Proactive by Design: How Punchmark Is Reshaping Online Jewelry Retail

We check in with Ross Cockerham about Punchmark’s sprint into faster payments, a rebuilt Vendor Marketing Library, and a shift to a proactive client strategy. Along the way we talk AEO, rising AoVs, and why human support still drives the biggest wins.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome back everybody to In the Loop. What is up everybody? My name is Michael Burpo. Thanks again for listening to In the Loop. This week we're having on CEO and co-founder of PunchMark, Ross Cochran. Ross is my boss, and it's really cool to have him on. We do this every few months. Ross's diligent listener of In the Loop is probably listening to this episode. What's up, Ross? And we talk all about what's going on at Punchmark. Talk about some things that we're really excited about, like these payment gateways, and also this project that we're working on together, this uh vendor marketing library, which I am so excited to share with the rest of the world. Uh, and we also talk about like the crossroads that we feel like the jewelry is at right now. Uh, we actually spend a lot more time thinking about that than you'd expect at Punchmark. We think about like the technology landscape and where Punchmark fits into that kind of uh puzzle in the jewelry industry, as well as how we can better serve the industry as a whole uh in our role. And you know, does that have to adapt? Every year uh or every few years, I feel like Punchmark kind of has to reinvent itself and adapt with how technology changes all the time. And uh this year is no different. So please enjoy.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the jewelry industry's favorite website platform and digital growth agency. Our mission reaches way beyond technology. With decades of experience and long-lasting industry relationships, Punchmark enables jewelry businesses to flourish in any marketplace. We consider our clients our friends, as many of them have been friends way before becoming clients. PunchMark's own success comes from the fact that we have a much deeper need and obligation to help our friends succeed. Whether you're looking for better e-commerce performance, business growth, or campaigns that drive traffic and sales, Punchmart's website and marketing services were made just for you. It's never too late to transform your business and stitch together your digital and physical world in a way that achieves tremendous growth and results. Schedule a guided demo today at punchmark.com slash go. And now back to the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

What is up, everybody? My name is Michael Burpo. I'm joined by Ross Cochram, CEO, co-founder of Punchmark, my boss. How you doing today, Ross? I'm doing awesome. How about you, Mike? So well. Haven't had you on for an episode since September of last year, and there's been a lot of changes. And I like to have these conversations with you uh because it's very fun to get a chance to see what you're focused on. I'm focusing on uh one layer down, and it's maybe my hands are kind of in the muck, but you get to be in the muck as well, and also kind of seeing a higher overview. Um maybe could you just give like a little recap on how was the past uh, I guess, five months since you were on last time uh with Punchmark and also just with life?

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Well, um, a lot has changed in the last five months. Um the biggest thing is that our company, you know, due to structure, due to um sort of eliminating all of the things that were necessities in our platform, um and now you know, going from what you need to do to what you want to do. So now Punchmark has been operating as a what we want to do for the last probably six months. Um a little before then too, but we're we're not really needing to like fix as many bugs as we used to have to, or uh just do the regular boring maintenance stuff. Um so the heaviest lifting we've been able to do has just we're flying through it. And and it is it has been a dream to be able to release features that actually matter. Um, and we haven't had this level of speed in a long time. And I know internal morale is up, client morale is way up. We we're we're celebrating what we call our B back clients. Uh, these are clients who have left Punchmark and then come back to us. And I think that's a biggest, the biggest testament to our what our team has built, what the relationships of our customer support team and things like that. So um Tommy and Brian just came back, and and Jason and Mana just came back from a show uh with Hope, our marketing manager. Um, and they they talked about another BBAC client who's like this close to signing up. I hope they come back. I hope I really hope they do, but it sounds good. But anyway, all those things combined, um it's like you go, not like work was ever not fun. I love what I do, but work is just fun now. You know, like everything we're everything we're we're just rolling so much. So, so that's the biggest change recently is that we are flying at speeds that we've really never been able to achieve before.

Why Payment Gateways Matter

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Yeah. There's two different kind of parts of that, just to like clarify for even people listening in. Uh, I sometimes wonder how much people relate to that uh from a from a jewelry standpoint. So for tech people, there's there's a couple different things. Sometimes we're working on features that are uh we just call them like infrastructure, and we don't even make announcements about them because we can't. Because, like, do you really want to hear about we spun up another server or we uh made it so that our uh you know joint uh table joins are more efficient, and as a result, your images are gonna be served a quarter of a second faster, uh, which you're gonna load all your pages faster. A lot of times, like that gets us fired up, but like we can't brag about it because uh truthfully it's just like very unsexy. But the other thing I think that was really interesting, uh, to kind of touch on it, where we're kind of developing features, is we almost hit it for better or for worse. We got into this part of the year at the end of every year, uh which is uh right around October, middle of October, where we put in almost like a code freeze. It's not technically a code freeze, but it kind of acts as one, where we don't release uh sensitive uh releases uh around the holidays. It's no secret that retailers do a ton of their business in in e-commerce in November and December, and we would hate to interrupt that. Not that we, you know, would ever release anything broken, but it could. And as a result, a lot of these things were just like kind of so close to being done, and we just didn't release them before uh November because we just didn't want to risk it. And now we're doing it. It's January, we're just we we just dropped in a whole bunch of stuff. Um, I wanted to ask you about the one that I think was kind of I'm most excited about. It took a lot of work. Brian's been working on it forever. I want to talk about payment gateways. Uh, maybe not sexy sounding, but can you um can you kind of explain what that is and why we're so excited about it?

SPEAKER_00 7:09

Yes. Um, it's again, like you said before, it's one of the infrastructural things um that isn't really like the fun, interactive, you know, jewelry shopping sort of platform features. Um, this is more of like the baseline of, you know, uh what happens at the background and how we connect to other payment gateways. So like boring, right? But uh at the same time, I think the sexiest thing to a business person is a better PL report. And if you if you don't create friction and be at the point of sale, right? At the you go where the customer is, like that's step number one in in marketing and in in business. But number two is don't get in your own way, right? If someone comes up to you and says, um, hey, I have uh just rolls of quarters, can I can I buy with that? I mean, that's kind of annoying, but at the same time, you can't be like, no, we don't take what's a quarters here, right? So we we have we have to go where the customer feels comfortable. And what's cool about what we I'll I'll paraphrase it with just the the weight of uh you know the the integrations that we're adding to our checkout. Um number one, Apple Pay. Um and then Link, Klarna, uh Google Pay, um, you know, even uh, you know, other like uh Samsung Pay, right? Even things that aren't really like widely used. But we're going if if a customer feels comfortable there and they have all their data there, um what's cool with Link is if you're if you've checked out with Link before anywhere on any other platform, um your your stuff is remembered. So it's just the ease of checkout. And you're like, wait, how is my how is my card taped? Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

I have that problem with Apple Pay. I buy my you know, touch tunes, you know, like the the DJ uh set like you can attach to the jukebox at a bar. I I get touch tune credits. I spend 15$15 over the course of like a blink of an eye. And that's what people do with jewelry. It's like impulse. Oh, I gotta buy this.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Boop, boop, two buttons, double tap, and you're in. Right? I mean, that's the thing is you know, we joke about good UI. And what good UI, you know, a user interface, what a good user experience does is it makes it could make the you know, unforgettable moment happen where it's like, wait, did I just buy a piece of jewelry for my wife? I I guess I did. I guess I did. Um, she now has a$2,600 bracelet, cool, you know, like and that's that's what we want. Like, we don't want it to be oops, right? But I mean, if if we take all the friction out of the experience and make it just so easy for a customer to buy something, then hey, that's it might equate to anywhere from 5% more sales to 50% more sales. I mean, who knows? Sky's the limit, really, on what the rate of increase is from what we've added there. But um, you know, people have been asking, clients have been asking, it's no secret, uh, for Apple Pay and things like that to be added. Um, we've had quite a few different um, you know, integrations in the past, but that was one, that was one of the mic drops that we're looking to add to the platform. So anyway, very excited about this. It's also very streamlined. Um, and and it's it's like a uh an express checkout that's all in one page, right? Whereas before it was like step one, shipping, step two, billing, step three. Like there was it was just too, you know, more friction, right? You want to make this so seamless so that they enter something, they click a button, they click another button, and they're and they're done. And they have they already ordered the piece, you know?

Checkout UX And Early Sales Lift

SPEAKER_01 10:40

And it's and it comes at a very opportune time. And I did a whole episode on this, so I don't need to rehash, but uh just to kind of compound on it, I just got the leaderboard, uh, we call it the leaderboard, um, the e-commerce report for the punchmark platform for the month of February. We're recording this on March 5th, so I get it on uh the th the first Thursday of the next month, and it spits everything out. And I mean, this is not even exaggerating. Uh this February 2026 is up 33 and a quarter percent over last year's February, which is you know, which was about the same as the February before that. And January was up 47% over la the year before that's uh January. And it's just more clients are making sales, more clients are making what we call many sales, that's like 10 or more sales. And then I'm just thinking it's also crazy. The um the average order value, that's what I look at the most of AOV. AOV is uh at seven, it's over$700 uh for our platform. So we only do jewelry, uh, we only do do jewelry e-commerce, and as a result, we get a very uh boiled down look at what the jewelry industry is showing. And I think that the$700 AOV is very telling. It's that people have a trust in commerce, they are trusting uh where jewelry's at. And what's funny is we're seeing like the same number of sales um as the year before as far as like total transactions, but we are definitely seeing um larger transactions. So I'm hoping these new payment gateways will kind of just add fuel to the fire. And we haven't even seen like the full results of them yet. And I I'm kind of looking forward to seeing if we get like a little hockey stick kind of motion up and to the right, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Yeah, that's incredible. I I I love to see that. And just intimately knowing the history as one of the founders of e-commerce, when Brian, my brother and our CTO came on board, um actually quite a long time before he actually came on board, um, 2011, he helped us build our first e-commerce engine in our platform. And the first things that were sold were beads, right? And these beads were like 68 bucks and 86 bucks and 90 bucks, and that was it. And it was just little, you know, little people weren't really buying jewelry online back then. And yes, it was happening, right? It was happening on the larger stores, it was happening on some of the other independent stores that really set their website up for perfect e-commerce. Like you needed to emulate trust like so much to even be able to get a purchase over$100. And the average transaction uh value was probably right around like just over$100. It was like$105. And to see that it's over$100, like$700 now, it's and I know it fluctuates, it'll go back down to maybe$550. It's you know, but we've watched it. I go, I remember when it was$275 and then three something, and then$450, and then$500,$600, then it went back down a little bit and then it came back up. So um it's cool to watch that. And obviously, I know you have a whole podcast episode on it, but you know, the influence of the price of gold, things like that affect everything and the whole industry. Um, but I like to see that because the average order value is a huge metric that basically shows you're getting more for every single transaction and every single interaction with your customers, you're actually making more out of it. So there's more profitability just by the time propo, you know what I mean, uh proportion of how much you spend time, like if you're selling a bunch of beads versus, you know, five thousand dollar pieces of uh merchandise.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

Yeah, we've seen a lot of watches getting sold, which is um kind of not crazy to me. I I I'd want to put the watch on, but that's just me, I guess. I I'm not everybody apparently. But uh I kind of want to keep talking about like new things we're developing because that's kind of how I'm sort of uh framing this episode. And one of the things that we've gotten to work on in is that uh it's always cool sitting down and working on a project with you because you have uh like the keys to to the kingdom, you you can develop on our what we call admin, it's our like infrastructure and you can build things at the root. Whereas if you work with you know the development team, sometimes they have to go through a whole system. And a lot of times if we work on something together, um, for example, when we worked in um in HubSpot making these uh drip campaigns, it was I felt like we were moving very fast and there was a lot less red tape. One of the things that we're working on is this vendor marketing library. Are you able to set this up and and maybe frame how it's gonna impact our clients?

From Beads To $700 AOV

Building The Vendor Marketing Library

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Yes, absolutely. Um, this is something um so just to step back a little bit, back in 2000, it was around 2011 when we started it, Dan uh Dan and I, um, when the company was only that little, um, and we a Jason came on that year in 2011. But um around that time, between then and 2012-13, we continued to refine it, but we created a um uh what we called it a social distribution network, and it was called the retail marketplace. Vendors would log in, they'd be able to upload their products, import spreadsheets, uh, and then manage retailers, and they'd be able to manage uh, you know, requests for access to their assets. So if somebody said, Hey, I want access to you know, to Corey or A Jaffee or Kelly Waters, they'd say, you know, yes, they'd log in, approve it, et cetera. And we had a marketing engine back then when a vendor could go in and add, say, a marketing banner. And then when a retailer logged into their website, if they were approved for that brand, they'd be able to see in the main library of all of our assets, all our marketing banners from homepage things to footer ads, we called them, and sidebar ads. Like we had very specific spots for them. And retail could just easily add this to their web to their website with the click of a button. Now we're we're rebuilding that in a much more modern way. Um, we're not fixing, it's no longer fixed on very specific key points of your website, like a homepage banner or a footer ad, whatever that was in the past. Um so so now it's there are just several different formats, and we rebuilt it in a way where vendors can just log in, upload whatever you know, marketing assets they have, whether it's for billboards or whatever, and then the system just automatically, you know, puts it in a certain format and saves it, and then the vendor can add tags like you know, ladies or engagement or men's or fashion or gemstone. So what's cool about this is um it's leaning right back into our vendor relationships and the power of that, right? So, you know, you have a lot of uh sort of a trickle-down methodology when one uh a one-to-many ratio, when a vendor logs in and uploads something, they're affecting essentially 500 different retailers who can access that. If a vendor goes in and takes 10, 15 minutes, updates one of their prices, then it affects 500 people. You know, so there's a lot, it's like a ripple in the water, right? You have these vendors now who have a lot more, let's say, exposure uh potential. So they can go on into the vendor portal on punchmark.com, update their retailers, their marketing, their products, their settings. Um, and instantly they can see a response from that. And so that's one thing I'm very excited about, in addition to the library, um vendors having direct access uh to add and edit all of their marketing resources. Um, but in addition to that, being able to have a view of what consumers are doing with their products, right? So that's so exciting to me because while for a read from a retailer standpoint, retailers don't really care one way or another what a vendor sees, but at the same time, this becomes so much more valuable to the vendor. So now the vendor's participation level goes up like 150% in some cases, where people weren't logging in that often before. Now, like we just pulled a report recently, and there were 28 vendors that logged in in the last week. And this is very exciting because more engagement from vendors equals more engagement from, you know, making sure products are even that much more up to date. New marketing is in there, and retailers are super happy with the automation um and just the the mechanics behind the scenes that are just happening on their website where they don't have to do anything, right? From that same ripple effect.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

That the idea of uh user-generated content, that is the white whale when it comes to building a um a self uh kind of propelled uh platform. And what's fascinating to me, and was something I've been thinking about in this position, is like, what is Punchmark's role in the vendor to retailer relationship? Because what I've learned from actually talking to people that are not in the jewelry industry, is that that relationship does not really exist in other industries very often, or uh I've never heard of it actually. So, for example, that relationship where uh you're going to be like essentially reselling this product, well, the the vendors one of the vendors I talked to recently, they were telling me that they already have a platform similar to what we were just talking about when it comes to they oh yeah, we put all of our images there, it's like a drop box, and then we can see how many times people download them. Well, what's really interesting is that suddenly if you put it uh in the vendor portal in this marketing library, uh it already exists in their assets and they don't have to go anywhere else. Then when they're building a landing page for their engagement rings or their seasonal collections, they can just go in and just like see all their vendor images, and then they find the one that they like the best, and they sort by engagement and then they'll start pulling it down, and hopefully they're updated. One thing I've learned is marketing images are so expensive to make. I guarantee these vendors are spending uh it's not$1,000 on these things. That way they're spending uh, I mean, probably five digits, maybe even six digits on a campaign. And using that, what's a better return on investment is people actually using them and driving interest in that product, in that product line. And when they start engaging, that's what I have always wanted. When I was helping design site manager initially with version six, my goal was I wanted site manager to be open on every retailer's. Um computer all the time, always. And I thought that that would be our a wonderful thing, is if like we just have them open it all the time. And then with this one, it's like I want the vendors to be thinking about the vendor portal all the time. And if they can just start putting stuff in there, well, suddenly it's like adding fuel to the fire. I'm I'm very excited about where we're going with it. I think as people start using it more, it's just going to propel itself even more.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Agreed. And, you know, that's that's a very common problem that we're solving here, you know, in the same breath of the a similar problem that we solve for retailers, where they historically had to manage separate inventories, right? And they have their inventory in their store and then their inventory in their website, right? And we we know that problem, and that problem still exists for a lot of retailers who don't have point of sale integration, which is crazy to me. Just adding, they're just like indebting themselves with with work that they're just gonna continue to have to do. And so, in that same sense, with vendors, when you tell a retailer, the minute you tell someone they have to go work, it you like enslave them to the future, right? For lack of a better word.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

You're like, okay, here's your only job is pulling the lever. Well, think about it.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

It's gonna be their only job. Let's say I'm a vendor and I tell a retailer, hey, check out my price sheet. Okay, here's the Excel sheet, here's all the images, go use it, go import it to your website. Super easy. Now, the retailer sits there and spends 15 minutes, an hour, three hours getting the stuff on their website. Finally, it's good. They're like, cool, I merchandise this, everything's good. Next month, the price of gold goes up goes up to$6,500, right? Like, what do you do? Now the retailer's like, no, I gotta spend another five hours changing these. Hey, they reach out to the vendor, do you have new prices? Oh, yeah, you could download the sheet here, and then they have to download it, and then they have to do it again and spend another, maybe it's only 30 minutes this time. But still, you see the point. It's if every single vendor who I've talked to that says, Oh, yeah, it's the it's the funniest conversation. First thing they say, they shrug their shoulders and say, Oh, we got that covered. Yeah, we have a Dropbox with all our stuff. And then I ask the question, how often do people actually do use it when you send it, when you send the data to someone? Okay, tell me your success in actually getting this on websites. And they'll say, Oh, well, now that you say it, probably out of the last 50 that I sent, I think one, I think one person like it's tremendously like just ineffective, right? So so that's why I'm so happy that we have this system that we just we help vendors, we help retailers. It's same same principle as the checkout. Go where the customers go. The vendors can go where the retailers go. They're already logging into their website. Now they just have to click a button and add the banner. Like it's so anyway, I I'm giddy about this release because it means a lot to our vendors and to our retailers, our entire platform and the ecosystem we've created thus far.

Vendor-Retailer Dynamics And ROI

SPEAKER_01 24:59

And where I'm I think is it won't even reveal itself because like immediately until they go to build something. What's fascinating is that we are um starting to market to vendors, and and like and by market, I mean like we do uh feature releases and email blasts to our clients. Uh, and by clients we refer to our retailers, and we're sending them stuff, hey, new features in site manager, new things. But then I have started to market and send things directly to our vendors, which is something we've never really done before, like the subsect of emails that we just have never uh reached out to as often. I can do it on a one-to-one basis, but now we're actually starting to be like, hey, um, we got a new feature coming, it's really exciting. What's fascinating is that sometimes someone's gonna put something in there and uh maybe the retailer won't know yet. But then when the shows come, and this is gonna be out way before JCK, but when JCK comes, I'm sure I can already see this um experience where Michael Jewelers, me, uh, I'm gonna sit down with um Ross's uh jewelry line, and I'm going to be like, oh, here's like the new release, we're getting it ready for the holidays. Um, we have marketing images. Um, who's your website provider? Oh, it's punchmark. Oh, we already put those in your image library. And then when it goes to build with it, they're already there. And then it's just like, it's a one-stop shop, it's right where they are, and I'm so excited for that experience. I feel like that's the level of in user experience they use this term delight. Um, I can't wait until that moment of delight where it's like, oh, I don't have to go to Dropbox and then download things and then sort through them and then put them up. They're right in my my files, my image library. And uh that moment is going to be very soon. And the first time I see it happen, I'm gonna be like, oh, it was all worth it. It'll be super cool.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

Right? Uh, I know. And, you know, looking back at the fact that we had a proof of concept where this was working really well. Um, I remember even helping the vendors out and protecting them when uh, like for instance, we had a vendor, I think it was John Hardy, if I remember correctly. They had the rights to use Penelope Cruise in their marketing. And it was beautiful ads, right? There's great, like, as you would expect, lifestyle images, very like close shots on the jewelry itself. Um, and then they had they had the rights to use her name and likeness until like, I don't know, March 2015 or 14 or something like that. And so they had to take they had to take that out of everything. So we had to sort of help them police that and and enforce that and take Penelope Cruise off of 500 websites, right? I mean, maybe not all 500, but we had a lot of people using it. And so um anyway, I I I the both sides of the playing field are covered here, you know, for vendors who need to maintain restrictions and you know, strict guidelines on their assets, especially those that they have legal rights to for a determined amount of time. And then for vendor for retailers who actually get to use these and just with the click of a button. So um anyway, I think we've gone on a while about this, but I I'm very excited about um how this will replay, considering we've done this before, but this is like V2, you know, uh a whole new version of it with AI injected into all of it.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

It's a really uh again, we I keep using the term crossroads. I feel like uh in 2020, Punchmark had the opportunity, and I do think we capitalized on it as as well as we could, maybe like 85% of of possible um looting of it or taking of it, I guess, was you know, suddenly people had their storefronts shut down and they needed to switch to an e-commerce platform and like take advantage of the online sphere. And we were there and we really leaned into it. And now I also think we're seeing a much it's it's less visible. I mean, like COVID was very uh in your face. I think that right now you're also seeing that. I think that 2026 is a very, very uh important year, impactful year for the jewelry ecosystem and for especially for jewelry tech providers right now. Uh I talked with Dan on I have a one-on-one with him every month, and uh on Friday I spoke with him. I was like, what do you what do you feel about this right now? And he's so fired up about about AI and how it's changing his lifestyle, and it's how um and he just feels like good about where Punchmark is. Can you talk to me about where you think what you think 2026 will look like from the outside? Because I I think you might even have a a slightly different view on it, too.

Rights Management And Library V2

SPEAKER_00 29:58

Yes, um, I'm glad you brought up Dan because um, you know, for those who know him, don't know him, uh he and I founded the company in 2008. And a lot of our success, in fact, I'll just say most of our success was based on Dan's vision to create just a an unparalleled experience. Um, we were making flash websites back then, right? And we had just such a beautiful experience compared to what was actually out at that time. Um, the way this experience evolved, and the same way Daniel evolved at the same time, um, has been a beautiful thing. And watching him as our chief product officer, uh, you know, basically running the product through rigorous uh sort of gauntlets of uh, you know, different elements that are added while while technology continues to evolve, right? So 2000 2013, it was like create a mobile version of your site. And there was like a special mobile version that only showed when you were on a mobile device. It was kind of like an app, and and then just responsive design in 2014-15, and then you know, moving on to new things and all taking advantage of some of the groundworks, like the bootstrap library, the jQuery library. Dan headed up all of that and his ability to work with CSS, cascading style sheets for those who don't know, and complex HTML, um, in addition to being able to do whatever he wants in this landscape, right? Um, also, obviously, credit to our designers that, you know, have been, you know, pushing a lot of the you know beautiful designs. And then Dan will style it up and and make it nifty, right? Um, so through that, and I'm not I'm not discounting Tom either. Tom is our front-end developer who does a lot of CSS and things now, and he's amazing. Um, but now Dan is you he's like on steroids now. You he has interacted with AI in a way that people just wish they could do. First of all, Dan has always been an absolute workhorse, like a workhorse. Yeah. And he he works too hard. So um, but he he the stuff he gets done, it's like a steamroller that just cannot be stopped. So I wanted to make uh take a second to kind of you know pay homage to my co-founder because he's he's amazing, right? Now he has these tools and so many of these new features that have just rolled out. He's like, all right, check this out. I need a code review on this one while I'm working on this. Now I have this AI thing. Now now it's just it's insanity. So he he always has his ear to the street, he always knows what a system needs. Um, and when he doesn't know, he finds out, he researches, he dives in, he looks at what other people are doing, what other trends are happening. And yes, the jewelry tech world is at a serious crossroads right now. Um, we have some new players coming into the game, but more importantly, we have consumer expectations changing on a daily basis. Daily basis. Consumer experience is changing on a monthly basis, which app they use. Now they're using ChatGPT to find where they where to buy jewelry. And and you could say, you know, a consumer might not know what a you know vintage cathedral setting is or you know, what a bangle bracelet is, but if if he starts talking to his agent and he and this, he's like, listen, my wife likes these huge bracelets, and it's like, I think you're referring to cuff bracelets. Oh, yeah, actually, that sounds about right. So a cuff, yeah, sound sounds like an appropriate name. So anyway, I she likes yellow gold, she likes cuffs. And she might say, Oh, did you know, right, that Falls Jewelers in Canapolis has great cuff bracelets and bangle bracelets, all in yellow gold. Would you like to check it out? And you're like, of course, sure. And you're gonna trust it because this is the agent that you as a consumer, as uh a novice, you know, poet, you're you're writing things, co-writing things, it knows you. So now it's gonna it's gonna make recommendations that you trust. And if it says, go to Falls Jewelers, right? Go to Barnett Jewelers, go to Arezzo Jewelers in Chicago, um, you're it's you're gonna trust it. You're gonna listen to it. And even if you go and do your other searching, I'm like, well, you know, Claude told me to go here, so I'm gonna go here, or Siri told me to go here, so I'm gonna go here. And AEO is a major, major thing that you know we're rolling out in our platform. Other platforms aren't going to have this initially, and so that's just one of the many things that have just changed the whole shape of how the tech world is is running in jewelry.

2026 Jewelry Tech Crossroads

SPEAKER_01 34:54

What's really interesting about that, what you just talked, Sean, you just went over like the last 15 years of online business. You talked about like going in and it's like suddenly mobile, mobile design. Well, in 2011, when you guys started, mobile shopping was not uh really a needle mover at all. But then in 2013 it was, and there was kind of like a again, a little fork in the road. Do we dive into this or do we not? Very easily, and many people didn't dive into it. Well, in case you didn't know, mobile shopping accounts for uh increasingly larger uh proportion of the proportion of the uh of the online shopping landscape, but then it doesn't stop there. It was about appearing higher in uh search engines. Well, maybe you go all in on search engines. Now, in case you didn't know, uh Google's lunch is getting eaten up by these um answer engine op uh answer engines. So, like when you query a AI, they are answering a question, and that's kind of what Google was doing, but now it's not them, it's a different platform. Well, the rules are different, and same thing with like uh ADA compliance, uh the American Disabilities Act, I've talked about ad nauseum in the past, but what's fascinating is that some uh platforms didn't dive into it. It is not sexy, it is not something we really can market that well because it's the rules, you have to have it. Well, Dan just one one or two months uh just sat there and just face tanked it and went through and did all of the work we had to get done. But what's really exciting, and to give people kind of a peek behind the curtain on on this on the development team right now, what's fascinating is we've never had this problem, which is our current bottleneck is not how much features we can uh develop and write, and it's not the bugs and making sure that it's the QCing is looking good, it's just making sure that someone has the time to review it and then QC it and then get it out the door. So it's it's a different problem that we've ever had. Normally it was about like, hey, do we need what if we had 15 more developers? What if we had a hundred more developers? What does that look like? That was a problem when I started. Like, what if what if Punchmark just suddenly had a hundred million dollars come out of the sky and we just hired a ton of developers? Now I don't even think we would spend it on developers, we would probably just have people clicking all the buttons and making sure that it works and then getting them out the door. And that is so exciting that features are ready to come out, and it's something that I find very exciting, and I hope that other people do too, even if they're not impacting you on the day-to-day. But like, for example, you talk about AEO, those accordions, that is the most needle-moving one, and we didn't even talk about it that much. Like the fact that it's like having you show up in those Google summaries at the top, those things are so cool.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

100%. I know it's it some of it is you know just common sense, right? Have an FAQ page, ask a question and answer it, right? Um, don't get crazy, like who's the best jeweler in Los Angeles, right? It's um that's a little bit, you know, kind of misleading in a way. But if you if you focus on your strengths, right? If you're really good at custom jewelry, um, you start creating an FAQ or the accordion tabs of, you know, like how long does it take to start a custom jewelry project? And like each project is like you're giving the you're giving AI all these tools to have a comprehensive look into your business. And, you know, when you say things like, you know, most clients will drop off their piece and do this and get it back within like two weeks, and that's you know, they come in for the great reveal. And then you you can word it however you want, and AI will have your back because it like it it will, if someone asks a very specific question and says, you know, do you make engage, I don't know, something crazy. Like, do you make an engagement ring while I wait? Like, no, you don't. So maybe one company does this crazy thing and can fabricate, no, I it's probably impossible, but what I'm getting at is if you have a strength and you show it on your website, you will come up for that question. And you might not come up for a question that you don't really care about. So you it it's it's similar, it's all appropriated based on like what what your strengths are. And if you set up your website to uh represent or emulate the the best parts of your business, then everything else will fall follow suit. But it's no longer just content, it's no longer just writing a blog about it or creating a page. There's a schema and a deep schema that like you need set up in the background so that AI really understands that sort of question-answer uh you know structure and and uh architecture.

Answer Engine Optimization And FAQs

SPEAKER_01 40:08

Yeah. It's I I think of it as positioning. It's like, you know, we talk about chess a lot. Like chess, it's it's not about just the pieces that you have, it's also about how are they positioned. And there's like positions of strength and the positions of weakness. Well, I I like to think that Punchmark is doing the positioning for our clients, and then it's up to them to move the pieces around. But if you have a very, you know, a secure king and like you know, your pawn structure is wonderful, well, suddenly the game feels easier. And I think that that's kind of where we've gotten with the developments in the background. Sometimes I I mean I I think you see it with with the e-commerce reports. Every single we've we've had uh it's just about 12 yeah, 12 months in a row where we outperformed the year before. And I I hope that's gonna continue. I I don't know, maybe we continue forever. But it's just really quite uh quite exciting to see how when you rise to meet technology change, I think it puts you in a very strong bargaining position. And I think that's kind of where we're at.

SPEAKER_00 41:25

100%.

SPEAKER_01 41:26

So I kind of wanted to finish on this part, is I always like to ask when I have these conversations with you, what's getting you fired up? Because sometimes I feel like we are talking about we're just you know talking about how awesome we are and and and and all this tech advancement. And sometimes we lose the point of like, what is your what are you passionate about in in the business? Uh can you kind of like maybe reveal or or chat about that for a second? Like what's getting you going?

SPEAKER_00 41:58

Yes. Um, this outside of all the you know fancy little things that we're building, um, that's not the thing that excites me the most. The thing that always excites me the most is client success. And a lot of people say that. A lot of people say, oh, we're we're you know, we're geared for our clients, our client's successes, our own success. I've I've even said those words before, and I I truly believe it. Um but when when you actually double down on it, when you actually do the work and the effort to align your business, align your success with your client's success, um, that becomes an amazing thing. We've done that in um certain milestones, right? So 2020, when COVID hit, we had to create a whole service and ticketing system. And we we weren't able to keep up before then. And as soon as we did that, we we leveled up a lot to help our clients with the things that they needed, like fixing, right? Now it's not about fixing anymore. So what's cool about it is we're another generation in. So think about that level of service in clients, but the level of customer service going up a notch to now what's next. Same thing that I talked about earlier when we started. We're doing less of what we need to do and more of what we want to do. So now it's like, what do you want to do? What do you want out of your business? You know, and and I I've never been such a big proponent as a founder about walking away from my business when I can, because you want a business that's going to operate on its own so that you can enjoy your life with your kids, with your family, create experiences, right? What else are we doing all this for? And I've done several talks on growth and you know how to structure and scale your business. And my last talk last year at one of the RJO shows was scaling your business and regaining your life. And I'm very passionate about that. So What I'm happiest about is not only can we create tools that help people be able to let their website run on autopilot, but the biggest change recently was our account management update, repositioning our entire company structure for our client success, right? So we're going from reactive to proactive.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

Proactive. Talk about that for a second. When it comes to that might sound like a mindset shift, but there's actually was like actual structural changes that went into the team. And it took like a lot of work, if I remember correctly.

Shipping Features Faster Than Ever

Client Success As The North Star

SPEAKER_00 44:40

And a lot of time. This is this is about a year and a half to two years in the making. Um, we we had been talking about this for a while, strategizing about it high-level, brainstorming about it. And then we'd be like, we're not ready for that. Like it's a big step. We had to hire around it. We had to create systems around it. We had to ask customers what they wanted. We had to ask our retailers what they essentially wanted and understand this even more and more and more. And finally, um, we were able to, we had all the strategy essentially created by, you know, probably around the last time we had this podcast, our last podcast, um, October, September, October. Um, and then we launched it like first of the year. And the biggest change we did was we hired more tech support help so that we could take our account managers who were doing essentially everything, right? Tech support, client relations, reaching out, answering phone calls. They they were doing so much work work that they couldn't think about why they were doing things and how to help customers and asking, what do you really want out of this? Right. So it was like, okay, yeah, I fixed that. Now your banner's good, or oh yeah, I fixed that, now your products are okay. Like, oh yeah, you had a stray category on there. Fix, fix that, done, done with that. That was all our account managers were doing. Now our tech support is still doing that actually more rapidly because of the new pivotal change and promoting junior as a ticket team manager. Um, and then having our account managers do actual proactive outreach. And, you know, the the reason we did this is because this is a this is a funny sort of narrative that that happens. A retailer will typically, uh not just retailers, business owners typically look to streamline their operations in the cheapest way possible. And I and I'm not I'm not diminishing anybody. I'm just saying that's we all look to say, what can we do for the least amount of money, least amount of investment? And sometimes you're like, all right, we're yeah, that's a hundred bucks a month. I got four hundred bucks a month. Easy. But then there's opportunity costs. Then there's like, what am I leaving on the table by going with the cheap route? So what else is out there? So they find a website company like Punchmark that they partner with and they do more with us. And they're like, whoa. So what we're doing now is here's what's here's what's ironic about that. A retailer might say, Yeah, I have a website. Like someone who doesn't have a Punchmark website, they'll say, Oh, yeah, yeah, I have that covered. I have a website, my website's great. But they they don't even understand what they're missing and what's you know, the lead generation that's not happening, the opportunities, the appointments, the walk-ins, the results, the wish list notifications, all the things that are churning in the background. And so people tend to just kind of shrug it away and say, Yeah, I got that covered. Now, what our account manager is doing now is reaching out because running a retail jewelry business is the most demanding thing outside of restaurants, probably. Like anything retail, you're dealing with customers who are coming into your store. There's just, there's, there's a whole long, and then you have services and products and all kinds of other things and security, right? You're running an operation that's pretty multi-pronged. Now, you don't have all the time to kind of like step back and let's let's analyze the website today and see how that's generating new leads for us. And let's look for optimization opportunities and figure out how our navigation can fit. Like maybe once in a blue, like maybe once, twice a year, you're gonna say, oh, wait, that category's broken and you're gonna be reactive and you're gonna say, fix that category. Not like how can we reframe this in a way that customers are going to respond and transactions will increase, right? And so, and and then how do you stay on top of every new feature? Because if if you're like on uh a website platform over here and they have all these features that they're releasing, you're how do you stay on top of that? Yeah, so that's why so even first of all, it's awareness. Second of all, it's taking advantage and having the time to take advantage of it. Now, the biggest win that our account managers have been able to achieve is our website strategy meetings. Now, these are gold. And I say that because we're now being goal-oriented, like I said, aligning our success with our customer, with our client success. Now, there's there's five steps to this essentially, right? Being goal-oriented to our clients. Like this is what this means. Step one, we're gonna run an audit on your website and we're gonna look, we're gonna do some automation, we're gonna run some AI things, we're gonna have some scripts on our on our server that does things, checks for broken things, looks for misspellings. Oh, you misspelled the word jewelry on your on your uh buying goal buying event. So we're gonna we're gonna look those up, find those, identify those, and then bring those to the meeting and say, hey, by the way, we're gonna fix these for you, like free of charge. Like this is just an easy win. So we're gonna run audits, then in our meeting, we're gonna collect goals. Now, this is the most important part of it. To interface with you, we want to know. We don't want to sort of mansplain what we think you should your business needs. Although, look, I'm not taking anything away from our crazy experience you know in the industry or with tech. But we can guess and probably be close. We'll be close, but we want to know what you want. Like, what do you want? How do you want your business to improve, to increase? Um, or do you want to just have a lifestyle business that you don't even want a revenue goal? You just want to be able to, you know, do your own thing on Wednesdays and Fridays, whatever, whatever that is. What what are your goals? So, step one is running audits, step two is collecting your goals. Three is fixing those easy wins that we found and that you've might have brought up to us too. And then step four is coming up with short and long-term strategies. Now, looking at, I mean, it it's it's easy when you know what your goals are. I think one of the hardest things in life is finding what you actually want. Once you know what you want, then you can push the gas pedal down 150% and know you're going in that direction. But a lot too many times we're like, yeah, I might want to do that. I might want to carry multiple brands, I might want to be like more of a custom shop. I might want to be, no, there's too many might wannabees. We want to know what your actual goals are so we can double down, triple down on those things and help you achieve those digitally. And then, step five, we rinse and repeat. We have another website strategy meeting and we check in with you and say, hey, you mentioned you're hiring a new salesperson and a marketing person. How is that going? Can we help train that person? Bring them to our client workshop. Can we, you know, can we are you are you looking for a revenue increase and what percentage? And how can we help you get there? And then how can we break this down in very feasible results like you how many traffic, you know, how much traffic does it take to get there through how many appointments does it take? Um, you know, if if you put a a a goal uh number with every single goal you have, a conversion number, um, you can kind of you know work the maze backwards and reverse engineer your goal to say every appointment from my website is worth a thousand bucks. And if I get one every week, that's another$52,000 a year that I'm getting from my website. So there are very simple, tangible things that we can do here, but we just want to know your goals. So Jason and Mana, our account management management team, has been going out and meeting with people at trade shows, meeting with people through Zoom, and doing an excellent job, just collecting things, giving some easy wins. And from here, I mean, it's all the next time we we the vision is the next time we meet again, we're going to have a lot more strategy and we're going to be even that much further along than we were last time when we were just collecting the goals and declaring, you know, our wishes to the universe of what we want out of this big thing, right?

From Reactive To Proactive Account Management

SPEAKER_01 52:40

And then they can go back and sit down and just be like, all right, like you said that you wanted more uh checkouts on your website. Well, you're up a little bit, but like let's talk about how you could do it even better. And I think that those are uh the real true value starts to kind of reveal itself as you do it a little bit more. And I think that the first step was look for people that are listening, you guys know it is really hard changing infrastructure. It is like reverting or changing the course of a river, it's just grueling and it's a grind. You have to think of everything that could go wrong, and you need to actually have a day when you actually say, now this is how it's going to be done. And what's really cool is now we're in the part where it's actually happening. Jason just went to, or Jason and Mana just went to IJO, and they had like like 15 of these meetings each, and they just I don't envy them on that one, but they seem like they really enjoy it. And I think that that's one of those things is like I think they're gonna be in such high demand at the next uh at the next set. People are gonna talk about it. It's just a really cool thing, and the fact that it's centered in the human experience. Like we just spent all you know the first half of the podcast talking about tech and like AI and stuff like that. The fact that we just made a real pivot into being even more human, I think that's worth a little round of applause for sure. Come on now. Totally, totally.

SPEAKER_00 54:08

Yeah, I'm excited about that.

SPEAKER_01 54:09

Heck yeah. Well, Ross, maybe we'll leave it right there. I think that this is a good little check-in. I always like getting excited about what we're working on, but it's also one of those things is uh sometimes we use this platform to kind of share what other people are excited about, and sometimes we don't really kind of yap about ourselves as much as we should. And you know what? I'm trying to do that a little bit more this uh this season is just kind of share what we're stoked about, and there's a lot to be stoked about. But anything else before we wrap this thing up? I think that's a good note to end it. Heck yeah. Well, everybody, thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week, Tuesday, with another episode. Cheers. Bye. Alright, everybody. That's another show. Thanks so much for listening. This episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, Michael Burpa. My guest this week was CEO and co-founder of Punchmark, Ross Cochran. Also produced the music. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez. Thanks so much for listening and leave us feedback on punchmark.com slash loop. That's L-O-U-P-E. Subscribe on all podcast networks. Alright, thanks. We'll be back next week Tuesday with another episode. Bye.