The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Jeremy Shepherd, CEO Of Pearl Paradise on Building A Successful Business And Insight To The Pearl Industry Marketplace

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Jeremy Shepherd, CEO Of Pearl Paradise on Building A Successful Business And Insight To The Pearl Industry Marketplace Pearlparadise.com Jeremy Shepherd is an entrepreneur and e-commerce expert who has spent more than 25 years in the digital space. His experience includes developing, curating and launching direct-to-consumer, televised shopping segments for NBCUniversal and TelevisaUnivision, and building PearlParadise.com, one of the largest direct-to-consumer pearl brands in the world.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the Big Show and Podcast. My friends and family, we certainly appreciate you guys coming by. Remember, the Chris Voss Show.com. Welcome to the Big Show and Podcast. My friends and family, we certainly appreciate you guys coming by.

Remember, the Chris Voss Show is the family that loves you, but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law. Today, we're going to be talking about pearls. What? Pearls, Chris? What? Pearls? Yeah, you're going to like this, especially with Mother's Day approaching and different things going on that you need to buy stuff for holidays. So we'll get into that in a second. But in the meantime, as always, you should refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Hey, I don't know if I ever discussed this on the show, but we cut a deal about, what was it, a month ago with Simon & Schuster, and they book a lot of their authors on the show.

They auto book all their authors on the show now. We're doing like two to three podcasts a day between them, Penguin Random House, and all the major book things. But I don't know if we ever announced that Simon Schuster was auto-booking on the show. So just so you know, there's two to three podcasts a day we're doing. We're normally used to do one to two. And if you can't find something to enjoy in the Chris Voss Show, you may want to see a psychiatrist and get some help. Anyway, that aside, thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, FortressCruzFoss, goodreads.com, FortressCruzFoss,

LinkedIn.com, FortressCruzFoss, and all those crazy places the kids are playing today. Today we have an amazing gentleman on the show. He started his own pearl company, which is what I need to do in my spare time, or gold company, or other rare gemmages, as they like to call them in the technical fields, and learn more about all this stuff and do more about all this stuff. We have Jeremy Shepard on the show with us today. He is an entrepreneur and e-commerce expert who spent more than 25 years in the digital space. His experience is in developing, curating, and launching direct-to-consumer

televised shopping segments for NBCUniversal, TeleVision, and BuildingPearlParadise.com, one of the largest direct-to-consumer pearl brands in the world. Welcome to the show, Jeremy. How are you? Thank you very much, Chris. I appreciate it. I am doing fantastic. Thank you for having me today. There you go. And I already gave your plug-in for PearlParadise.com, so we got that out of the way. Give us a little bit about your origin story. What got you down this road where you now run a pearl company? Yeah, it may seem kind of random, right? I was actually a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines and I used to, you know, straight out

of college, I joined the airline. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family where I traveled a lot and I spoke several foreign languages. So getting a job with an airline was sort of a shoo-in, easy job to get. And I wanted to see the world, sort of like, you know, people join the military for, except it's a lot more cush to be a flight attendant and travel the world than, you know, sit in a ship traveling the world with the Navy. um i was a flight attendant with northwest airlines and on layover in china i bought a strand of pearls for a girl i was dating at the time i didn't know anything about jewelry didn't know anything about pearls at all and um i brought the strand of pearls back to the states and she got it appraised to find out what it was worth you know i didn't tell her that i paid about 20 for the strand of pearls maybe closer to 25 but uh the appraisal came back at

about 600 and so um light bulbs started going off in my head saying wait a second um is there really that much of a disparity between the cost and the retail value of pearls. Wow. And that sort of launched me into this business. At first, I checked out jewelry stores, started talking to people who own stores, boutiques, etc. And I found that just about everybody in the industry, we'll call it, the jewelry industry here in the States has a very specific way of receiving their merchandise, whether they buy on consignment or they're on memo or they have specific suppliers that they've been working with or their parents have been working with. and there really wasn't much room for some new flight attendant kid to come in with a Flight bag full of pearls and and try to sell pearls in these jewelry shops So a friend of mine Recommended I try something different something new and mind you this was in the 1990s. So, you know, this wasn't last year This is quite a few years ago

He had been selling odds and ends on this new website called eBay at the time. And he suggested maybe I should try selling online. I gave it a shot. I didn't end up selling on eBay at first because I didn't have a digital camera, so I couldn't upload photos, which was a requirement. But Amazon had something called Amazon Auctions and Zshops. So I posted an auction on Amazon. And basically, it was just the details of the appraisal that my girlfriend had received.

So, of course, I didn't know anything about pearls at the time. But the appraisal said, this is the type of pearl. This is the shape. This is the quality, etc. So I posted that information on Amazon Auctions. I cashed my paycheck. cashed out my credit card, everything I could. I think I had about $3,000. I jumped on a plane, went back to China, went back to the same place I bought that strand of pearls for my girlfriend and said, I'd like as many of these strands as I can buy.

And I bought, I don't know, $3,000 worth, maybe about a hundred strands. I brought them back and within about a week to two weeks, all of them had sold. And so I launched this business about 25 years ago. 25 years ago. So give us an overview of what Pearl Paradise is about, what's on it, et cetera, et cetera. Well, today we've grown into one of the largest Pearl retailers in the world. And online, we are by a large margin, the largest online. So since that time, I have purchased a Pearl farm, an Akoya Pearl Farm in China. That didn't work out very well, so I don't have that any longer.

But I've also developed relationships with producers and farmers in Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Tahiti, Mexico, Hong Kong. And so although I'm no longer a flight attendant, my wife and I still travel about three times a year to different parts of the world where we fly over with bags and we do deals with these producers and processors and we bring back bags and bags of pearls back to the United States. And on PearlParadise.com, we carry basically every type of pearl that's commercially available on the market. Wow. What are some examples of some of the variations of pearls? Well, there are generally two types of pearls. You've got saltwater pearls and freshwater pearls. The names are pretty self-explanatory.

Saltwater pearls are grown in oceans, seas, etc. Freshwater pearls are grown in lakes, seas, et cetera. Freshwater pearls are grown in lakes, rivers, streams, et cetera. Within those categories, saltwater, you've got Akoya, Tahitian, and South Sea. Those are the primaries. And then freshwater pearls are more of the, I would say, less expensive, more starter level type pearls. And they come in just about every color under the rainbow. Freshwater pearls are a little bit more pastel, but with Tahitian pearls, you've got black pearls, green pearls, purple pearls, rose colored pearls. So not all pearls are white.

And a lot of pearls tend to have shapes that are not round either. So people think white, classic, round strand of pearls, but really that's kind of boring. There's really an entire world available. There you go. So there's lots of different variations. This is cool.

I'm seeing all the different colors and things like that. I imagine they have to polish pearls to make them, give them that shiny look they have. polish pearls to to make them give them a that that shiny look they have well they are they're polished not in the way that you would polish diamonds you know the surface isn't necessarily changed um but pearls are one of those unique gems that are beautiful and ready to be worn the moment they come out of the oyster you know you think about diamonds they come out of the ground it basically looks like a piece of gravel they've got to be worn the moment they come out of the oyster. You know, you think about diamonds. They come out of the ground, and basically it looks like a piece of gravel. They've got to be cut, polished, shaped.

Pearls, you know, you're going to want to wash them. You don't want a necklace that smells like, you know, the inside of an oyster. So they've got to be washed, and then they are polished. They're polished to a nice shine. But other than that, pearls don't necessarily need any treatments to uh to be beautiful yeah and and they're basically uh you know one of those things that have to be made by clams right they there's no really other way to make them right unless you make fake pearls i suppose well i mean yeah there are fake pearls out there that are made out of

glass and um majorca is a pretty well-known fake faux pearl brand. But no, they cannot be made in laboratories. They cannot be made in factories. They are made by an oyster. And that oyster decides whether it's going to be a pearl, whether it's going to be a nice pearl, whether it's going to be a valuable pearl. It's all sort of up to the oyster and Mother Nature. There you go. How much of the cut do these these clams get you know we're doing them a favor we're doing them a favor we pull that thing out and it's

sort of bothering them you know we pull it out and we put them back in the water they can draw another yeah it's just it's just amazing how that works i've seen like there's been these i think i've seen them on tikt. There's people doing videos where they open up the clams and pull the pearls out and dig through them and stuff. It's kind of interesting to see. I don't know what they're doing or what the process is, but watching on TikTok, it's kind of curious. I'm like,

hmm, so that's how that works. It's an interesting process, and in fact it's sort of a how can I put this? It's not real. Let's put it that way. There are factories in Asia that bring in these little tiny baby oysters and

the entire point of these factories is to open these little shells up insert a low quality pearl into the shell then they drop the shell into an alcohol formaldehyde solution, which causes the shell to constrict and close. And so it constricts, it closes,

and they put it into a shrink-wrapped plastic bag and they ship it over to the U.S. or wherever else they're going to be hosting those pearl parties so that they can be opened on TikTok or opened on Facebook Live. Oh, really? A pearl is being harvested. But the reality is it's more or less just a show. Wow.

So that was the question I had set up for you, too, was how does one determine from, you know, real pearls versus, you know, fake pearls or glass? I mean, is it like a way to test? Like I'll see these guys on tiktok that uh they uh i watch a lot of tiktok can you tell and they they you know they look at rolex watches and expensive watches and they can you know see what the thing to see if it's fake how do you tell if uh it can you chew on it like gold you just give her no i'm just kidding probably don't do that you're actually

kind of spot on. Really? Yeah. Just bite it? Chew on it. I wouldn't bite it. But if you take a pearl, a real pearl, and you rub it on the biting edge of your tooth. Really? It'll feel like a sort of a super fine sandpaper.

Really? And fake pearls will be smooth. So fake pearls will be like rubbing plastic or glass on your teeth it'll slide right over pearls are they grow by layering down these layers of something called nacre they're these platelets uh aragonite crystals that are almost like bricks you can't really see them because um they're a little too small for us to see them with our with our naked eye but under a microscope or um or even under a high-powered Loop you can start to see some surface texture and that texture sort of looks like a fingerprint almost on the surface of the Pearl and although it's not visible to the naked eye, your tooth can feel it. So it's not a wives' tale.

You actually can rub a pearl on your tooth to determine whether or not it's real or fake. But you also need to have a fake one or a piece of plastic to rub on your tooth right after the pearl so you have something to compare it with. Because it's really soft. That's interesting. I mean, right now, all the women in the audience are running to go check the pearls. So you have something to compare it with. Cause it's, it's really, that's interesting. I mean, right now all the women in the audience are running to go check their pearls and make sure they were about to do the test. You know,

and maybe you should, you know, I don't know. It's I, I, I've, I've always been fascinated with how people can do that. They can look at things and,

you know, sometimes diamonds or whatever and, and figure out if they're real or fake and stuff like that. Because I'd be one of those guys who I'd buy from the wrong people and buy fake pearls. But that's why people should, of course, order up your website. See how we got that plugged in there on the roundabout? Yeah.

Fake pearls, there's no reason for fake pearls anymore. If you want lower-priced pearls, well, then there's freshwater pearls. Freshwater pearls are, you know, you can get a strand of freshwater pearls for $100. And it's, you know, it's not going to be a really fine quality strand of pearls, but it's going to be better than figs. Definitely. Yeah. Do pearls operate like, you know, like gold does on the market for gold jewelry where maybe it goes up and down depending upon demand and stuff like that? In a way, you know, the market's always changing, you know, sort of supply and demand.

When a type of pearl is really popular, for example, right now, white South Sea pearls are really popular. They're trending in mainland China. When anything trends in China, the price goes up because supply and demand. But pearls are not commodified. And this is a really important point about pearls. In fact, it's probably, well, let's just put it this way. The biggest mistake people make when they buy pearls is they buy them like they buy gold and diamonds with gold you know you've got 10 carat 14 carat 18 carat 24 carat you know the approximate price of gold everybody can just check what the gold price is today with diamonds you've got your cut your size your clarity etc and there's a rapport price list that tells you what the wholesale price should be on those diamonds.

Pearls do not have anything like this. What that means is that when people go out shopping for pearls, if they try to take the same approach they use with golden diamonds, and that is say, I want a strand of a Koyas and I want it to be triple A quality. It's really easy to find someone to sell that to you. But the issue is you could line a hundred strands up with a hundred jewelers and ask them which one is AAA quality. And they might give you a hundred different answers because girl grading is completely subjective. There are no objective standards that go from jeweler to jeweler or no internationally recognized standards for that matter in grading girls so with buying pearls if it's approached as one would buy gold and diamonds it's the easiest way to get ripped off wow that's interesting.

I'm looking at you have the earrings, the necklaces, the bracelets, the pendants, the rings. Maybe somebody should make it so that you don't have to buy diamond rings anymore. You should buy pearl rings. You think that can ever happen for marriages, weddings? You know, I've made a lot of pearl engagement rings over the years. It's definitely not taking the place of diamonds. Definitely not. But there is that element to the diamond industry that some people don't want to support. You know, pulling them out of the ground, the labor that goes into it, et cetera. Pearls are a green gem in that, um, they're, they're sustainably produced.

Uh, they're farmed the, um, you know, and that, that's an important point. All pearls are farmed now. People don't go out into the ocean and die for oysters to try to find pearls. It doesn't work that way. It used to be that way over a hundred years ago. Um, and then, you know, one in 10,000 oysters would produce a pearl and oyster populations were being decimated. Well, now pearls are farmed and not only are they farmed, but they're farmed in like ecological reserves. Pearl oysters are delicate, delicate creatures, so they have to be really well protected and the environment has to sustain them for them to produce pearls. or environmental concerns, pearls are a really great green option to either gift someone or,

back to your point, even create an engagement ring. There you go. There you go. There's everything you can do there. And you offer virtual appointments where people can meet with you on your website. Is that correct? Yeah. In fact, this is something that is relatively new for us. And I think, I don't think I can actually see it. It's happening. There was a bit of a seismic shift in the way people shopped with us. And I'm sure it's happening elsewhere during the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, most of our sales happened on our website, just directly from our website. And if customers did reach out to us, asking for additional photos of a particular strand or maybe a video of a particular strand outside in different lighting environments, we would provide that. And it was, it was a regular request. Now people want to meet with us face to face. And I said this shifted during the pandemic because it started happening during the pandemic. And I think part of it has to do with people becoming so used to and accustomed to video calls and meeting with people face-to-face online

that wasn't the way it was three years ago now it seems just about everyone has their own camera and you know has their own laptop has the ability to meet face to face so um in q4 of last year we actually built a virtual studio. And this virtual studio, well, we brought Sammy's Camera, this big company that works in Hollywood here in Los Angeles, into our office to create a virtual appointment studio with nine different degrees of light to give sort of that same in-person experience to people online. So although our virtual appointments aren't the majority of our sales, the majority of our business, we still have several virtual appointments scheduled every day. And I don't think we've had a day without a virtual appointment

for several weeks now. There you go. So people can meet with you you know sometimes when you're buying stuff especially expensive stuff it's kind of nice to meet people face to face at least i mean even though it's over zoom there's still kind of a you know there's a thing people look for looks like you also uh uh mix the diamonds with the pearls is that a song um yeah that's a steely dan song is it that's a Steely Dan song. Is it? That's a Steely Dan lyric. Mix the diamonds with the pearls and turn around the world.

Kid Charlemagne. I'll check my lyrics there, but I'm pretty sure that's what it said. Yeah. So there's some beautiful, what is this? This is the golden South Sea pearls. I kind of like these because they're golden. Maybe that's why I like them so much. But this is pretty cool, the combination of diamonds, pendants, and pearls. I kind of like these because they're golden. Maybe that's why I like them so much, but this is pretty cool. The, the combination of diamonds, pendants, and, uh, pearls.

We, um, started creating our own findings, um, about seven years ago. And, um, it's actually pretty unique to what we do. It's we don't buy findings from regular finding suppliers and by findings i mean things like ring settings pendant settings earring settings and those sorts of things we we make them all here right in los angeles and the reason we do that is because we're able to select the diamonds that we want to use with our pearls when you buy findings from findings houses, which is the way most manufacturers work when they're making jewelry, the findings have diamonds that are typically in the SI grading range. And SI is slightly included. So they're not the nicest diamonds, but they look okay what we do is we buy our diamonds loose and we do and we only buy vs diamonds even for the little tiny ones the little point ones point twos point fives that we set with

our pearls we use vs diamonds and um we um use wax castings here in los angeles and we have every one of the pieces that we make and attach to our pearls made here in Los Angeles for us and we typically do that to order and believe it or not it only takes about a day to make them really wow that's great turnaround time to pump them out and stuff the Kid Charlemagne reference was uh just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl not sure it's the same sort of meaning for what we're expense meeting since kid charlamagne is a song about drugs but that was an interesting reference I don't know I still look it up after this call yeah yeah the kid charlamagne one of my

favorite steely dance songs so uh you know maybe you can call yourself kid charlamagne although I don't know the song. I haven't figured out what drug they're cooking. I don't know if it's cocaine or something else, but, uh, it's a, it's, it's a fun song. And if you know, if you know those guys from Steely Dan, they, there might've been a little drugs involved. Awesome. Still, it's a, so there's a lot of drugs involved. Uh, but that's what makes great music.

I don't know. Last time i checked so um what do you feel makes you guys different as a pearl retailer from other companies in your competitive field well one of the primary differences is that um we we source our own product um and um we can only do that because of the economy of scale that we have in that we do sell a tremendous amount of pearls. Typically, if you're going to go to a jewelry store, for example, they may have two or three strands of pearls, maybe two or three strands in each category. We've got several categories. We have over a million pearls here.

We've got a 1,300 cubic foot vault. We've been collecting pearls for years. I mean, like I said, we travel the world three times a year to buy pearls. And we have a vault that's basically filled to the top of pearls. Wow. So typically when you buy pearls, you're buying from a jewelry store that bought them from a wholesaler, one of the wholesale houses in New York or Rhode Island. Those wholesalers have purchased them either from auctions or from importers or from the Hong Kong Jewelry Show, etc. We don't deal with any of those steps. We go directly to the processors or the producers of the product.

If pearls were commodified, and what I mean by that is if every strand of pearls had a set wholesale price like diamonds do with a R port price list we would have no competition we'd have no competition at all because the value would be very clear and the difference in buying from a producer and selling directly to a consumer versus buying from a producer selling at a jewelry show selling to an importer bringing into aaler, then going memo or consignment or cash sale, doesn't really matter over to a jewelry store. You're really looking at several steps in between. So you could take a strand of pearls that costs a hundred dollars in, in Japan or in China, for example. And by the time that strand got to a jewelry store, it could be $1,000. It could be $1,500. The markups are just astronomical.

So our business model from the very beginning has been to make fine pearls. Not your low-end pearls, but fine pearls available and affordable for anyone, for everyone. And that's really unique in what we do. Other than that, there's lots of online companies that sell pearls. But there are very few pearl companies online. And this is an important thing to note because anybody can start up a website anybody can put pearls online sell somebody's pearls start a website for a jeweler for a wholesaler you name it and not actually be a pearl company so to the websites out there um they're using stock images they don't have their

pearls they're not shipping their own pearls. If you buy something from their website, they send off this order off to either someone in China or someone on the other side of the US who is shipping their pearls for them. And that's how they're selling the pearls. There are actually only two other companies that I know of that are actual pearl companies that sell their own pearls online. All of the rest of them, basically, they're just resellers without a real pearl business behind them. Even though on the website, they might have stories about, I've been in the business for 20 years or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're really not. And so I would say, do your homework if you're shopping online. And two things, always call the telephone number.

Does the telephone number work? Or is it just on the website to make people think they're a legitimate company? Wow. And number two, ask for photos. Pearls, like I said, they're not commodified. You cannot say, give me a AA plus or give me a AAA strand of pearls and know exactly what you're going to receive. And there's lots of variation within each category. So ask for specific pearls or specific pictures. also that sets us apart in that most of our sales come after we've supplied either photos or met with someone in a virtual appointment. There you go. There you go. How long do pearls last? It seems

like they last, I don't know, forever? Well, they can. It really kind of depends on her. That's true. So, you know, pearls are organic, so they can be, they can be a little delicate. In fact, this is why people who do want to, um, create a pearl engagement ring, there are certain types of pearls that work well. There are other types of pearls that don't work very well for this. Pearls are porous and they're organic, so they can soak up oils. They can soak up elements in the environment and they're somewhat fragile. So they do have to be cared for. A quick rule of thumb is last on first off. You don't want to put your pearls on and then put a bunch of hairspray on or spray them with perfume or other chemicals that can damage the pearls.

Wow. spray them with perfume or other chemicals that can damage the pearls um if you're going to um you know at the end of the day before you take your shower you take them off before you do your you know your facial routine you take them off you don't get any chemicals on them and then the easiest thing to do is after wearing them just wipe them with a dry cloth to make sure there's no residue and then yes they should be passed on generation to generation as long as they're fine pearls as long as they have quality nacre they will last multiple generations that is wild that is wild i didn't even know that about pearls i just learned something new today which is why i have people on the show so i can learn stuff um that's that's pretty insightful i had no idea but

i i guess that makes sense i mean you I suppose if you took a hairy crush one, if you really went at it, right? Yeah. You could probably do that pretty easily. Yeah. Watch on your money. Watch on your money.

Go up and smoke. Yeah, sure. I wouldn't advise it. I wouldn't advise it, but, um, yeah,

it would work. Okay. It gives me an idea for new Tik TOK channel, smashing pearls. That would be a really expensive TikTok channel to run. It would, but, man, you'd have some angry people. What the hell are you doing? I'm smashing pearls.

I don't know. I could actually do one that smashes TVs. I could easily do that better. I like that better. I like that better. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, think about it this way. It's kind of like a De Beers thing where you're kind of hoarding the thing to drive up the price.

You know how they do that with diamonds? You can do that with pearls, you know. You just destroy them. I mean, you could just, like, do that and just see how people would get pissed off and it would probably go viral. People are like, they're smashing pearls. I don't know. You know, just do the bad ones or something. So, anyway.

I don't know. You may be the bad ones or something so anyway future maybe give me an idea here chris i mean we we do have some rejects that we find once yeah just smash the rejects and people be like they're smashing expensive pearls all over you know and you you spin is this thing we're like uh you know at at the company here uh, we only have the best pearls, so we have to smash the bad ones. This is what we do with the bad ones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I tune in to see that. I'd be like, holy shit. There goes a thousand bucks right there, man. Wow. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have to run that one by my team. Uh, you know, my wife, especially she's the chief creative officer here at the company and she's my you know my partner buyer and everything so every pearl we buy goes through my eyes and her eyes so we try to make sure we don't bring any pearls back that we eventually have to destroy yeah yeah but I've seen some and

in fact you know it's interesting you bring it up in tahiti for years they had this law that pearls had to meet us a minimum quality like level before they would allow them to be exported and in order to legally export the pearls you needed this stamp from the government saying okay these pearls are acceptable now i'm saying acceptable this didn't mean they were all fine they could be really low end, but still the acceptable low end. And so pearl farmers would have to submit their pearls to the government of Tahiti for testing prior to getting that stamp

that allows them to export their pearls. And if the pearls didn't pass, they had to grind them up and they ground them up into powder and into powder in this machine that sort of looked like one of those like wood chippers almost where it was shooting out the pearl powder out the back of this machine fargo yeah i sort of like fargo with pearls um and now there we're talking millions of dollars because um you know t-shirt pearls can be quite expensive and if you're destroying thousands of pearls at a time, um, yeah, that could be a, it's a lot of money.

Yeah. Can you shave pearls? Like, do they have layers to them like that? Or, you know, in a way, um, you know, pearls are sort of like onions, you know, where you've got different layers after layers. We call it peeling, not shaving. So if you take off the outer layer of nacre, sometimes, and by the way, this isn't done very often anymore. Pearl peelers, that used to actually be a job and experts in pearl peeling had a pretty good business about a years ago natural pearls when they were found

um you know natural pearls are so rare you know finding a good natural pearl is maybe one in 10,000 oysters which is why pearl farming is now you know taking over the entire industry but if you found a pearl a natural pearl that had a blemish or a dark mark on it that made it either unsaleable or detracted from the value, a pearl peeler could come in and peel off the outside layer of nacre from this pearl. I've never done it before. My eyesight probably isn't quite there anymore. Maybe 25 years ago when I got into the business, I would have been able to.

But basically, it's, as you call it, shaving or more or less peeling a layer of nacre off the pearl and underneath that layer of nacre is a is a whole new pearl that you know sort of like the rings of a tree in every growth cycle you've got sort of a different tree that was created around that ring same thing with the pearls so you've got a different pearl underneath that layer maybe that's a new tick tock channel the uh pearl peeler i mean i was just making a joke i was just making jokes about the shaving thing because it seemed funny but i didn't know that was a thing a pearl peeler wow you were also making jokes about this bite in the gold thing and it seems like you've got a little more inside knowledge than you think you did i guess or something maybe i maybe i was buying pearls in a prior life or something uh i see these lavender fresh Adama pearl earrings.

It's got a beautiful pink tone to it. Lavender. Yeah, lavender is a color that is really particular to a specific kind of pearl. It's the freshwater pearl. The freshwater muscle that produces this pearl, it's a pretty large shell. It's about the size of a dinner plate. Even though freshwater pearls can be quite small, they can also grow to be quite large because the shell is so large. Inside the shell around the ventricle side of the valve, there's this rainbow color that, that, um, that occurs naturally.

And this color has got pink, orange, purple, sort of a, like a pastel rainbow almost. So the types of, or the colors of pearls that the shell produces range from white to basically a dark purple and everything in between within the pastel range. So the lavender color you're seeing

is is a completely natural color you don't see it quite as often because of course white is the primary color that's produced but lavender especially a deep dark lavender is is really highly prized and the darker you get the more rare the color actually is wow that's really cool i'm looking at some of the black pearls too they're on here i think there's a ship called that from a movie but uh yeah pearl or something like that yeah right yeah disney um i i thought that would be a good reference to throw in there it's really cool all the different variations that you guys have on your website and how people can mix it with gold and

looks like some silver and diamonds and everything and everything in between. Anything more you haven't touched on or you want to tease out about what you guys do over there at Pearl Paradise? Well, you know what? I think there's one more myth that I always like to throw out there.

Just sort of dispel the myth and only because it's so widely disseminated and that is that pearls never ever ever grow around a grain of sand like oldest myth in the book and you still see it in on websites you see it in blog posts you see it even in books This description of how pearls are actually formed in nature and it always starts out with this grain of sand gets stuck in the oyster That's not how it happens. Really doesn't happen that way No, no what happens because they've either damage to the shell a boring worm boring as the Do-r-i-n-g boring through the uh through the shell there's these cells on the inside of the shell that create nacre or shell material and that's what they're genetically programmed to do and these cells get pushed down into the body of the oyster from some

happenstance and they continue to do what they're genetically programmed to do which is grow this nacreous substance which is what pearls are made out of so although it may sound romantic that you know a grain of sand gets stuck in an oyster and they've got to coat it with this substance to make it smooth so that it doesn't bother the animal it's the wives tale and if it were true think about it the entire ocean floor would just be covered with pearls yeah wow i Wow, I got lied to by cartoons. I think that's where I saw that first in cartoons. I'm really surprised that Warner Brothers would lie to me like that. I know.

I mean, at least Pepe Le Pew is still running around. I mean, everybody knows skunks can speak French. I don't even know if that's a... Really? I don't know if that's a... I don't even know what origin that is for Hollywood theater. But we'll just run with whatever I said. So this has been pretty insightful, man.

I've learned a lot. I've learned how oysters are made. I learned all the different things. And I'm going to go look into maybe a new career at pearl peeling. Maybe I'll just go around and tell people that's what I do. At parties, I'll just be like, hey, what do you do, Chris? Ah, pearl peeling. Really?

I'll just make up some crap about it. Like, yeah, you get a microscope and you have to use the shaver. I like the shaver. I don't know why. Well, now you know enough about it to actually carry the story. Yeah, I can carry the story. And all the chicks will be like, you have pearls? And I'll be like, yeah, I got a whole pile back at the house, but I got to peel them first.

So I can't have them until I peel them. So there you go. The Pearl Peeler. Things I learned on this show I just love. So thank you very much, Jeremy, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, man. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it.

It's been fun. Thank you. And give us a.com one more time. We'll get a plug-in for that. The website is pearlparadise.com. There you go. And you can find me at pearlpeeler.com. No, I'm not going to do that.

That's just a funny thing. So anyway, thank you very much for coming on, Jeremy. Thanks for our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com for just Christmas. YouTube.com for just Christmas. All those crazy places in between. The big LinkedIn linkedin group the 130 000 linkedin group the linkedin newsletter subscribe to all that sort of fun stuff because you know what you're going to learn stuff and when you learn stuff you become smarter when you're smarter you're sexier like me hey guys

thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe we'll see you guys next time