Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Yeah, honestly, if I knew how hard it was, I wouldn't have started it.
For anyone starting an E commerce brand these days, I would really think about how dedicated you are. I think people don't emphasize enough how hard it is and so many people make it sound so easy. I just build a site and it's just printing cash. No, that is not true. It took so much work initially for the first two, three years. It's just going to be a money pivot. Honestly, unless you're like an influencer where you have some killer products. The e commerce space has become very competitive in the past couple years.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Welcome to the Society Gal podcast where trailblazing female entrepreneurs and creatives come together to spark change and build their dreams. This is where your passion meets purpose. And together we're crafting a future where everyone has the tools to succeed.
Welcome everybody to the Society Gal podcast. This is your host, Dana Schuller and we have Julia Shue here with us today. We have a really amazing guest today. We're so excited to have you, Julia, and to talk about something that hasn't been talked about too much on this podcast, really about E commerce, about sourcing. We're going to talk a lot about that and dig deep into it in this podcast if you're interested in getting into the E commerce side of business. Julia has a lot of experience with this and she has an amazing journey to share today. So listen in, Julia, we're just going to go ahead and have you start introduce yourself and we're going to dig into your story in all your businesses.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Thanks so much for having me here. I'll start with a quick intro to myself and then we'll love to share a little bit more about this kind of crazy roller coaster journey to where I am today. But I'm Julia. I'm the co founder, CEO of weio and we're building an AI power platform to make sourcing really awesome merch at factory prices super easy. Before starting wayo, I was actually I started another e commerce brand which maybe a lot of society got members have heard of called Multitasky. We sell a lot of fun functional tag gadgets, Home Office Suppl. It's very pink. It's very much, you know, meant for female go getters. And we sell through a lot of BB channels like Fat Fun, Urban Outfitters, Good Morning America, many more. Before that, I was chief of staff at Alibaba North America and that's what led me into this whole supply chain e commerce space. I was born in the US But I grew up in China, so I'm like fully bilingual. PI cultural. So, you know, growing up, always wanted to bridge somewhat between you know, the overseas factories and Western consumers. That's what led me to this path. I started my career in finance consulting and strategy. I used to be at Disney Corporate Strategy and built the Disney plus global financial model. That was my first job out of college. But I've always been very entrepreneurial, starting businesses. I think since I was in high school, I did a public speaking organization. In college, I did a social enterprise nonprofit helping single mothers through knitting and selling college branded products on campus. Both are still alive. After leaving Alibaba, I did some independent consulting. I think that's when I joined Society Gal, I guess is the most important part because I was doing freelancing and helping a lot of companies and startups build financial models, given my Disney experience.
So that's when I met a lot of the Society Gal members, when I was trying to start figuring out how to build my personal brand, get clients and all that.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Wow, that's awesome.
I really love to hear, I mean, going back even to just when you're in college, starting that nonprofit and how ambitious you are and everything that you do. That's why I loved hearing your story. And you do everything really well. So your nonprofit, which is just amazing mission, that's still going today, right? What is that called?
[00:03:41] Speaker A: It's called Tink Knit.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Going today. It's fully student run. I just went back to campus and I saw our knitter hats in the bookstore. I went to Brown. We do a lot of Brown University like branded products. It's very, I think it's very cute. And also seeing the impact like, you know, until this day, helping a lot of the local single mothers.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean you. And then you are doing products and branded products. How did even going into the, I mean right out of college, went into Disney and helping with their financial model help you build a foundation, moving into your E commerce brand, like multitasking and Wayo as well. Like, how did that really support you there?
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say it wasn't like directly correlated in terms of the skill set and all that, but it did help build up knowing how to work in a corporate environment and under high stress and building up the efficiency and a lot of the skills that you would need as a leader down the road. Working at Disney Corporate was not that easy. We're dealing with a lot of really smart, high profile people. When I was joining that specific group was like, you know, literally the strategy for the whole company. When I joined, we were thinking about launching Disney plus. I ended up being the analyst building it from literally nothing until it launched. That was a really transformative experience for someone so young. I was only 21 at the time. To get that kind of exposure, you know how to think strategically and act professionally and then, you know, that translates into how we now currently manage our team and set up standards. So I think it wouldn't have been the same if I never had that professional training. And the reason that it I actually ended up in Disney, I didn't think about that in college because I was like, I'm going to graduate and do my own startup. In junior year I got the McKinsey Women's Impact Award and then that led me into the consulting world. I interned at McKinsey and then I think I kind of got more exposure into the whole consulting business world. But I was also very clear. I've been a builder since I was very young. I always liked building things from zero to one. Seeing the impact and to me, being an outside third party consultant was very painful. I think for some people, they enjoy it, coming in, giving advice and leaving. But I would just be so frustrated because I'm like, I want to see it happen. I don't want to just jump in and give some advice and then roll onto another project. I need to see things happen. Otherwise I don't feel the fulfillment. So that's why at the time I was thinking maybe it's because of the third party consulting. If I go in house and do something from 0 to 1, it'll be more fulfilling. Which is slightly true to some extent. But I think after Disney, I also was very clear that I'm a very people person, very well rounded. Like just focusing on the numbers and staring at spreadsheets is very painful for me too. So. So that's why going from Disney, I was like, I need a career. That's something that, you know, is a little bit more as a generalist and you get to see a little bit of everything and decision making. Which is why I joined Alibaba as the chief of staff. As a next kind of stepping stone in my career. I think joining Alibaba made me realize it's not just I think I need to do my own thing to be running my own thing. Otherwise I feel like I'm suffocating. That's why it led me to quitting the whole like corporate world and then just taking a leap of faith and trying to figure out what I actually wanted. I Thought I had it figured out, got all the jobs that people wanted, but I was just like, this is just not right for me and I need to start from scratch and really figure out what is the true purpose and passion for myself. So that's why, you know, got into consulting for a year before I knew what exactly I wanted to do. Got into E commerce, started multitasking. That was a passion project during COVID That grew a lot bigger than I imagined. At the beginning, I literally was just thinking, I'm just gonna list some of the products on a website. These are the stuff I like for my home office, like cute and functional stuff and you can't really find them. And then it grew into a whole brand and then it became kind of more like a passive revenue business. Right now I don't spend much time on it. Probably spend like 1, 2 hours a week just overseeing my team's running it. And it led into Whale because through multitasking we built this whole supply chain. A lot of my consulting clients came to me. They're like, you know, China, you worked at Alibaba, you know, ran an E commerce business. You must know how to find factories. I'm like, you know, that's kind of true. Maybe I'll try to figure out. And then that led to this whole new business of helping all kinds of companies just source any custom product you can imagine. So right now when you go to Whale, it's literally like, I know people use like for imprint, Custom Inc. Or Visa Print. You see a product, you design it and then you get auto code and checkout. Like that's not news to anyone. But all of those platforms use domestic vendors and that's why it's so expensive and limited. What we did is actually we were able to build out this entire automation database through our design tool and a quotation tool with global factories, overseas factories. You're getting the variety of products and the price point that you would get from Alibaba, but also the seamless checkout experience and top notch customer service that you would expect from a domestic platform. So kind of best of both worlds. And. And we can do like minimum starting 50 units, deliver as quickly as two weeks. So it's not the traditional headache or worrying about the quality if it will show up on time because we basically guarantee that for all our customers.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: I love how you went through your whole journey and that's why I asked about Disney and even Alibaba and your foundational experience and these other companies where you weren't the leader of a company. You're working your butt off there. And I loved how you talked about you wanted to be immersed in the project and see it from beginning to end at the very skill set that you have.
But you felt limited in not being a leader. It's cool to see you develop as a leader. Where you wanted to be is someone where you're a leader and you're leading a mission or you're leading a company and you're. You're leading a project and you're in control of that, which is really cool to see how your passion led you there. And I really love Julia, how you're also very aware of and intentional with your steps. You were not ever settling for something, which is really cool. You're always like, okay, where do I want to be? Who do I want to be? I know these are necessary steps that are taking me to get there. But from going like multitasking away, I would love to talk about that a little bit more because I know you're like, I mean, multitasking. Everyone's like, how do you. How did you even start that? So can we backtrack just a little bit with multitasking of how that like started? Because you had experience with the Alibaba, but how did you even start getting that off the ground if someone's like, oh, I would love to start a brand like that. Everyone should go look at that website, by the way. It's really awesome. How did it even start and how the idea spark from there?
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Yeah, honestly, if I knew how hard it was, I wouldn't have started it for anyone. Commerce brand these days, I would really think about how dedicated you are, how much cash to build a brand. I think people don't emphasize enough how hard it is and so many people make it sound so easy.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: I want you to talk about it.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I just build a site and it's just printing cash. No, that is not true. It took so much work initially for the first two, three years. It's just going to be a money pivot, Honestly, unless you're like an influencer or you have some killer R and D kind of products. The E commerce space has become very competitive in the past couple years. When I started multitasking, it was 2020. E commerce is on the high. Dropshipping was still a thing. And then everyone's trying to start E commerce and it seems so easy ever since 2021. I don't know if you follow some of the tech news with Apple's like iOS 14 release. The privacy policy tracking is much Difficult. Like ads became more expensive. So many e commerce brands took off in 2020, the ad spends probably doubled on average. It's normal to get a 2.3x return on your ad spend. And now the industry average probably below 2x depending on your product and segment. It is a lot harder to sell through ads and people are also getting more immune to it because they got so much of that during COVID I think because of all the macroeconomics impacts, starting a brand has been harder than ever. And a lot of brands probably died the past couple of years. It's been a miracle that, you know, multi azzy survived and we found our niche and we're able to scale. It doesn't take that much of my energy these days. But the only reason we were able to get that is because we invested a lot up front and you know, the D2C marketing through a lot of money into ads, PR, building up the brand and, and that got us a lot of B2B attention. We found really great partners that are very consistent. We sell through a lot of corporate gifting platforms. Multi products are very giftable, like little tech gadgets, office supplies that, you know, works really well for that segment. And usually Q4 is our, you know, big month because all those gifting platforms will just be blowing up. We got some consistent partnerships with like, you know, B2B channels, like FabFitFun, like Urban Outfitters, Anthropology.
So having the B2B recurring channels then now basically turned it into a more passive business because I know I don't have to do any ads, I don't have to do any kind of D2C marketing. Now I can just reap the benefit of all the effort I put in the first couple years. But I would say the first two years was very, very hard. Getting a small business loan was really hard and really expensive. And for a business under three years old, it's really hard to get approved with any SBA loan, which means you're paying crazy interest on those E. Com short term loans. If you do the math, it's insane interest, probably even more expensive than your credit card. So I think that's all stuff I didn't realize when I was starting the brand, but luckily was able to power through and just believed in it. And there were dark times where I was like, should I just give up? This is so hard. But I decided to push through it like regardless. And now we're like four years in brand is still, I mean it's still young and growing, but it is getting to a phase where it's more stable. It's not stressing me out every day. I remember the first year. It's like literally all the time. I want to just refresh my shopify, like, see how many orders I get. And these days, I think year four, I'm just like, oh, I haven't checked it for a week. Let me look. And then I look at it. I was like, wow, where are the orders coming from? This is great. So there are two good times after you go through the period. But I would say the first three years, it's to a point where I'm like, all my investments, all my savings is like, in my business.
And people don't tell you being profitable doesn't mean you're casual, positive. You could be profitable on paper. And your cash flow is still not good because you need a front inventory. And that's the hard, hardest thing I think about E commerce. As a brand owner, you need to front inventory because everyone expects fast delivery. And if you work with B2B, they have payment terms. So your cash flow is never that great because whatever you order today, probably as soon as you get paid, it's like three months later, oftentimes six months later. Right. So just depends on. I think the bigger you grow, the more you upfront. But if interest rate is high and if your business is under three years old, you're not qualified for sba, then what do you do? You put in your personal money and how much are you willing to put in to grow this brand? I think that's a question. Back then, when you're throwing money in ads, it's like you're fronting all the inventory and then you see the roas is bad and you're losing money on every sale. But what do you do? You still have to keep growing that because otherwise you don't get sales. I feel like every day I check my ad manager, it feels the gamble towards the end, there's no science anymore because there's no accurate tracking. Which is when I gave up on ads altogether. After two years, I just fully paused on DTC marketing. I just switched fully into B2B channels. And then screw that. And that's when we started turning profit. Whereas the first two years, it was just bleeding money. Every year. My intention for multi ASSC is more for, you know, it's a passion project. I wanted to grow it and raise VC kind of money anyways. So I'm totally okay with it being just a small, profitable business that I love. And just like, you know, yeah, the showcase of products I like. But if people want to actually scale it, that's a different story because then you have additional pressure of like getting capital scaling into it. You can't actually pause the ads even if you're losing money. So you're just kind of at a.
[00:15:23] Speaker B: Good place right now. I love how you went to B2B and found really good quality partnerships that stabilized you as a company. And I love how you even talked about like you're at a good place, like you don't always have to scale. You can grow the business and make it sustainable. I love how you're not like we didn't need to grow it to be massive, but I grew it enough where I'm enjoying it.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's something I had to make peace with, especially with way of being the new focus. I knew I just don't have enough bandwidth to scale it big, you know, like if, if it's really big, that means more employee, more expenses, burden and more day to day management. It's like energy I don't have really. So because I want to spend my focus on growing way out and where we raise VC money, we have a whole team now of almost 30 people. Right. We got to scale and we have a lot of go hit with my unique situation, I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna keep multi tassie at a really healthy rate. I don't need it to grow. I just want it to make some profit every year and then I'm happy, you know.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: But I think what did you learn from multitasky that made you develop whale like what was not working or what was like, you know, what kind of sparked the whole whale direction from multitasking? What did you learn from that?
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[00:17:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I was very clear that I don't want to be running or scaling a business that has inventory.
That was one big lesson. I did not know when I started E Commerce. At the time dropshipping was still working. I thought I could drop ship, but very quickly, even in the first two months I realized it was impossible because it's too unpredictable and experience is not good enough for the customer because it's at least too Weak for delivery. People are so used to Amazon these days. If we wanted to work with B2B channels, they would require domestic shipping. And the SLA is pretty strict. Oh, like, because we also then got into TikTok shop and all that. It all required domestic shipping. So for us, it's impossible. We have to find inventory and have it in a warehouse in the U.S.
so, yeah, like, that's one thing that I realized and why I went to way around. Because then we're building a platform to help anyone source custom products directly. A lot of times we're helping companies make merch, swag, you know, all kinds of, like, custom products. And they're okay with like, holding some inventory because they're just like giving away to their team. Right. Like we're giving away at events and stuff. It's not like they need to figure out this whole, like, inventory and then resell issue the target audience a little bit different.
And then also I think it is a much bigger opportunity because we're literally transforming global supply chain, making it a traditionally really tedious custom B2B experience, turning that into almost like a D2C instant click of a button kind of experience, which hasn't really existed in the market. And I felt like that's something really innovative and revolutionizing an industry. Whereas, you know, building E commerce brand is fun for me, but that's not the one big thing that I want to do. I just felt like as I was running a brand, this is fun, but I want to do something bigger and create a bigger impact and solve a problem that no one else was able to solve. Especially with my unique advantage, knowing both, like, the US China side so well. And then also, you know, had a tech tech team and like, tech, you know, experts joining on board. They were able to figure out how to build a tech product that can turn my visions into life. I thought that was really cool.
All the traditional industry knowledge, all the tedious manual things I didn't like. I was able to rally up a really smart tech team to build a product that solves that problem for what I'm passionate about. That's what led to Whale. Even before Whale started, we had so much demand. All the people coming to me asking for help with sourcing. I knew there was product market fit even before there was a product.
So that's also one of the reason I was like, you know, there's so much demand in this space and that's like such a problem for everyone.
I want to build something to make it easier for everyone. I've been a brand owner myself and I knew how hard it was to navigate the supply chain. I spoke Chinese. I can't imagine for people who don't have the language or direct connections from overseas how hard it could be. A lot of my friends who don't speak Chinese telling me how their experience was, how confusing it is. This industry has to change. There's too much opaque information and people marking up and screwing small business owners over for the same product. I'm able to source it for half the price for the same kind of shipping. Literally 50% savings for my friend. Why don't we build a platform to make this more accessible to all the small business owners in this space? Right.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: Because sourcing is like I, I mean, just like you're saying. I mean people, when I think about that, even businesses there, it's just people are so lost as to how do I even do so when I heard of Whale, I mean it's pretty amazing and I would love to hear any examples that you have of specific people that have used Whale.
Like different businesses. Do you have any examples that you can share of like how they used way and what they used it for?
[00:20:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I would say we have all kinds of different customers. Some are more like the tech companies. Like I mean we, we were first Flexible's customer. Like we used our free service for a lot of our container shipment and now Flex 4 make their merch through us for a lot of their events and stuff. So that's one type. We have a lot of AI tech companies. Like Artisan is one of our new client. They do AI sales lead gen. Like they're kind of like your SDR AI agent. And then we also have like I think Bird's Eye birds. I actually got connected with the founder because we were both on that Forbes 30 under 30 list. And they help a lot of e commerce companies make individualized like customized postcards where if the client, you know, scan the QR code then you instantly can see who scan and can retarget them with email and stuff. So a lot of times we help those tech companies make their merge, but on the other hand we're also their customer because I use Artisan now for our sales stuff. I use Bird's Eye now for a lot of sales efforts. So I think that is what really excites me because we not only can help a lot of those businesses merge for better and cheaper, but also we get to know all those cool tools that we could potentially utilize. That's a part that I really enjoy with Working with startups. On the other hand, we also work with a lot of e commerce brands like Lo Siento. We've been working with them since years ago, before we even had this tech company. That was when I was just two people doing sourcing agent work and helping them.
Tequila brand based in La Venice. And then we make all their like side merch, a lot of their, you know, cups, hats, stuff like that. We also help other e commerce brands source their fully custom products. Sometimes it's really complicated, like full custom packaging that requires like mold and you know, like R and D for months to actually push it out. Stuff like that. Yeah. So I think it's like also just through that we connect with those brands and use our products. We help actual veggies with their packaging. Sourcing as my friend's company and I get the veggie burger patties all the time. I think it's a great way to see what people are looking for. We help a lot of creators and influencers make their merch as well. Rebecca Zamalo is a really big YouTuber. She has almost 20 million followers and does a lot of kid and family content. We did a lot of their custom merch. She's also our first angel investor. We get plugged into a lot of different spaces to, you know, get to see, you know, what creators really want to do. A lot of times that also inspires us thinking about what kind of catalog products should we launch and automate. So, you know, we saw a lot of demand for this specific notebook. Then we'll bring it onto the catalog and make it available for everyone to customize in a couple of clicks and self checkout.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: It's really crazy because I know so many people go through months of figuring out their product and what it needs to look like to make it, I don't know, custom to them. And it's just so cool how you're like as a click, click, click of a button. You can brand it and get it on your storefront or to your people, especially personal brands, even influencers, like you said, you know, I was talking to someone else on the podcast who's an influencer. They were talking about how they had a dream of getting their own products out and their own things, but that, you know, just the overwhelm people have when they think about that. It's really cool how quick it is and how often you're bringing new products forward based on your clientele. I really also love how you talked about the benefit from all these connections with amazing businesses when it comes to sourcing, I think there's a lot of of misconception with China or overseas products.
What are your thoughts on sourcing from overseas? I know a lot of people have this like, oh, it's overseas, it's not good quality, it's crappy.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: You know, it's not all false because we vet thoroughly and we would sample from dozens of factories until we picked a product that we launched on our catalog. Most of them are bad. I do think when you're going directly from us to China, it is very risky because majority of the factories don't really care as much about quality. If you don't have a relationship with them, you don't manage them and you don't have contracts binding them to make sure that they stick to a certain standard, they won't do it. Not all of the factories. I mean they're not super educated and know all the things that western customers care about. You need to educate the factory owners to make sure that they perform exactly the way to western standard too. So I would say that is a valid concern. Especially if you order something for Alibaba and you're like, is this real, this reality?
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Which.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: And that's why we launched Wayo, right? Because we're just like, it's not transparent enough. That was built more for a Chinese factory stand for Western consumers. They're trying to get subscription and ad dollars from the factory so they open it up for anyone as a customer. When you go on there, the highly rated one, the one that's promoted, is it really the best one or just the one who paid the most ad dollar? You know, it's not really serving in a favor of customers. So what we want to do is we vetted for you and all the products that we've already done. We've definitely paid to sample it. We paid to make production ourselves before we launch it on a catalog. We not only know the actual product quality went through all our quality control tests, but also how to work with a factory. If the factory is not cooperative, which sometimes happens, they could seem everything great on paper, awesome rating, they have all those credentials. But then you actually work with them. They just like, oh like randomly change and push off your production. They told you they're going to deliver a day. They don't actually, you know, and then the goods are done and then you send a quality control person to there. They found a bunch of issues. There's the management piece and a backend ops that you can't just scrape from a database or figure out online the most important thing is if there is actually an issue and you're in the U.S. and the factory actually exported to you in the U.S. right. Like you're not going to be able to return that once it leaves China, the factory is going to be like, well, now it's on you. And then you found out all the issues with the products. They can just be like, well, who knows, it might just be you damaging it in the US that's nothing to do. There's.
You can't hold them accountable. That's why having a team and a company on the ground over there, that's.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: A really good point to make. Like she was just over there. I mean, what, a month or something? Julian?
[00:26:44] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I was just there. I mean I spent so much time there. I think when we first started wa the first year I was in China for eight months out of a year.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. I mean, I just really want to make that point and really highlight that when we're talking about whale. Whale is quality. Julia and their team have put a lot of work into screening people and making sure it's quality. This is the point of Whale bringing quality things overseas and not just this temp, you wish thing. Julia has people on the ground. That's what's amazing about this.
[00:27:13] Speaker A: Yeah. And when you look at our catalog, it's not a massive catalog. It's like, you know, low hundreds. Whereas when you look at team of wishes, like literally I don't even know how many products have.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Yeah, insane.
[00:27:22] Speaker A: But it's like there are marketplace anyone can list on there. Whereas for our platform it's like we got a vet, we visited the factory and we need to build a calculator to automate any scenario for customization and quotation and sampled and all that to be able to launch a product and then make that onto our design studio. So anyone can now start ordering. I think that's a key differentiator and we do custom everything where it's like a lot of those like T machine, they're just like, you know, order directly from a factory drop ship to you kind of model.
[00:27:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: So that's very different.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: I think it's pretty unethical in many ways having just a mass just creation of random products.
And yours is definitely a lot more. You know, there's a whole process, there's a whole screening, there's quality products. If you order from Whale, it's going to be a really great product that you're going to get.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that took probably the longest time to build out that supply chain foundation. Probably at least two years initially, before we even had any tech dev. I was first tasking it through multitasking and then visiting all the factories. When I was in China, I think I visited over maybe a hundred factories myself.
It was insane. I was in this tiny town called Yongkang. No one even knows what that is. It's like a little village, like near Yiwu area. And they produce all the stainless steel water bottles. Literally that entire town, they have hundreds of factories. They make the same exact water bottle. Like, you know, the fake Stanley cups, the drinkware, all those kind of bottles are from there. I try to get a hotel. Literally, I cannot find a hotel because I. I was born in the U.S. i'm like U.S. passport holder. And then I cannot find a hotel that would accept me because it is that suburban. They have not seen a foreigner in that town. I was on protein bars for like two days because my schedule was so packed. I was visiting five factories every single day. And they were all super spread out, and there's also no legit food around. It was like, insane. And then I was just like, you know, this is why this business doesn't. Because I feel like not many people who went to college, like in the US is okay with dealing with this one.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: Also, you. You speak Chinese, right? That's a really big benefit. I mean, I mean, not anybody could do what you're doing right now.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: You literally cannot survive in those cities. No one speaks English. Yeah, but it was interesting. And then you see the manufacturing process. I visit all the different factories that looks the same online, and it's very clear which one is legit versus which one is not.
And yeah, I think that's how we vet and try to figure out, because sometimes even just through the online information, we would be fooled. Until you go and actually see the factory, you don't know which one's better than the other. So that's one big thing. Then building up our entire tech team. We poach a lot of really smart tech people onto the team. And that's when we started building Whale, the tech AI platform. And last summer, that's when we had the idea we want to build out a whole AI sourcing agent that can help you create anything. Literally, you can just be like, this is my website. And then we fetch your logo colors, we auto mock up a bunch of, like, swag for you. Literally, like, you know, multi assay. Let's say if we put in multi.com and knows that our main color is pink, it would just basically generate a bunch of merch ideas that would match with multi asses branding. Like you know, we picked some pink product and then auto put the logo into print on top of it. And then if you want something fully custom we have a fully like AI sourcing agent that can prompt you to provide all the information and then auto summarize and submit the project for you.
So we have a lot of things that we're building to try to make this experience super easy. All people have to do is share us with us, their vision, their ideas and then we take care of everything from there from finding a factory, granting the quality and then also ensuring the delivery. And we built a backend portal to automate everything related to exporting, importing, US China, all that.
So we make it a lot more seamless than the traditional way. The past year the team has been kind of working towards and we just launched in December so it's been very exciting seeing this public to the world and getting feedback and yeah we're going to probably start you know hitting go to market, you know this Q1 and a lot of like you know, crazy things coming up and all the events, conferences. So yeah it's been quite a journey.
[00:31:25] Speaker B: We're recording this January 2025 so just timestamping this for when this does come out. It's going to be really cool to see the growth. The checkout system just got put out right.
[00:31:36] Speaker A: Very soon we're launching Realistic Preview because we do a lot of like cool customization method like gold foil like you know and do D boss emboss and a lot of people don't know what it is. So we are building out like basically this visual effect. You can apply like your design on it and if you choose Gold foil it will have a realistic as if you took a photo of a real product with your print and gold foil, we're building that and releasing that in Q1 and then it's the AI sourcing agent. We already have one for fully custom products but we're building a multi agent that can pull from basically everything related to you know, sourcing and then we can either do fully custom or it can just like do a bunch of like auto merch generation for you based on your website recommendation. Yeah so I think that would make everyone's life a lot easier.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: We love AI.
So cool how you're using it in whale It's. I mean a lot of people think AI. Oh chatgpt and it's like no know so many businesses like your business are using in such amazing ways. That's gonna be so cool to see it come to fruition. Yeah.
[00:32:36] Speaker A: I think the main reason is before I was literally that AI that would answer everyone's question. And a lot of times people are like, oh, what material do you recommend? What does this customization method mean? Most people don't know that. I didn't know that before I started Whale either. And that is confusing. If you have a person serve every single use case, it's. It will take so much time and you're also just repeating the same information over and over again. So that's why we're like, let's just train AI. And it can answer a lot of the basic questions already. That saves a lot of time and people get instant responses. Obviously we still have a dedicated bilingual customer service team. We built out a whole bilingual project management team so they can, you know, talk to customers and they're all like native. They went to schools in US uk, like top like Ivy League colleges and then they're now based in Shenzhen and can also talk to the factories if anything goes wrong to make sure everything is operating really smoothly. Yeah. And then also I think the timing right. Last year ChatGPT just came out. I guess now it's like two years ago. Wow. So like spring 2023 is when we had idea like ChatGPT just came out. At the time I was talking to Frank who was an AI scientist, he graduate PhD from Berkeley and he did like AI his whole career. We came together and started Whale with Mandy who's my co founder, coo and she has her background more in strategy, finance. And then we're just like, can we build a platform that basically utilize the latest cutting edge tech to transform a really old school traditional industry like manufacturing, exporting, global trading and all that and just make it like to kind of user experience that now the new kind of like millennials in Gen Z would enjoy. Like a lot of founders, brand owners. Right. Like the kind of experience that we want.
So that's the mission here. So yeah, hopefully we keep adding more products and features and then anyone can go on and actually create cooler stuff, you know, on budget and get it delivered on time and don't have to deal with either, you know, the really complicated Alibaba process that's not super reliable or paying overpriced to like, you know, some of the domestic sourcing platform. It is easy but it's just like, you know, for that quality at that price, it's not really worth it and leaves very thin margin. If you were to resell it.
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I love digging into Whale and really like what's happening behind it all. Because I think that's what everybody wants to hear is what's happening behind it all. Just hearing the amount of work that went into it is pretty crazy. Really awesome to hear. But wow, Hearing from your perspective of starting this up and all the work it has taken, free to be in China, going to all these factories to make this happen, it's really cool to see how it's flourishing this year. All the things are starting to come together. You got your cart together, you're gonna bring out the AI and everything. It's just like everything's really coming together, which is really cool. Doesn't it feel great?
[00:35:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. It feels like a lifetime. I can't believe it's only been like, what, not even two years With Whale officially being a thing. It feels like so long. And, you know, being able to build up a team right now. We have an awesome team. Everyone is just incredible. But it took me so long to find everyone and we went through a lot of mistakes and things that I just like, you know, being first time founder had to take time to figure out. And I would not downplay all the challenges we've been through. Yeah.
[00:35:48] Speaker B: I mean, like, tell us a little bit before we end this today because we learned amazing things about way. I would love to hear just a few learning lessons you had about E commerce. Just like your whole experience, like, what are some of your biggest learning lessons that you've had, especially with Whale and developing that because, I mean, it's grown really quickly.
[00:36:04] Speaker A: Oh, there's so many. But I would say, like, finding a good team is key. That's so important. Many solo business owners, especially when I first started, I was just like, you know, by myself. Right. Like, you want the control, but if you want to build something and scale it, you need good people, you need a good team. That is critical. Being able to find my co founder and then recruiting this whole team, that's everything. I wouldn't have been able to do any of this by myself. A lot of business owners are like, oh, I just want to save money. I want to like, you know, keep on control, whatever, and then just want to try to do everything yourself. I think that's the number one thing you got to delegate because your time is the most valuable. And as a CEO, you got to be focusing on on things that other people can't do. So the mindset I had initially is, can I find someone who is cheaper than my hourly rate. Who can do it better than me then if I can, I would outsource that and spend my energy and time on something else.
Yeah, so I would say that's number one. And then number two is when you're recruiting, you gotta be, you could be a nice boss, but you gotta also have very clear standards and criterias and KPIs. And if someone is not hitting it, you gotta just cut that, you know, like we had to go through so many people, I think we turn around the entire team. Actually we have now almost 30 people eliminated. Maybe like half or whatever. You're just not gonna find the right person from the get go. And as your business scale, it's gonna need different kinds of skill sets. So it's very important as the leader to know if everyone is the right fit at that stage and for that role. It can't be emotional in this decision. You have to make the best decision for what's best for a team in a business. A lot of times that is the opposite of what you want to do emotionally because obviously everyone that you work with, you have like a bond and a friendship forming. But a lot of times you have to make a tough call. And I think the only reason we were able to get to where we are today is because we went through a lot of that early days and we're able to quickly figure out what mistakes we made, move in the right direction and just keep iterating, keep figuring out what is the best and not being afraid of admitting that you made a mistake. And as soon as you realize there's a mistake, just cut it and move on and do the right thing. Always do the thing that you know is the next best thing. I think when you go into that momentum and then after years you look back, you're like, wow, we did achieve a lot. And I'm so grateful that we did do the tough things at the moment. Now looking back, it's nothing but because of that, that's where it served us today and why we were able to reach where we are.
[00:38:34] Speaker B: So I think lessons on team. Yeah, your talk about how you have to step up as a CEO and how you've had to step up and just make decisions for the business because it is business and you have a lot of pressure with the business that you're building and all you're like all the work that I put into this too of your vision and needing a team to support them to keep it going, I could see how much that could have held you back by Keeping a team because you had a lot of feelings about it.
[00:39:00] Speaker A: Yeah. You need people that you can trust and rely on and that is so important because especially as the business grows, you won't have time to look at every single detail and micromanage every single area. That is not a good leader.
But on the other hand you need to have people that you can trust so you can let go and let them run it. And I think that was the, the most difficult and challenging thing in the first couple years is to find that and build that and you know, have that rhythm going on. Once you have that, then you can move on to the next challenge and scaling and all that. I think that's the foundation, especially when you're going from zero to one.
[00:39:35] Speaker B: Thank you for that insight. That's really great. Especially because a lot of our community are solopreneurs are, you know, are at solo. I mean women in business are very new in business, I mean just in the world in general. And so it's really great Julia, for you to come on here and talk about your team and how you developed that and what you've had to do to do that because a lot of people, like you said, want to stay alone and that's just not how you're going to be sustainable over time. Whatever business you have, you're always going to need support. Nothing's done well by yourself forever.
And so it's really great to see your business being supported really well by a team that you've grown. That's really amazing.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: I do want to add one point. With Wayo, obviously we got venture funding. That's how we can afford having a real team. I know for a lot of solopreneurs that is a concern. I would highly recommend outsourcing overseas. We have team members based in the Philippines and they're incredible. They speak really great English. It does take betting you have to find the right person for you but they could be a very affordable way to find someone who can really help taking off a lot of the pressure, you know Multinassio we have a virtual assistant ops manager now based in the Philippines and she does everything from our customer service, email, SMS marketing to all our backend ops like product launch, literally everything. And she's incredible. So having someone like that takes so much pressure off of you. And then for multi assy we also have obviously like a you know, us based like ops marketing manager and she does all our TikTok. You'll see like all the tiktoks with her face. She's actually From Society Gal. That's how I initially found her. And then you know, from there. She's been with me now four years and you know, did everything from even initially our warehouse, our whole family was helping to now us marketing and everything. So multihassey. We just have those two full time employees like running it. And it just takes so much pressure off of me so that I can focus on other stuff in my life and on Whale. So I think maybe that's more relatable to a lot of solopreneurs because Whale is like obviously like we have so many people. It's a different story now. But even with Molten Hastie, we've been through a lot. I had to figure out who's the right fit, going through different ones who are not a fit, different agencies, and then ultimately figuring out a process that works for me. One other advice I would give is you always need to figure out yourself before you hire someone. I made this mistake so many times. I would like find an agency and think they're going to be my savior of the day and figure out for me it never worked for me. I always had to after spending thousand dollars, figure out myself and then do it myself again after firing them. I would really recommend before you hire on any agency, watch YouTube videos like figure out your yourself before you bring on a person. Because otherwise you wouldn't know if they're screwing you over. You wouldn't know if they're saying the right thing or not. You can't evaluate their performance. That is really dangerous. Every single time I had a bad hire like that. The root cause of that is because I didn't understand that function myself. So I didn't know that they're a bad hire until it's too late and we already burned through too much money. So I definitely would recommend taking the time initially as solo partner, definitely doing everything at least once yourself. But don't spend too much time on doing everything yourself. As soon as you master one thing, try to figure out can I hire someone who can do this for me? You know, cheaper and better delegate that out and just manage them from there and then move on to learning the next thing and finding another person to replace yourself. You gotta initially take the time to at least understand how everything works.
[00:42:57] Speaker B: That's an important point because I've gone through the same experiences and when you're in the beginning of your business, you're like, oh, it'd be so much easier just, just hire somebody. It's not when you don't understand it and you're not established enough. I think there is a point when you need to be established enough to understand your business, how it works, what works, what doesn't work and how you want it to be run to then delegate it to somebody. Because what you're talking about are hires that are scalable hires, someone that's going to be on your team and there's, yeah, there's contracted things and project based work that people do. But what, what's great that you're talking about, you have like operational people, you have people that are doing specific, you know, multiple tasks because they're employed as well. If you can't delegate, if you don't know what you're delegating, it's hard.
[00:43:40] Speaker A: I've done everything from building a warehouse, packing up all the orders, being at the warehouse, literally packing up like hundreds of orders during holiday self, to running all the ad campaigns, all the marketing kind of things like figuring out how those like programs work, affiliate, like everything you can think of, literally. I built my own Shopify store. I figure out how to do the liquid code and plug in different things like initially like everything from office to marketing to tech to sales to supply chain, you gotta do it all. Otherwise it's really hard to know how to optimize a thing. And sometimes before I investigate into oh, how does this email flow work myself, like I just didn't know that, you know, there are steps I'm missing, there's stuff that you can be optimizing. It takes a lot of time to understand all the different pieces. For me it took years. Right. Like basically it started from me doing multitasking and everything translates with whale. It's all intertwined.
But yeah, I do think like it did pay off in the end that now that's how we were able to find good people and build this and launch this and build a solution for everyone. Hopefully that can make sourcing a lot easier.
[00:44:42] Speaker B: Thank you Julia for being on here today and sharing all of your learning lessons and really digging into whale and just amazing business you're growing and launching. We can't wait to hear more and I hope all of you by the time you listen to this can hop on a way on, see all the amazing improvements and multitask, ask you and use it for your own business. And Julia, do you want to say anything else before you get off? How can everybody connect with you as well?
[00:45:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's it. Thanks so much for having me. Our website wayo is just the way O com T H E W A Y O dot com and want swag merch customer product sourcing supply chain related stuff. That's where you can reach me atjulia the whale.com that's probably the easiest way or LinkedIn. My name is just Julia L. Xu. Hope to see if we can help anyone bring their ideas into reality and always here as a resource.
[00:45:29] Speaker B: Awesome. Well I hope all of our Society Gal members I know Julia is part of the Society Gal community. You might see her on some pictures.
Society Gal. She's been a society gal for a while. I hope all of you can connect with her and really take advantage of this. I know there's so many coaches and other businesses, e commerce businesses, so many people in the community that would benefit from Wayo so I really hope you take the time to view her site, check out Julia and all amazing things she's doing. So thanks so much for hopping on today on the podcast. I hope you have a wonderful day.
[00:45:56] Speaker A: Thank you. Take care.
