The last six months have been somewhat of a rollercoaster for yours truly. There have been a lot of lows, but also a lot of highs.
One of the highs was becoming a part-owner & technical director in Linda's fresh water pearl jewellery business, Zhulin Pearls.
Linda has already announced the online launch of her little entrepreneurial adventure a few weeks back. Roping in her Mum, Linda has been consistently selling Chinese freshwater jewellery at local markets on Magnetic Island for the past six months. In December, Linda approached me to build her an online portal so she could broaden her reach in Australia. I wasn't too supportive at first, mainly as I had been in quite a depressive funk during that time. However with her egging me on, I started to get into building the portal and learning quite a lot about online e-commerce systems and methodology. We launched after a two false starts. Firstly we ran into perhaps the most awful ordinary webhost in the world, Dot5 Hosting. We found a much better webhost which then ironically went through its own period of service upheaval. We also enjoyed the immaculate timing to suffer from the great 2007 Asian internet outage caused by the aftermath of the deadly Boxing Day earthquake in Taiwan.
Needless to say that no, or painfully slow internet access can really put a dent in your e-commerce plans. This was truly frustrating. So many false starts was really starting to bug me, but together we kept at it and managed to nail the content, build the systems, update the registries and finally launch our site just before Chinese New Year. Since then, we've been in what we call 'soft-launch'. During this period, the bulk of our business has been through word of mouth advertising and also telling friends and family about what we can do. We have sent almost 10 kilograms of pearl, sterling silver, stone, glass, bead and faux-coral jewellery back to Australia. Not bad, but business has been sporadic. So we planned to rectify this and we have just commenced our "hard-launch" which will include an Australian-focused advertising campaign mainly centred upon magazine competitions and various other forms of advertising on the web.
It has been quite exciting, and very much consuming a lot of my time over the past few months. Now that the bulk of the systems have been tested thoroughly, we will begin to roll out our new website features and ad campaigns over the next few weeks, just in time for Mother's Day! (HINT HINT)
My prior work and study experience has almost been solely in the academic area and scientific research, so jumping into adventure has taught me quite a lot about small business. It has been very, very illuminating. One thing I have relished out of this experience is the ability to produce tangible, end-products to your work. I think I like being my own boss bossed around by Linda.
Recently, you might have noticed the introduction of advertisements on this site. Part of this was a decision to recover some hosting costs due to the recent rise of web traffic to scRambler, but also to promote Zhulin Pearls a little more widely. I hope you're not too offended by the commercialisation of this website.
So I came to China to forge a career in biotechnology and environmental sciences, and now I find myself as a minor entrepreneur and a budding writer (more on that later). It is awfully strange how things can turn out in your life.
So, if you are in the market to buy that little something special for your loved one, consider our business, Zhulin Pearls for your gift purchase.
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