, #2 augmenting our product catalogue, and #3 disposing of returns efficiently. If we can achieve these three goals, WE CAN WIN. As opposed to...
A new kind of startup - based on, EGAD,...
[follow up note to a venturebeat journalist after our telecon …]
plukka plants the seed for an entirely different sort of startup scene, one that is based on real-world mastery of manufacturing. it is a permanent comparative advantage that the startup is based at the epicenter of the world’s manufacturing, hong kong and, specifically, the pearl river delta. (if you look at the average...
Real businesses are based on real users
This was a great link from Om (of Gigaom) yesterday, http://ow.ly/8JXO1: it’s about his friend’s Four Principles of Delusional Economics. At first, I thought it was a book about the decline of American political and cultural hegemony (!) but, in fact, it’s about how some startups are based on business models which are worse than wishful thinking, i.e., HOPE. (Y’all know...
Life Rule #2 It takes time to build greatness
I’m not sure I actually abide by this rule personally. Every time someone on my team says, Rome was not built in a day, I shoot them a glowering look. Well, Rome wasn’t, but Shanghai Tang was rebuilt and CAN built in less than 2 years each (the former during SARS even), with ground-breaking accomplishments and brands ballyhooed far and wide. All that WITHOUT the benefit of lightning...
Rules? WHAT rules?
the day started really well because someone bought a ring for almost $3000 from us, the third sale within 24 hours. sales have obviously begun to pick up. unfortunately, this still doesn’t have anything like a sedative effect on me at night. if you haven’t guessed, major accomplishments bring me relief for no more than 5 minutes. but, i have to say, knowing that the business will turn an important...
Groupthink=mediocrity & reticence
(A sidebar on The Open Plan Office - yes, we have one at Plukka - even though I’m the boss!)
just in case anyone has not detected that i’m misanthropic and introverted, despite appearing to be one of the most outgoing, gregarious people you’ve EVER met in your life, my views dovetails nicely with susan cain’s here, on the importance and power of individual solitary...
Life Rule #3 NEVER COPY
[Refer back to my post about a week ago, about my talk to SCAD students. It contained a ppt slide reciting my Life Rules.]
I just unfollowed someone on Twitter because he doesn’t believe that originality is a moral option in some cultures. (I hate locking horns with dumb people on Twitter. I made up my mind to unfollow this guy after the first tweet, below, and after having read his angry,...
Numbers never lie, but they don't shed light on...
So, after making the Google Adwords campaign live, I have been watching it like a hawk. Actually, real-time advertising analytics is probably a dream come true for someone as OCD as I am. However, the first set of stats SUCKED. And showed a LOWER sign up rate than what we get from general traffic! As usual, I massively overreacted and thought, OMG, wtf is going on — after only 4 hours of...
Converting EVERYONE is hard....
Today, I had an informal discussion with an important venture capitalist and angel, M, who questioned the ability of the consumer to verify the “true” value of our discount. He kept on comparing Plukka to Rue Lala — the latter sells “real brands”, not even stuff expressly manufactured for discount outlets. I replied, well, yes, they do sell the “crappy leftovers...
