First day at work – and it was a great day. Some really nice surprises. Our new RedStores Packaging is now in use and I love it. I saw it first when I saw our outbound bin, and the deep red looks so cool vs the purple.
My prelim financial results came in and it looks like a decent year – so that is quite nice. Worked a approving wire’s and got through critical emails. Still have something like 600 emails to get through – but most of those are 2 weeks or older – so I may just do my “manage by exception’ move – and delete them all – and see what comes back (psss …. my secret! 
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Our RedStores Site Design looks awesome. Here is some designs as promised. The designs are below. We even looked at a new “PearlsOnly’ home page – which is quite nice but will have to wait until RedStores is done (if ever – since if we do this right – at some point PearlsOnly will converge into RedStores).
2nd- our TaoBao to West (lets call this Enabling China to Go Direct) – is now doing good. Our trial run picked up 40 products in last few days – so our systems are getting ‘excised’ in terms of TaoBao to RedStores process.
If you look at SilverDevotion.com – there will be 40 new products now. Here is a link: http://silverdevotion.com/silver/customer/just_arrived.php
The beauty of this is that we are talking JIT purchasing – we hold no product at the moment – but the moment an order is placed – the product is in our office and ready to ship a day later after quality control. We are talking just 40 products now – and its just a trial run – but imagine now 40,000 products – or 100,000 products – with zero inventory on hand, 24 hour sourcing, and 3 day delivery to customers hands. We are just talking jewelery now since it a pilot, but these 40 products are already hitting Amazon in US, UK and soon FR, and DE. And, hey, to those that have an idea about trying to copy our idea (this is China after all) – good luck – took us 7 years to get to this place.
So, what this means is that we are gaining super fast ability to go to market with not just latest trends when they emerge, but to source those items and quality control them in virtually less than 24 hours.
We have also spend a LOT of time looking at Amazon, and have made some very significant discoveries about Amazon – I can’t go into details here about what we found – but lets just say that we at this point know more about how to ‘work’ Amazon than 99% of the sellers on Amazon. What this enables us to do is cherry pick and source as we identify trends.
So, the challenge in the months ahead will be to scale up product onboarding – and then the operation and logistics. We can handle up to 500 to 1000 orders a day right now using our current office space – however anything beyond that will require a whole new logistics setup – with receiving, QA, shipping – all in real-time. Hmm…if you look at my background it was all about real-time information, automation and data – somehow my engineering experience is coming to play.
So, having said all this – the credit for this work is not mine – the whole team got behind this – and it touched across all of our departments – and the cool thing is that we did it!
I’m not sure quite yet, if everyone in the company sees the tremendous thing that we have done here yet, with 40 products the sales will be tiny – BUT what is important is that we have tested and proven our systems and infrastructure – and we know we can do it. So, scaling up is relatively simple compared to ‘building up’.
And now onto the cool RedStores design. There is more to this that I’m holding back – since we are moving into the area of ‘content enabled ecommerce’. I won’t discuss this at this moment since this is something quite fresh – but its going to come out hard and strong in addition to what is here.
And, in small passing, I just happened to take a picture of Jessica, our Operations Manager today for
my visual phone id. She has been behind our strong effort during Xmas, our Amazon touch point and a very good people leader. I haven’t seen anyone fight harder for her people than her! So, here is Jessica, sporting her new look and making hard things looks easy.