Manufacturing and Selling a Lingerie Brand from Chiang Mai Thailand with Ian Rembrandt

Today’s episode is a fun one – we are talking about selling lingerie made in Thailand around the world. We will be featuring Ian Rembrandt where we talk about his experiences 10 years since he started selling lingerie on Amazon, Etsy and his website – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Let’s tune in.

√ Lingerie website
√ Visit our GFA partner – Mercury – for US banking solutons for your ecommerce businesss
√ Visit our GFA partner – Casia Cross Better Logistics – for your logistics needs

Thank you so much Ian!

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[00:00:00] Episode 399. I’m at the Cross Border Summit venue doing a little intro today. And today’s show, we’re talking about selling lingerie made in Thailand around the world. It’s a fun one. Let’s tune in. Welcome to the Global from Asia podcast, where the daunting process of running an international business is broken down into straight up actionable advice.

And now your host, Michael Michelini. All right, so thank you for tuning in. We’re almost [00:00:30] episode 400 today. We’re at 399. We have Ian, a business owner, a gladiator, as I call it, e-commerce Gladiator seller sells lingerie, really cool lingerie showing it. We got video version for those watching and also, of course, audio.

Check out the video if you can. We are here at our, it was our fifth Chiang Mai meetup after Covid, where we talk about Ian’s experiences 10 years since he started selling lingerie on Amazon and Etsy and his website, [00:01:00] the, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Also, we’re preparing for our fifth annual Cross Border Summit November 16th and 17th, and we have Early Bird coming out this week.

Crossbordersummit.com. Grab ’em. There’s not that many. We got people actually bugging us to buy these, so definitely grab that opportunity. And after the show, after the interview with Ian, I’m gonna do a little promo video. I got my script right here if you want to hear about what’s in store for Cross Border Summit this year.

So let’s first tune into Ian’s [00:01:30] interview. Let’s go our fifth. Post Covid FBA meetup and I’m excited for today’s case studies. Our first guest, the first few meetups was just me sharing, but today we have Ian with us, a selling and also manufacturing locally here in Thailand. I know a lot of people wanna learn more about selling from Thailand manufacturing in Thailand that have been feedback.

I just got back from China myself. But Ian, it’s really pleasure to have you on this show. This is the first [00:02:00] time I’ve been hunting anything like this, so, well, thank, this is my favorite part. I like to find people like you that are on the ground. Okay. Doing business, not just going on podcasts and promoting yourself, but you’re, you’re in the trenches and Asia business selling.

You’re, you’re, that’s what I, I want, I wanna find people like you and show people around the world what you’re doing it. So can you share a little bit about yourself? My name’s Ian Rembrandt. I’m from London England. I lived, I retired when I was 50. Moved to France, sold my business in England, moved to France, [00:02:30] spent 10 years restoring a shadow in France, which I still own, if anyone was to buy it, by the way.

And I got very bored and had personal problems and decided to look to moving somewhere else. And Thailand, I’ve always fancied Asia, never been. And I thought, yeah, why not? So I started looking around, met a very beautiful girl. Came over here, fell in love, got married within six months. So now I’m here.[00:03:00]

I’m a designer, so my business is designed, I, I designed in England. I had my own design company for 10, 15 years. Did very well until the recession, and I lost that, so I’ll start again. So one of the things I do believe in is having some passion in what you’re doing. If, if you’re, if you’ve got no passion about what you’re making or selling, you might as well forget it.

So you’ve gotta have some interest in what you’re doing and. You know, when you’ve got a very beautiful wife and you go looking for lingerie and it’s pretty much rubbish. Yeah, [00:03:30] it’s not, it’s not great. It’s not great. He, you know, we went to London, we went shopping in Oxford Street and it, it was all for oversized ladies.

You know, there was nothing for small, small women. I mean, there was nothing. Nothing. So we thought, okay, we’ll come back to Thailand. And while ship, we looked here as well. There was nothing really worth buying here. So we came back, we thought we’ll buy it and bring it over here and sell it. Well, we found that no one wanted to actually deal with Thailand because they were worried about being [00:04:00] copied.

Yeah. So we thought, okay, we’ll start making it now. That’s a whole new ball game because once you start manufacturing, which I’d done before and you don’t know anything about it. You’re starting from scratch. This is 10 years ago. You, the learning curve’s very quick because it’s costing you money every time you make a mistake.

But anyway, we got it up. We got it going and it started to go quite well. We learned a lot on the way. I like to make high quality product and I like to make. Product [00:04:30] that is different from anybody else’s. You know, you have to have a niche in the market if you want to sell something, you don’t wanna be out there competing with the same all the other people with the same products.

You’ve gotta have something that’s got that edge. Quality always has the edge, so if you can price it reasonable and produce really high quality stuff, You’ve got a reasonable chance. Then after that, it’s about marketing and the one thing you learn in, in lingerie, it is one of the hardest businesses to be in [00:05:00] because you’re up against everything.

You’re up against everything. You, you know, it, it is one of the hard, you get banned on YouTube, you get, it’s just like really, really difficult. Mm-hmm. We started off with our own website. As you can see it, it’s orange to show.com. The name of our company, by the way, is Orange to show. There’s his name cards are there.

Mm-hmm. It’s a little bit hard to, and it has a meaning and it’s a French word. It’s French for Fallen Angel. I wanted fallen angel.com, but it was gone, so I used [00:05:30] the French version and then we designed the car, we designed the logo. We’re registered in America, so we are a brand registered in America and our logo and everything is registered in America.

I used America because it’s the strongest legal bite. Yeah. I’ve already had one in Brazil copied and I’ve got them off. So it, it’s one of the strongest places to register your business if you wanna register. A, a brand. Because you’ve got a lot of, you know, go getter lawyers over there. Mm-hmm. So it’s pretty [00:06:00] good.

So that’s why we did that, which actually came in handy when we went to Amazon, cuz we’re brand registered on Amazon. So it gave us a little bit more, more shout. We, we learned a lot. We made a few mistakes. We, yeah, we made some, we all made mistakes there, but, Not too expensive. And we put those to one side and we, we carried on.

We produce, we are probably, I can’t [00:06:30] say definitely cuz there might be someone somewhere, we’re probably the largest g-string designers in the world probably. You know that probably. There’s always gonna be some, we, we, we have a hundred different designs we carry. Over 2000 in stock. They’re all handmade, all hand packed.

Yeah. That’s just g-string. We carry, we have a whole range of more expensive [00:07:00] stuff as well, going up to $200. So our sets go up to $200, our full set. So we start from $33 to $200. Yeah. I, I don’t wanna do cheap stuff, you know, you want the quality stuff, you have to pay for it, you know and everything is meticulously done.

There is no that will do. It has to be absolutely perfect. If there’s a mark on a board, it’s gone. It’s in the bin. We don’t have any rejects. There are no rejects. Our return rate is virtually zero. [00:07:30] Even on Amazon, we probably get four returns a year, five returns and three of those go back into stock cause they never got opened.

You know, we bin very little. If, if, if you get a return on Amazon, it goes in the bin. That’s it. Done. Got it. What, so this is why I stick to G-string now on Amazon. But I’ll tell you, Amazon’s a whole different story. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, that was actually in fact, well, we, I kind of broke down some outline questions.

Yeah. We have a few in your audience who can also ask maybe towards the end. Okay. Okay. So you said 10 years ago, so Yeah, it’s been [00:08:00] a slow, it’s been, it’s been a lot of knock backs. I mean, we’ve had, you know, we had to finance it all ourselves, so that was a, you know, quite, quite, Difficult. Yeah, yeah. We did very well.

We did, we, we went on Etsy and did very well. We were doing about 2000 a month on Etsy and then we had Lazard, we had our.com. Which we never pushed really, because we were doing quite well on the other ones. And then we started doing merchant on Amazon and we were quite surprised with the amount of stuff we were selling on [00:08:30] merchant.

So we thought this looks really good, you know, and we invested a lot of money into making a whole big load of stuff, a whole shipment. And we sent it off to Amazon. And one of the things we realized, Which, if any of you’re doing small amounts of stuff to Amazon, photograph it and video the packaging.

Yeah. Photo. Every single item you sell with all the SKUs on it and video, the packing, [00:09:00] the ceiling, everything. Because we lost a shit load of money with stuff that got nicked when it got to Amazon. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Like a lot. Yeah. And we, so we speak a little bit louder. What happened when it went? So he’s saying to we, we had stuff taken the shipment on.

The shipment, the first big shipment. We had quite a lot of stuff missing, missing, missing. When it got there. It was missing when they listed it. Yeah. And it still happens. We still have [00:09:30] to video every single packing and we photograph every single shipment. So we lay them all out on the table, we photograph all the way down, and we video the whole thing, and then we video the packing.

Actually video the whole process of packing it and sealing it. We check it, we count it out, we put it in. Yeah, because we still get it. It still happens maybe one or two. Normally if it’s two, it’s too large or too small. So they do take the stuff, you know, sometimes. If I can, [00:10:00] if I send them the pictures and the video, they, they replace it.

They just gimme the credit. Sometimes it’s just one, I can’t even be bothered with the aggravation, so I just let it go. But if it’s two or more, then I, then I, I go for it. But so that, that’s one thing I’ve had and it’s, you know, if you’re doing small amounts of stuff where you can actually got some control over it we also have all our own SKUs and we have.

All the, the barcodes we use, Amazons we don’t use, let’s use fas, ku, I use FA SKUs because it’s much easier. Yeah. So we shipped this [00:10:30] big load over, we lost a few, and it’s, to start with, it was going really well, really well. We were doing really well. And then, then we saw my product on Alibaba, on Ali Express.

With our brand, everything else. And I decided to take Ali Express on with it and I contacted them and I said, cease and desist. Yeah. Two days later, [00:11:00] our site, our Amazon f b started getting hacked and they just hacked us for two years. I mean, they took up pictures off, they took our everything off. And you know this, we were literally.

It, it was a nightmare. I mean, I can tell you we’d invested all this money in there, and they were, they were just taking our stuff down every day. Every day there was something going. We had to go through all this. I mean, you can imagine how many SKUs we had. We had to go through every single one to see what was going, so we had that for two years.

Then another trick they have is they [00:11:30] actually buy, oh, and, and you can hack Amazon fba. You can hack it. It’s hackable. Some people have access to the catalog. I, I had a guy actually hacked it in two minutes, right in front of me. Went straight into my listing. He’s very good at it, but he did it. Yeah. So it’s hackable.

Okay. So don’t, I mean I think it’s more because it’s a catalog based system and there’s certain, cuz it’s not your listing, others can also edit listings. I’m not sure exactly. I was competing against the Chinese company. Yeah. I mean, especially Chinese that have, [00:12:00] they got people in experience I know. And knowledge to edit things anyway, so that, that put a lot of pressure on us.

It actually helped Yeah, it was very distressing and you can’t believe how distressing it is. But yeah, we, and they also will buy, if there’s a, if there’s a big day coming, you know, like the, the quarter days, you know, the, the special days, prime days, prime day they will buy your product. Yeah. All of a sudden you’ll find, wow, I’ve sold 52 units and boom.[00:12:30]

And it was sit there, 60 units all within three hours. Yeah. And they’ve just nicked your stock and they’ve just shut your stock down from the prime day. Yeah. Three days later, they’ll cancel the sale. So all due prime day, all your stock is actually sold. Wow. So that’s another one you have to watch out for.

Yeah. This is when, you know, you’re under attack. That went on for, for over two, nearly two years. So in the end you just, and then we had. We had as [00:13:00] I said, lingerie is extremely difficult to sell. We had really nice models, really done properly, and that was fine. And then at about the same time, they decided that they, they wanted to change.

I couldn’t put models on anymore, so we, we got a dummy and we put a dummy on. Yeah, no, that wasn’t that good either it looks too human or, or they, they just blocked her. So in the end, We got [00:13:30] an old dummy, a China dummy. It’s quite good. And we had it remodeled. Resprayed in metallic, metallic silver. We had it done in, it’s quite stunning actually.

We had it done robot. We had it done in Honda Metallic. Silver got like dark silver. There is no way you can, or a bot can actually recognize that as a human being. Yeah. Right. So if you go on amazon.com now, you’ll see [00:14:00] 90%, well, nearly all our stuff is on a dummy. Yeah. And it’s, it’s. My dummy, it’s my girlfriend and ai.

Yeah. But ev, you know, you have to remember that every time we have a product, we have to take thousands of pictures of it. Yeah. So we had to set, we set, we have our own studio. We have all our own equipment. We have lighting. Loads of lighting. We have two cameras. We’ve got everything you can think of.

Backdrops we’ve got. [00:14:30] Everything. Yeah. So we set up and we have our own Photoshop because we, we do our, our photography costs are big, huge. I mean, every product we, every, every item that we do, we have to photograph about 20 times, and then we have to have it laid out. We have to have it all different ways.

So, and then we have to do it for Amazon, and then we have to do it for hec, and then we have to do it for the website. So every time we have a product, And we carry, we have, I think over 300, 400 products. Mm-hmm. Well over there. [00:15:00] I’ve lost count how many we got. Okay. So, so that was it. Anyway, so we, we died off a bit with Amazon, but, but they’ve been consistent.

We don’t spend any money on Amazon. We don’t, we don’t do any advertising on Amazon. We don’t do any pay per click. We do nothing. It’s all organic. Yeah. Okay. So that, that Samson Okay. The last year, we’ve been shut off for the last year and a half already. We’ve been shut off from our sales with, with in Thailand.

Because the government decided [00:15:30] Yeah. Any, anything, any website, everything shut down because of PayPal, because, yeah, but it’s not PayPal. It was the government put pressure on PayPal to not take money. It, it’s, it was a government that PayPal couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t get anything back, so they, in the end, they shut down and created Thailand, PayPal.

So PayPal is not PayPal, as you know it. It’s PayPal, Thailand. Mm-hmm. And Etsy only used PayPal. PayPal. So basically what the government did was they shut down all the [00:16:00] online sales outside of Thailand for over a year. You know, you can still get a sale provided the, the buyer has got a PayPal account. But if you just click into this to buy it, no.

And that in turn takes you down. I used to get 40,000 hits on Etsy a month. I’m down to 2000. Okay. So, you know, we’re now, we’ve now got Stripe, which is great. We put it, we put it onto our website and it’s starting to come up and we’re now [00:16:30] putting a lot of effort into the website. Which this is good for building our brands.

Yeah. We’re we’re, we’re doing it because we are, we rank on Google. We’re, if you go on Google, you’ll see our pictures all over Google. Yes. So Lazard, we had problems with we had to shut down middle Lazada because we, when Alibaba took over Lazard, which they did, as you know. Yeah, yeah. We got blocked on.

We got blocked on, on we got blocked on Lazard because they said They said it wasn’t our brand [00:17:00] and Lazard, we, we showed them all the branding and everything else and they said, we don’t know. We were just told by head office to shut you down. So lots of war stories here, but you know, if you give up, you know, it is crazy.

You’ve gotta keep on going. Yeah. You know, apart from the fact they’ve got a hundred K in stock, I’ve, I need to shelve deal with that. That black hat stock was before Covid. Cause I remember we were talking about that. Yeah. Before Covid. I mean, we had, we, yeah, we have, I mean the Thailand is, Thailand was a [00:17:30] fantastic place to manufacture from if you could.

Yeah. Because you had a lot of big pluses. Those big pluses have now gone. It’s not easy. Staffing’s not easy. Very difficult. I employed Burmese now. Just Burmese. Yeah. Burmese in Thailand. Yeah. Best guy. Okay. Yeah. So I, I, I can’t, I can’t. I can’t do the other end. I, I’m not gonna say any more than that, but, but Burmese are the best.

Both my workers are both Burmese. Yeah. I [00:18:00] produce twice as much. Interesting. Twice as much. I mean, literally twice as much, and never a fault. Okay. Okay. I take my, I take my staff straight from university and then I train them. That way they’ve gotten to know bad habits. I, I can train them to do quality work, not just run a machine through it.

And, and unfortunately, that’s what most of them do. So, and we get no rejects. Every piece is perfect. And you’re welcome. Any of you to have a look at the product if you could forward. Yeah, we have to let me know some samples. Yeah. We make a [00:18:30] wide range of stuff. We, we, we are now concentrating in G-string because we have another site called Say It with a G-String, which will be a gift.

It’s a gift site. So you can buy, you can buy for your girlfriend or whatever, a monthly G Stream that comes and sends you every month. Yeah. Oh. So once we know your size, you can register a member and you’ll get special discounts and everything else that we were gonna launch just before Covid, and then Covid came along.

We lost our, we lost our way of getting the product to the [00:19:00] market. We couldn’t send it because they got lost at the airport. We now have a fantastic system for America. We sent for a private shipper. It goes to the, it goes, flies into into America. It then goes into the UPS system. I’ve never lost one package in over a year.

Every, every package has got there and it’s been there in 10 days. Fast ship or No? I use fast ship to ship now. I don’t use DHL anymore. It’s crazy. Yeah, I’ve closed my camera. Dhl I just use, cuz it’s German. Yeah, they go cuckoo. I ship[00:19:30] with Peepee shipping. They’re really good. I sent it to Bangkok.

It takes a day to get to Bangkok. It, it goes off up to a kilo. You’re up to up to a kilo. You’re okay. Anything over a kilo, you can’t. It goes, it goes into a package with dg DHL stuff. They fly it into America. It goes into one Pacific place, and then it’s, you already get your tracking number the next day.

As soon as you put it in, you get your tracking number within a few hours. So if you’re on Etsy or anything else, you wanna get ’em a tracking number. You’ve got the tracking number, but it’s a US PS tracking [00:20:00] number. Yeah, I understand. And we haven’t lost one. Everyone’s got their and it’s amazing how fast it’s got there because we’ve stopped the blockage at the airport.

Mm. Because. Type post just waits till they’ve got a box for that particular destination and it’ll sit there for three or four weeks and then you’ve gotta refund the client because you haven’t got the stuff. Yeah. You know, I mean, we lost hundreds of dollars worth when Covid was on. So, to clarify, so one kt, so this is for B2C shipping customers in the us Yeah.

I ship straight from [00:20:30] here. I use, I use, I use I use, I use Amazon to fulfill my items. On my website or Etsy, if I’ve got it in Amazon, I use that. Mm-hmm. Because it costs me the same amount of money. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I can take it straight from stock. I can have it in three days. Okay. So I, and I, and you can ship it not in an Amazon box, and you can ship it with a.

Not Amazon designated shipper. You can ship it with who you want. Really. So you’ve got a lot more [00:21:00] options now. So you don’t have to have an Amazon box on it. And there’s two ways of looking at at it. If someone’s bought off you and you wanna boost your Amazon, then let them put it in a box and they can see it’s come from Amazon.

They’ll go on the site and buy off there next time. Yeah. So I still get the sale. Right. Mm-hmm. Or you can say, now I’m gonna keep this one separate. Because they, this customer may come back for some other items that I not on Amazon. Okay. You know, only half my products, well, quarter of my products are on Amazon.

Okay? By a quarter. Alright. [00:21:30] There’s a lot here. Okay. This is pretty intense. I, I feel it’s kind of some people are asking if this is at what level. I feel like we’re a little bit advanced today, which is good. Well, if anyone’s got any questions or, I mean, I have questions I’ll go through and then maybe get everything at all.

So I may have come across it and I may be able to help you. Yeah. Like he’s been through everything because 10 years I’ve started a company here. I can tell you, excuse me. You’ve got, you have to scrub that one out. Yeah. You’re gonna have to deal with when you set up the company here. You [00:22:00] accounting and bookkeeping.

Mm. Which is something like you’ve not ever seen before and all the problems that you might incur. Yeah. Because we’ve had them. So, so then, so we say 10 years ago, it’s like 2013 about, yeah. Started, we actually started the company in 2013. That was when the idea was, was there. And then entire company, all these companies.

I have a com. Ah. I have a, yeah, I’ve got a, this is only a Thai company. Okay. I did, I’m always, I’m the sort of person that looks [00:22:30] into the future Yeah. On everything. Yeah. And I, I covered myself. I like to have a back door. So I set up a company in the UK called Stra Show Lingerie. And that’s been sitting there.

I did start it off with Amazon. Yeah. But Covid came everything. I just, it’s still, I still do my accounts every year and everything else, but it’s still there. And if, if Thailand goes the wrong way, I can just shift the whole thing over there. I own everything, [00:23:00] so I can just shift it over there. Okay. So I can set the manufacturing up here, but I can, you know, the, the temptation at the moment to take Etsy.

Close my shop down on Etsy and reopen it from the uk. Is, is, is actually about to probably happen. So you know what a lot of people do is Singapore or Hong Kong and then Thailand under, under the hundred Dose. Yeah, because that’s even this podcast we started as a Hong Kong business podcast. Yeah, I looked, yeah.

Hong Kong. I’m not happy about. Yeah, [00:23:30] most usually Southeast Asia is more Singapore. It’s a bit political. China and Hong Kong is more like that relationship. But usually you’re doing it. It’s too vulnerable. It’s too, it’s too, it’s too Well, how is Singapore? Not Singapore. Singapore? Yeah, possible, but I I’m watching to see what’s gonna happen in the west cuz it looks messy at the moment and I’m just watching.

Yeah. Both in America, I mean, I, I tend to follow more American politics and what happens in America cause it affects me more. Than the uk. Mm-hmm. And, and, and what happens in [00:24:00] America affects everybody more than anywhere else. Yeah. Yeah. So it, it’s, I study it every day’s collapsed. Right. First Republic, every, you know, I watch everything, everything.

You know, I’ve got, I don’t bring politics into my business ever, like some companies have done recently and got called. So I never bring politics into the business. So, and then so you talk about manufacturing. Yeah. So you have the same company, manufacturing and selling, same one type company? Yeah. For both.

Yeah. Everything we do [00:24:30] everything in house. We, we design it, we manufacture it, we pack it, we label it, we ship it. Okay. We don’t sell to any. Any stores we market and sell all our own products. Only b a c or b2b? No, nothing. I could, I could, but I don’t want to because I, I’ve, I, you know, I was in the business.

There’s a, there’s a tendency with businesses to undersell stuff if they’ve gotta get rid of stock and they money. And I never want my product undersell. Yeah. [00:25:00] Mm. I don’t do sales. I never do sales. I don’t discount, I don’t do sales because it’s very annoying when you buy something and you pay quite a high price for it, and then next day it’s in a sale for half the price.

It’s there is about pricing or Ms. Msrp. Yeah. But at the moment, I’m, I’m, my plan is at the moment to completely redo my marketing. I mean, I, I, I’ve got websites that I’m gonna [00:25:30] set up. And I’m not gonna depend on any of the outlets that we’ve been depending on like Etsy. Like I’ll set up my own outlets and, and do it that way.

So I’m, I’m in control of everything. No one can shut me down. I’m not even gonna go on YouTube. I’m gonna use Vemo. Yeah. So that they can’t shut me down on that. I’m gonna, yeah. I’ve just had my Instagram hi hacked, which I told you about. Yeah. You know I’ve got a guy on, yeah. I’ve got a hacker hack in him now.

So, I’m just paying for a hacker to hack him. [00:26:00] All right. And then on my list is mul. So you’ve already kind of talked a lot about some of these, but multiple channels. So you’re, you’re still selling Amazon? Us I still on Amazon. I still am on Etsy. Etsy I am still on Lazada actually, but I don’t even bother with it.

My, my website I have, and I have another site called Say It, with the G-string, which is not yet, that’s subs actually up, it’ll be, it’ll be a subscription plus site. Yeah. And then seems like you’re preferring your own website as a channel. I like, like to be in [00:26:30] control. Are you doing paid ads on it, on your website?

No, I’m doing nothing at the moment because I’m building, I’m, you know, my website if you actually see it, it, it’s, it’s quite big. Yeah. And I have to re-list my, I’m reading on my SEO and every, it’s orange show.com? Yeah. Oh, just.com. Okay. I’m redoing all the whole, I’m going for the whole website. We’re reshooting all the, all the stuff, everything.

I’ve done. Probably 15 more new designs, which are quite really nice. I bought one of them today. [00:27:00] Great. And so I’m spending the next few months literally on a computer. It’s one my eyes look like pistols in the snow on a computer from seven o’clock in the morning till six at night. And I’m studying.

I do two hours of studying ai, ai. AI is really, you know, I’m watching every single thing that comes out and yeah, it’s gonna save me a lot of time. I bought. I bought Logic lo six months ago. Logic. Yeah. Now that, that, that is [00:27:30] ai, but you, you have, it’s more specialized to your product or your, your company.

So you’ve got them for a restaurants you’ve got, and they’ll do all your SEO and everything, and you can do your heading. You put your, your, your keywords in. Boom, boom. It’ll do everything that spreads. It’s very good, actually. I’ve done a couple, I did a couple of listings with it just to see how they’d actually, you’ve gotta do a little bit of, a little bit of engineering with it.

Just make it, make it sound a little [00:28:00] bit better. Take stuff out. What’s the service name again? It’s called Logic. Logic. I’ll give it to you. It’s logic. Okay. Ai. It’s much more specialized. I’ll give you those. It’s much more specialized in what I do or in. Marketing, you know, so, I mean, they’ve got stuff for everything.

You’ve got blog stuff, everything it’ll give you Yeah, understand. I mean, you can basically write a whole story, you know? Yeah, there’s about your company, which is what we’re gonna do for the front, you know, for our about. So if [00:28:30] I could summarize, seems like. I mean, I think it’s pretty much one of the best goals.

You’re getting your own traffic organically on your website? Yeah. Seo, yeah. Is that, so you have no paid as in Amazon? I don’t do any paid ads on anything at all. I mean, if I did, I’d do a lot more business, but I’m not ready to do that when my website is like, Really crisp. Yeah. And I’ve got maybe three other websites coming into that, which is what I used to have.

Yeah. Then I, I can, I’ll have some back links. I mean, I’m studying SEO [00:29:00] at the moment as well, so you never stop learning. Yeah, sure. You never stop learning. Everything’s changing every single day. I mean, it’s moving with AI so fast that it is just quite incredible. I mean, staggering, actually. But yeah, I’ve just got a new one.

I, I, I watch, I’ve just got a new one for for Photoshop work really fast. Really good. Sorry, am I too, I’m going on too much. I’m make sure Recording. Okay, sorry. Yeah, I’ve just got a new one for Photoshop which is an app. It’s really, really good.[00:29:30] I’ve just done one, one picture with it and I was blown out.

So if that works, I can save myself like. Days on Photoshop, if you have all these models and all these skews and products. Yeah. And you can just ai Well, we do video as well. And video. So we got, we got, we’ve just taken on. We’ve just taken Wave. Wave. Yeah. You mentioned Wave Really good. Really quick, really quick.

I mean, we’ve got Move ev, move ev we have that. We’ve got the latest move over here. We got, we got quite a lot of software. Okay. But it, it all [00:30:00] takes work and you’ve gotta be like quite. Reasonably skilled at what you’re doing. Mm-hmm. Some of the new stuff, it takes that necessity for skill out and we wanna do a lot more demo products so that we wanna actually show the product live.

I just, I bought a, a webcam which is, follows you around. It, it, it’ll actually automatically, it’s ai, it’s 4k and that we will use to create videos and, and online selling. So, you know, two [00:30:30] years ago I wanted an online site on my, on a website and there was nothing then now, yeah, it’s possible.

Anything’s possible now. So you have to re-look at everything you’re doing and use it creatively to, to get the effect that you want. And if you can look into the future to see where it’s going. You can be ahead of the market. I like being ahead of the market, you know? For sure. I mean, it’s, it’s, I’ve always been ahead of the market, you know, when I was designing it [00:31:00] definitely seemed like you’re always studying, always learning.

I’m dyslexic so I look ahead. Yeah. I’m always running ahead of myself, you know? Sure. Both my kids are dyslexic. Both my sons, my, my, and they’ve both done amazingly well. You know, I mean, really well. So. It’s not a, it’s not a a minus to me it’s a plus. Okay. I didn’t do well at school, but, but, you know yeah.

Schools, I feel it’s less and less important nowadays, especially PI and tech and internet. Yeah.[00:31:30] So we’ll open up to questions. So I’ll just, I’ll just read out the domain for those like A N G E and then chu d e c h u.com. Yep. Yep. And is there other ways people would, would put, show us would, is that the best place for you and your brand?

If you, if you want to see probably more of what we do, there’s more on that. There’s more going on all the time, but we’ve got a lot to go on. I think we’ve got about another 20 products to go [00:32:00] on. Nice. Maybe more. 30. Okay. So, you know, we’re developing stuff every day. So, I mean that’s the core of product businesses designed new products, like I mentioned, cans Fair are looking for new products.

You’ve gotta have, you know, you, you’ve gotta have unique products. I mean, we were the first pro, not the first, but probably pretty close to the first people doing strappy body harness. Yeah. Now, you know, strap, one of the things, one of the things that you, one of the things that is for a hundred percent sure sex [00:32:30] sells.

Yeah. It sells. We all need it. Right. And if you can look fantastic with nice lingerie on Yeah. It’s great. You know, so it’s the one thing that we’ll always sell. You know, if you haven’t got much money, you’re gonna buy the Chinese stuff off of, of, of Howie Express. If you’ve got a bit more money and you want to give your girlfriend a really lovely treat, you give her our stuff.

You know, we’ve got people come back every year, you can read the reviews, come back every year for, for their wife because they love the stuff. Perfect. Australia, we send [00:33:00] it to America, you know, we did from us. Sometimes we send it from here cause we make it special for them. And then we, we do, we do one office as well.

So if you come to me, I, I, I mean, I’ve done. It’s maybe something America is probably gonna be the quite good market for, but we, we’ve actually made. Lingerie for men on several occasions. Oh. Some very famous ones as well. But, but, but yeah, we do, we make to order. So we can design and make for you America looks like it’s gonna be a great market.

[00:33:30] Yeah. The trends, all the trends new, cute, new keywords for seo. Yeah. Model. I’ve actually, models I’ve designed, I’ve designed, I’ve designed a few pieces already interesting. And we’ve made some and sold them. But it’s not an area that I particularly want to go into cuz I, I, I don’t get any pleasure out of it.

I love designing for women. I, I, I’m a designer so I take the shape and I design my product for that shape. I also design clothes as well, so I do clothes as well, which are really, really smart. Yeah, great. [00:34:00] Very sexy. You know, Asian women haven’t got big, big breasts. Yeah. And, and they all get quite, you know, a lot of ’em get quite upset cause they haven’t got, doesn’t mean to say you’re not sexy.

Yeah. Asian women are very sexy. You just cut the back out. Yeah. And then the back looks very sexy. Mm-hmm. You make the thing work well, it it, you don’t have to have big breasts to be sexy. You don’t have to have big lips and the big ass to be sexy. You can, you know, Asian women look amazingly sexy if you emphasize [00:34:30] the, the product that they have, which is their back or something like that.

They can look amazing, you know? You know, women are beautiful. You, you know, you just, you just gotta make them, you know, it’s like putting the wrong dress on somebody, you know, there’s really badly designed dresses that don’t make you look good. Don’t wear them. Go and get something that looks good, you know?

Makes sense. So Yeah, I probably have to cut all that out. It’s, no, I think it’s, I think, you know, when we, you talked about earlier, and I should have highlighted it, in business and e-commerce or Amazon or any [00:35:00] business, there’s two major parts of the business. You said product and marketing. Yeah, of course you can add sales, you can add in accounting, you can add in other things.

But really the, I think most e-commerce seller say product and there marketing. Yeah. But you need a good product. You know, you need, but marketing, I still think marketing is more important than the product. People. Look, everyone, you know, you, you have a restaurant, you’ve got three restaurants. Yeah. One serves rubbish.

Yeah. You know, if you like food, one [00:35:30] serves rubbish, one serves mid-range and one serves top range. Each of those restaurants will pick a certain customer. Some customers love eating rubbish. Yeah. I mean, look, you’ve got McDonald’s, Christ, you know, people go in there and eat. I dunno why I won’t let my kids eat it, but they do.

Right? But, and then you’ve got like the mid-range restaurants, which people will eat and you’ve got the top range restaurant. If you change the chef’s round, you’ve got three empty restaurants. So it’s about, it’s about marketing to who you’re marketing to. [00:36:00] You find who you’re marketing to find that market and concentrate on them.

You know, my market is from like 21 to. 50 and older, but just say 50. So I’m in that market. I’m in the market where I’ve got the cam go. Wants a nice wear, the stripper wants a nice to wear. The girlfriend boyfriend wants to buy her a nice set because they’re going away, they’re getting married, they want a, a wedding set, which we also do.[00:36:30]

It’s a big market, you know, I’ve got, I do really raunchy stuff. I mean, I do this, you know, I do the wet look, high cut, wet look stuff. So I, I’ve got a pretty broad market that I do. Yeah. And it, it, it will appeal to a multitude of different people in that age bracket. Yeah. I’m not gonna appeal to the cheap end of the market because they can’t afford the stuff they’re gonna go and buy it from, from Alibaba or something like that.

Yeah. So I’m, I’m looking at the, the market that’s got a little bit more [00:37:00] money, or not necessarily, but wants a really quality product for their girlfriend’s birthday or their Yeah. You know, don’t want to give them something slung in a little plastic bag. Yeah. And it’s gotta be nicely presented.

Presentation’s really important. You’ve got a restaurant, if it’s just slop on a plate, look, shit. Yeah. You package it nicely. It looks good. Yep. Yeah. You know so, But marketing is the most important thing. You can have the best product in the world, but if you don’t market it right, or if you can’t get your marketing right, you know, and that’s what I need to do.

[00:37:30] You know, I, I know my, you know, I know my faults, you know? Mm-hmm. And I just gotta learn more and more every day. Every day I study it. Yeah. Yeah. But marketing is the most, I put both my, my sons through university in France on sales and marketing. I said to them, Go and learn sales and marketing. Cuz if you can sell something, you can make money because it doesn’t matter what you sell.

If you can sell it, you know you can make money. Good. So just to highlight what he says, you know a lot of people always wonder what product to sell, but he [00:38:00] says who he’s selling to. You find your market, not what you’re selling, but who you’re selling to is you can sell the same thing your competitors are selling, but you’re targeting a different person.

The same product for as person. So I also do that. I think Who is buying it? Yeah, your product. I mean you, you are, you are selling to a certain type. Yeah. Yeah. This is a new products we’re working on. Okay. It, it’s the scout brothers bag, but it’s this one. Yeah. Sort like travel and business. Yeah. Business.

Yeah. Business man. Well mean that [00:38:30] sort of thing does really well in London cuz they get on the tube with that. Yes. I mean, normally they’ve got little wheels on the bottom as well so they can wheel it around wheels on this. No. No. Okay. But you, you get the solicitors going down there with all that stuff.

Yeah. The solicitor’s lawyers. Oh yeah, the roller wheels. I think maybe open up the questions. Yeah, any, anything. And then we’ll go into networking. If somebody wants to add a question or a highlight or a point. Also we can talk about packaging. I think Mark it. You’re not, you don’t do any ads. No, you do. [00:39:00] Is it like pure seo?

Some. You’re on Amazon. I don’t do any ads on Amazon at all. Nothing. Right? So, so all, well, he’s been around 10 years. When does, sometimes there is organic ranking. I’ve been, I mean, I’ve been on, if you go onto Google and you just go on to put sheer lingerie in Yeah, go onto pictures. You’ll see eight of my pictures on there.

Okay. So it sounds like your key word research is critical. My keyword words, word research. Is that what you’re talking about? [00:39:30] Use the keywords, yeah. I mean, when I started, when I started online selling, I didn’t have a clue about seo. I knew nothing. And our, and our website was pretty shit. I mean, in terms of SEO or anything else.

I mean, it was terrible. As you get more and you learn more, you realize how much important you metatag and everything else. I’ve just done, I’m starting to change them all the way through. I’m going through my whole, all my listings on the website. I, I, I was on page one originally. I’m now by drop back to page three.[00:40:00]

Yeah. I’m now back onto page two within a month. So it, you got different, you know, you can play around with the keywords, like you know, I can put sexy G-string. Yeah. But I know and I’ll have maybe six on the page, or I can put, I can use a different use. You used play around with the different ones.

Once they click on that picture, they go through to, to another picture at the side on Google, and then you’ll see all my other listings underneath. All my other pictures underneath. So [00:40:30] what, what is important that if you’ve got a product, you get as many pitches out? What I’ve learned is that you can organically get your stuff out if you create really good pitches and get them.

On somewhere, Pinterest, whatever. Yeah. If you can get as many really good pictures and videos out, right, you will rank because those pictures will take you up there. And then my instinct, I have a look at your website, but [00:41:00] first thing, just a couple highlights out, right? One is your site’s 10 years old, right?

So I think, you know, we got quite good older stories hosted that were hopefully never offline or pretty consistent without looking links and images. Just by being law older. Yeah. What people start saying, they give up and they start saying they give up or they break, they don’t domain. Yeah. Also things like Trustpilot.

Trustpilot. Yeah. Trustpilot will also help you rank as well. And then I think the second, I haven’t looked at your images, but, but they’re [00:41:30] not very good by the way. Oh, they’re not good. My pictures aren’t good. Oh, these or what? Well, I would feel like they might feed into Google images and there’s. I’m not sure how much of those people are just like looking at girls in lingerie versus customers.

Yeah. There might be just people looking for girls in linger. A percentage, a percentage are, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But you’ve only gotta take a small percentage of those people that are looking. Right. And my pictures aren’t as. Raunchy as the pictures, the other pictures in there. Mm-hmm. Right. And they’re not [00:42:00] very, you know, when my wi, when my, my ex-wife left, she was the photographer.

Yeah. And suddenly I had to learn photography, Photoshop, everything else. Right. And, and we, we, we had a photographer came and we were very not. We didn’t get great results from the photographers that we used. Yeah. And again, finding models in Thailand you would think is really easy. Yeah. No it’s not. I can get Russian girls down in, down in [00:42:30] patio.

I pouquette Yeah. No trouble. But if I want Asian models, it’s extremely difficult. Are you?

But they won’t do lingerie? No, they won’t do lingerie. They’ll do nice dress. They’ll do this cuz then they can go onto, but they won’t do lingerie. Very few of them. And a lot of the ones that will are too heavily tattooed. I mean, I’ve had some great girls, but by the time they’re finished, they’ve got so many tattoos on them.

It’s like, It’s [00:43:00] like I can’t even see my lingerie. Yeah. So I don’t take tattoos. I, I got one girl at the moment. I’ve just done, she’s got a tattoo on it. It’s only small. I let it go, but I can’t do tattoos unless I’m doing the really raunchy stuff and then tattoos are fine. Yeah. So, You. It’s, it’s really how you’ve, how you play it.

But I’m not a big one on tattoos anyway. Whatever someone wants to do is fine with me, but I don’t want it on my le on my website. Yeah. So, you know, we had a really great girl. We just spent so much work taking the tattoos out [00:43:30] and then by the time we were finished, she had them at like everywhere and we just couldn’t use her anymore.

You know, it just got too much. But. Yeah. Then you’ve got, in Thailand it’s very difficult cause you’ve gotta tie the model that’s got to turn up on time. The photographer’s got to turn up on time. Yeah. Everyone’s got to, I see. He knows. Yeah. I just, they’ve all got to turn up on time and that’s really difficult because you’re paying everyone by the day.

Yeah. And you want to do like a, a full day shoot, [00:44:00] you know? I just thought you talked about your packaging. Yeah. So if you’re willing to Yeah. Okay. About the packaging. I think with the G-string particularly, I mean this is only one of our range of stuff we do, but it’s probably on our biggest range. The reason we did this is because we can send them very cheaply.

Yeah. They’re very easy to, to send. They’re $33 each. They’re nicely packaged. That’s how you get it. If you, if you, if we send it off from here, it’s all done in a beautiful, all done with bows and gift, everything. If we send it for an Amazon, that’s how it comes. [00:44:30] So we, we do all our own print. We do, we everything.

We print ourselves, we do everything. Now, when you, when you, when you send off to fba, you can have, have your own, you have the barcode and they’ll send you the, you click down, you get your barcode, and then you just print it off, off there. So that’s how you do it. And then you have to have your warning label.

That’s really important. If you haven’t got the warning label on it, you, they’ll just back it. The warning for what? The warning label. Oh, because they think, yeah, they think you’re gonna [00:45:00] stick it over your head and commit suicide. Right. It’s America darling, you know? Mm-hmm. So you have to have a warning label.

That’s important. We put a letter in which says, thank you very much for buying our product. This is our website, da da da. And please give us a review. Yeah. Most people don’t. Yeah, they just want the product and that’s it. So on, on the website and on Etsy, we get more reviews on Amazon. We don’t, but we, our reviews are all five star, so bar a couple, [00:45:30] which.

Doesn’t say anything. They just put three star or something on that. Yeah. That’s annoying. But most of our stuff is five star. The other thing we find that, that when we sell on Amazon, we’ve got no way of contacting the client to make sure they’re ordering the right size. Yeah. Now, one of the things when you’ve been in the Andre business or the clothing business for 10 years is that most women will order the wrong size.

Yeah. The men won’t, the women will. Yeah, because they think they’re smaller than they are. So we, we, we tend, we [00:46:00] tend to get people saying it won’t fit. Now we’ve asked them what size they are and they’ve told us I’m a medium or say, so we don’t list any sizes on, we, we actually put the measurements and inches on, on the product.

So when we, when we do a Amazon, we put the, all the sizes and we have a, a code that says your hip has to be 34 to 36 or 36 to 38 inches. Yeah. That way they don’t get confused with medium. You know, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a real medium. [00:46:30] No, there is no real medium. Every country’s got a different barcode.

Every country’s a different size. So if we send all over the world, I’m, I, I’m I, I go in inches and that’s it. And it works okay. We do adjustable for the larger ladies, so we go up to about a 50 hip on, on our, on our ex, on our, which is quite big, but that’s the only things I do. Big ones for everything else.

I go up to UK xl, that’s it. So I specialize in small sizes that [00:47:00] way I’ve got a niche in the market. The cut, the people that buy off me know I do small sizes only, and they’ll come to me because they can get something for their girlfriend that is gonna fit them. Yeah. And because you know, if you read other reviews they say it’s way too big, it’s way too big, or it’s way too small.

So that’s the other thing. So that’s, that’s how we send our, our stuff. That’s before it’s packed. Sharon, so much. Yeah, it’s alright. Yeah. We also do like pajamas and teddys and things like that. You, you’re welcome to have a look at.[00:47:30] Any other questions or we can just wrap up Any examples to try? Yeah, I did say I’m making men’s ones.

Yeah. Gonna be a good market in America. I think I’m looking into the future here. There’s like different lists of gender now. It’s like a long it’s gonna be a big market. All alright with that. I’m not sure there’s gonna be many men left. New, new SEO keywords. [00:48:00] Transgender ity. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll have to use that.

Yeah. Yeah. Last words. Okay. Well thank you. Thank, okay. It’s great. Anyone? Sorry, I’ve never done this before so I hope it went down. Okay. Hope it wasn’t too boring. No, you’re gave a lot can say. So tons of stuff. And thank you to our sponsor, our returning sponsor mercury.com online bank. Well it’s a real bank but can totally online for us.

Our blimp program participants are going through this as well. Thank you, mercury. Travis is great dear. Been [00:48:30] on our shows, been in our events, we’re gonna have another event where we will have them attending as well. And if you want to get a little bonus for you and us, if you sign up and do some special circumstances, you can go to global information.com/berkeley.

I also have a video tutorial that we use, even for the BLI people. Use the same exact video to learn how to use it. Ha. Hope you can check it out totally free. Why not See you there? Alright, thank you Ian for sharing. I actually, this is my favorite kind of people to get on the show. He’s on the ground here in Asia [00:49:00] doing cross-border e-commerce and trade, and he’s never been on a podcast before.

I think he did pretty great. Let Ian know. And now as I said, I wanna go into our cross-border summit preview, what to expect, what’s happening, open Borders, new beginnings. That’s our slogan for our fifth. Cross-Border Summit. We’re moving out of China. It’s in Cheang Mai, Thailand. I am here right now here at the venue.

We’re working hard, very hard for this upcoming [00:49:30] cross-border summit, and it’s a whole new world. We haven’t had one since November, 2019. We are gonna have a hundred plus attendees. It’s this beautiful venue. We’ll show you some clips. As, as as I talk, what’s gonna happen is we’re gonna talk about, of course, the new world and Amazon fba, the ai, you know, working with cross-border trade, you know, international business, B2B trade.

You know, of course the border in China is gonna be open. We’re gonna bring top sellers from [00:50:00] China to Chima here, Thailand, top sellers from around the world, from Southeast Asia, from the us, from Europe, from all around the world. It’s gonna be amazing events. We’re putting everything we got into this. So again, this is gonna be Thursday and Friday, two full days, November 16th and 17th, right here in Thailand.

We got the venue locked in. So what are some topics? We’re gonna talk about advanced strategies in Amazon fba in this post pandemic world. We’re gonna talk about ai. Everybody’s talking about ai. We’re gonna have some [00:50:30] experts, we’ve already been talking about this on the podcast. We’re gonna bring some great people.

We’re gonna have some panels about it. Learn how to work with your team, with humans, with ai, with your listings in Amazon. Some other things we’re gonna be talking about is corporate structure. In today’s world, you know, a lot of people doing business through Hong Kong or Singapore and mainland China, Europe, you know, VAs in America and Canada.

How to do all of these different global enterprise business will be an amazing topic. We’re gonna have top. Eight figure sellers from [00:51:00] China. A lot of my friends and people have been on this show. They’re gonna be doing different sharings about how they manage their operation with multiple offices around China, all their different brands, all their different strategies they’re gonna be sharing here in Thailand.

We’re also gonna be talking about blockchain tech. There’s a new system coming and we will be debuting it. A little bit there with some sneak previews and some gifts for people that come as blockchain. We believe it’s gonna be more and more in popular in cross-border trade and e-commerce. Of course, [00:51:30] paid ads, you know, PPC on Amazon, Facebook, TikTok.

We’re gonna have some great people sharing the insights about how to do that. Also with, with ai, we’ve got some friends that use AI with paid ads, sharing insights there. So be ready for that. And one of our favorite parts is we bring, again, we have top sellers from China coming top, sellers from the west coming.

We’re gonna have a nice panel like we usually do, where you can ask ’em questions, they can share their pros and cons and their differences of how they run their, their operations. Because I’ve learned Chinese business [00:52:00] is much different with their seller companies from those in the west. So that’ll be an amazing panel.

And then just generally it’s top value. Networking. This is an exclusive event. We have our G F A V I P members. We have our, our previous guests and people in this community sharing, and we only have limited seats. We will wanna know more about you. If, if you’re first time coming, we want to know a little bit more about you, your business, and if you’re the right fit to come.

But we welcome experienced [00:52:30] cross-border e-commerce sellers and traders to come to join us and network. There’s been marriages from this, there’s been business partners from this. There’s been, of course, business deals done and, and new services formed at these since 2016, 17, 18, 19. And now finally, again in 2023.

Grab this early bird offer. We would love to see you there. Cross border summit.com, visa, MasterCard, WeChat, bank transfer. Whatever [00:53:00] you feel comfortable, we take crypto to hope to see you there. I’m Mike Mcle, the host at of meja. I’m really excited for this one. Finally, post pandemic World open border, new opportunities.

See you there. So for some of our ticket options, our general entry ticket, which gives you full access to those two days, our main event of all the speakers, all the content, our lunch networking, and our after parties. If you wanna go big, you can get our V I P ticket, very limited amount. And what that gets you is a half-day mastermind a [00:53:30] day before with few of our top speakers coming as well as our speaker dinner, preparing for the event on that night before.

And that’s amazing value plus priority seating. If you’re a GFAVIP member, you’re gonna get a special price, longer term swag bag, other benefits, as well as you know, a guaranteed placement at the event. Also, if you really wanna go bigger, we’re gonna have some workshops. Some of our top speakers are gonna stick around the next day.

You can book three hour small. Group training [00:54:00] for an additional fee. Check the website for those prices and you’ll be able to get even more insights and training hands on from these people while they’re here in town. So lots of choices for you. Lots of ways to make. Your business to the next level.

We, again, check it all out at crossbordersummit.com and I look forward to personally seeing you there. To get more info about running an international business, please visit our website www.globalfromasia.com. That’s triple www.globalfromasia.com. Also, be sure to subscribe to our iTunes feed. Thanks for tuning in.