526 – How To Scale Your Business Whilst Living Remotely

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Ben Katzaman

In the episode:

00:50 – Accidental discovery
03:25 – How Wanderer Bracelets came about
04:57 – Fitting the product to a market
06:55 – The SCAMPER method
09:21 – The mindset that makes it work
10:59 – Building the team
13:07 – How important are live events?
16:23 – A couple of essential tools
19:13 – Working the system
21:55 – Some challenges of working remotely
25:35 – The layout of day-to-day
28:32 – A brief call recap
29:19 – Knowing who to hire next
32:19 – SuperFastBusiness Live from Ben’s viewpoint

Ben and other world-class business experts will be sharing insights live on stage at SuperFastBusiness Live 2017 – Join  them

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. It’s my absolute pleasure to introduce our guest today, Ben Katzaman from WandererBracelets.com. Welcome to the call.

Ben: Thanks, James. Excited to be here.

James: The reason for our call is in just a few weeks from the time of recording this, you’re heading over to Australia to talk about how to scale an e-commerce business at my SuperFastBusiness Live event, which we’ll also record, in case someone listening to this wants to catch up with that session.

The real story behind your introduction to me is that we were sitting beside each other at a dinner in San Diego at Ezra Firestone’s conference afterwards, and you were just sharing with me this incredible journey you’ve been on with your own business. I said to you, “Please come and share this story with our audience.”

There are a couple of things there. Firstly, a lot of people are, I think, trying to find out what they should do with their life or what they want to sell is a big, common question. In your case, it just was there. It was surrounding you, and you recognized it. So that was one part of it. The second part is, you’re quite a young man, and you’ve scaled a significant business producing hundreds of thousands of units, selling e-commerce, and you’ve got a large team. You have 40 people in your western team, the United States, and then you’ve got 150 people in your Bali team. So that’s a significant impact that you’re having on the universe in terms of creating stuff. So that’s how this came about.

Today, we’re going to talk about what’s involved in growing a business quickly and at scale, but also, and most importantly, remotely. Because you’re not sitting in an office every day, are you Ben?

Why work remote?

Ben: No, I’m not. I’ve got an office in Florida now as we’ve grown. We just opened a full office a couple of weeks ago. But over the last two years since I started the business, I’ve spent a lot of time in Bali, Florida, Hawaii, Seattle, Oregon, San Diego, San Francisco, LA, Austin, New York, Australia, Bangkok, the Gili Islands.

So I’ve spent more time remote than I have been in one place or with one team or the other. And that allows me to spend a lot of time with people I care about and meet people that I would never be able to meet otherwise, tap into new communities and nurture relationships. You meet somebody at a conference and a couple of weeks later, you happen to be in their city. That’s where the real magic happens and the exchange of ideas takes place.

James: I think that’s what happened to us. How old were you when you started Wanderer Bracelets?

Starting Wanderer Bracelets

Ben: I was 21 years old when I was lost, riding my motorbike through the jungle and came across a carver that was carving sustainable, natural, water buffalo bone. Like they’ve been carving up at the mountains there for generations. I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but I thought it was cool. So I drew an infinity sign on a sheet of paper and asked him if he would make a little pendant for me. I thought I could make a piece of jewelry with it to give to a friend.

I realized that he and a lot of his friends were really struggling to earn a living with their traditional craft, which is carving, and a lot of them were faced with the option of taking migrant labor jobs; like they may go cut down trees in the rainforest or pour concrete on the job site. That kind of broke my heart. I wanted to be able to see them be able to stay with their families and continue to practice their cultural art. I didn’t want to see that disappear. When I found that out, I was determined to see if I could come up with something that I might be able to create a market for. I found e-commerce was a way to be able to have an impact on this situation that I came across.

James: So essentially, you have found supply in this village, and then you’ve taken it to people who wouldn’t ordinarily travel on their motorcycle out into the backwoods of Bali, and they can now access these carvings and the jewelry. What makes the product different or special? Because I guess, there are local markets in pretty much every major city. There’s going to be a weekend market where people are selling handmade jewelry. How did you get to be producing hundreds of thousands of these items? What makes someone want to buy it?

What to bring into the market

Ben: Yeah. So when I met these guys, they were carving tribal jewelry. They might make little hook necklaces that you might see a surfer wear. There just wasn’t a big market for it. They might have hundreds lying around stockpiled, and they couldn’t move them. That’s where a lot of the struggle was. There wasn’t product market fit that was scalable, especially in the US market where I’m from.

I sat there. I just love making things, I love handicrafts. So I started playing with all kinds of concepts. So I made rings, and earrings, and necklaces, and I made some bracelets. I headed down to the co-working space that I was working out of and showed them to my friends. They’re like, “Wow, these are so cool.” So I did a think tank and they all gave me feedback, and they decided that I should really focus in on the bracelets because everybody can wear them. It’s not limited to one gender, and the sizing is a little bit simpler than other products. So that’s what I honed in on and continued to develop the product.

So I spent a lot of time figuring out how to make a bracelet that these guys can make with materials they could access to support their livelihoods. So it’s kind of taking it to the next step and not just finding something that somebody is already making, but looking at, ‘OK, here are the skill sets and here are the materials that they have. How can we take this to the next level?’ I think that lesson is applicable in whatever product or market you end up getting in. Even if you find a supplier that makes the world’s best cocktail shaker or just a standard cocktail shaker and you want to bring that product to market is one example, if you can find some way to add a new dynamic element to that cocktail shaker, bring it to a new market in a new way, maybe it’s a new color, a new style, a new theme that resonates with your audience, that can get you a lot more traction than just going and picking a random product to bring into market.

The SCAMPER technique

James: Right. It brings to mind a technique called SCAMPER, which is a brainstorming creativity technique, which helps you figure out new ways to bend an idea around. It’s like to reframe stuff. Have you heard of that one?

Ben: No, I haven’t heard of that. That sounds cool, though.

James: Yeah. Basically, SCAMPER is an acronym. But you take an idea or a product for example, and you think, S is SUBSTITUTE. How could I substitute this product? Or C is COMBINE. How can I combine this product? So like, you might find a villager making beautiful strings, and then you might find a villager making a beautiful carving, and then you say, “Hey, I could combine them into a necklace.” How can you ADAPT? So how you can adapt it for a new purpose. How can I MODIFY it? That’s what you did when you changed it from the traditional hook to an infinity sign. How can I PUT it to another use? So you might take a jewelry that people wear casually and turn it into like a high-end product for rappers. [laughs] How can I ELIMINATE? What can I take out of this to make it different? Or how could I REVERSE it? What would be the opposite of this? So it’s basically to prod and prompt ideas around things. So if you’ve got a very common product – jewelry’s a pretty old market, I imagine – it could be something to jog it.

But anyway, what we really want to talk about is, how do you manage to do this remotely? You and I have been able to tap into a business model that does not necessarily require you to be in a specific place at all times. In your case, it’s even more impressive because you’ve got physical product. You actually have a thing. I imagine it’s got to be produced, it’s got to be shipped. So you’ve got logistics.  You’ve got to store it, you’ve got to drive traffic. You no doubt have got to provide some kind of customer support at this kind of scale. There may be returns. So there are a lot of elements to your business, but you’ve grown it really well. Some people would say, “To build a business of this sort of scale, you’re going to have to go and be in an office. You’ve got to have your team right there where you can be eyes and ears open all the time.”

The mindset

I guess we should start with firstly, what’s the mindset around how it works for you? Did you decide, ‘Hey, I’m 21! I’m cruising around on my motorbike in a cool country. I really don’t think I’m ready yet to strap on a suit and tie and go into corporate life for my e-commerce business.’ Where did it end up?

Ben: Yeah. I started it just sitting there in my bedroom in Bali, started dreaming up the ideas, and then I launched a Kickstarter in December 2014. So to do that, I realized I needed to be able to fulfill the units and ship stuff out and build up some awareness on the ground. So I came back to the US in the fall of 2014 when I launched the Kickstarter campaign. At the time, I was operating the business out of a small two-meter by two-meter storage shed in my backyard. We’d ship the bracelets out.

During that time, I started jumping around the US. I went to Seattle for a couple of weeks. I went to New York for a week. I was able to meet up with people. I found that creating that serendipity of being in places where I had been able to connect with incredible people in my travels and be able to circle back, that’s where a lot of the magic happens. You can get into those juicy conversations over dinner, drinks, coffee, or whatever it is. They can steer you in the right direction. You can do the same thing on Skype or different mediums like email. But it’s just easier for me. I know to make time for people when they’re in the same locale that I am.

Working with the team

So I’ve really incorporated travel into my growth strategy. But as far as like working with the team, there are a couple of basic principles that thankfully I have been exposed to early on. I had gone to a talk at one of the co-working spaces where a guy talked about how he built his remote teams.

One of the books that he recommended was Work the System, which talks all about how to document and systematize a process and create a standard operating procedure. He showed us how he created a wiki structure using a Google site. So he just made a free Google site that you can make and was able to build out outlines and fill out information on how to do everything under the idea that anything that you might have to do twice, you need to document, because you might not remember how to do it or somebody else might be the one who’s needing to do it next. That’s how you can grow something rapidly.

So as I built my organization, that was one of the core tenets of our culture. I don’t want anybody writing anything down on paper. We’re not going to have a book or a journal somewhere that has the how-tos of how this business is going to run. We need to be able to have this accessible in a database that everyone within our company can access and edit. And this will be a continually evolving document. That allowed me to bring on my first employee, and second employee, and third employee, and scale rapidly.

James: Yes. Work the System is a fantastic book. I interviewed Sam Carpenter on this show. SuperFastBusiness has a great episode with Sam. I’ve met him at live events. It’s funny you should say how important it is to go. I saw him in Sta. Barbara, and I said, “Sam, let’s do a podcast.” He really enjoyed that show. So I refer people to that. I think he gives away a version of the book from his website. Work the System is awesome. We have a very similar concept as well, standard operating procedures. I love that. It’s like the skeleton that you can flesh out a business on that if you don’t have it, it’s not going to support the business.

There are two things I want to just ask you about just as a side note. How important is it to go to live events as part of your learning and growth phase?

The importance of attending live events

Ben: Going to live events has been huge as a part of the whole growth process. Some of the events I attend are Traffic and Conversion. I went to SuperFastBusiness last year. I have also gone to some events that are specific to my product and industry. So being what we call a “social entrepreneur” or having a business that has a double bottom line, which is impact as well as your revenue number or your profit margin, it’s important for me to be involved in communities that support that.

So I joined a community called StartingBloc where they have four events around the US every year and 2500 fellows that I can tap into in that same space. So I’d encourage you, like if you’re in CPGs and you’re making skin care products, go to events in that space and meet other people who are doing similar things because it will save you a lot of time, money, and mistakes, and kind of point you in the right direction. You’ll find that the more you give in these types of communities, the more will be shared with you.

I know at times, I’ve given my entire wiki to other people in different groups that I’m a part of, and then three months later, they give me a software recommendation that’s a game changer for my business. I think that openness is a big part of it. That authenticity and vulnerability, if you can exhibit that and share that with others in these communities, that’s how you have the most rewarding experiences.

James: Yes. I presume CPG stands for Consumer Package Goods.

Ben: Yup.

James: Right. I also agree. We share a lot of standard operating procedures inside SuperFastBusiness membership where I just take the blueprints that we’ve used in our business, and I share them with members. Because like you, we went through a rapid scaling phase where we had over 60 people in our business for a virtual product. So it’s all in the cloud somewhere. But I love the fact that when you’re employing these people full time, and you have 150 villagers that you’re employing full time, it’s doing something amazing for that. You’re putting commerce back into the society. They can feed people. I’m sure one villager would probably support an entire family. A hundred and fifty villagers would probably support a community of 500 or more people directly.

Ben: Yeah. Most of them have two to four kids. Seventy percent of our workers are women. Eighty percent of them work from home just coming once a week to our central, little operation. My business partner over there, he’d built a house on his land for me to live in when I was there this past summer. So I spend still about five months of the year over there on the ground working with them, which is a 12-hour time difference from my team in Florida.

There’s a lot of late nights and early mornings working, but it’s cool to be able to be in both parts of the world, in a place that five years ago, I couldn’t have gotten WiFi, in this area that I built my house in the jungle. So it’s neat to be involved in that little wrinkle in time where if the first time, you can be connected and be remote.

Some helpful tools
Some of the things that have helped me in working with my team in the US, because I’ve got a team – graphic designers, photographers. I’ve worked with copywriters. I have an HR person, a CFO, lawyers, accountants. I’ve realized there are some tools that are kind of like baseline have to have.

One of the things that we did is we used Slack instead of email and Asana, those two tools. So Slack is very like our immediate messaging. A lot of you guys on this call probably already are using this tool.

James: Yeah. Definitely, you’re preaching to the choir.

Ben: Asana for project management. But there’s always somebody in the room who’s holding on to their email inbox, waking up every day with 150 emails.

James: You’re not from the email generation either, Ben.

Ben: No.

James: That’s one thing I noticed with my team. We had 60-something people in our business. We all had Google email accounts, and we were using Skype. I got the report on how many emails are sent and received. I had by far and away the most. I had like hundreds and hundreds. The next closest to me in my entire team over an entire month didn’t even crack 100 emails. I’m like, ‘What? What are they doing?’ And I found out they’re using Skype, and they’re using Viber, and they’re using any kind of messaging platform other than email. So Slack was a game changer for us because that’s how they communicate. And now, that’s how I communicate as well. So email is just cut right back to almost nothing.

I discovered that anyone in their 20’s is really far more message-centric. You can see the effort that Facebook are putting into converting us all to Messenger. With SnapChat, etc., and WhatsApp, these things have been so popular because that’s how people want to communicate.

Ben: Yeah.

James: So Slack and Asana. What else do you use? You’ve already mentioned Google sites. Do you still use those, or did you switch that across to Asana?

Ben: Yeah, we’re still using Google sites for all our SOPs. We embed videos in there. A lot of the times, like if somebody’s being onboarded, we’ll have an entire Asana project that’s dedicated to onboarding that position. We can make a copy of it, assign it to them, and then you can watch them check off all the different training modules for their job. Like in our business, we run our own fulfillment shipping center. So we have multi-step processes for every part, from printing the packing slip to shipping the package out the door. And that’s all done in our center in Florida.

We also built and opened our own retail store, which has been a really neat experience. I’m going to talk about that a little bit more at the conference.

James: Fantastic. Well, Sam Carpenter talks about, in Work the System, how you need to get your stakeholders onboard with these procedures and that they’re fluid. They constantly change. Do you have enough confidence now that the team are updating these things, and that you don’t have to create the SOPs? Because that’s one of the biggest concerns people have around them. They’ve got the tool and then they have this overload. ‘Wow, I’ve got to go and create all the steps.’ I found usually the team are going to create the standard operating procedures and maintain them way better than I do.

Ben: Definitely. And I think that’s why it’s so important that you have people in your team, especially if they’re in management, read and understand that book. Because sometimes you’ll be working with somebody, and they have past management experience, but it didn’t involve that type of team dynamic in modifying the standard operating procedures. And then you quickly find out that they’re becoming overwhelmed when they’re looking at just a number of modifications that have to take place.

In our shipping center, they probably manage at least 100 different pages within the wiki for everything, from how to take the trash out the right way to where you can go to update the billing information on the Stamps.com account. But these are all things that have to be done over and over again. If the managers can buy into the system and then get their teams to buy into the system to communally take ownership of our operating procedures, it makes everything just so much more streamlined.

James: Yes. And if you have strong systems, it allows you to hire people with very little experience because they can be trained, and that’s a huge difference. You can acquire them at a more reasonable wage rate. It puts less pressure on them because they don’t have to have five years in the exact same role somewhere else to be able to qualify for the job. All these nonsense criteria that people put on job descriptions.

Ben: And then it’s a great opportunity for those employees too to be able to kind of move up the ladder so that their next job they have after working for you can be something at even a higher level.

James: Oh of course. It’s all about letting them find their role within your business where they can truly tap into their skills. I mean I’m excited about this because I’m talking about that topic at SuperFastBusiness Live. I’m doing the whole session on Team and the Four Mistakes People Make. And I’m doing a whole session on Building a Business to Sell.

So scaling and team are absolutely hand-in-hand tied together. You don’t scale without team. You don’t have team without systems. So you’re speaking my language. What sort of challenges have you found being in a different part of the world to the bulk of your labor force?

Some challenges of working remote
Ben: Yeah. I think some of the biggest challenges are just kind of those daily touchpoint communications that people expect to have. Things like implementing set meeting structures. That way, when I’m in Bali and it’s one in the morning, and I’m too tired to be able to really process what’s going on, having the purpose, objective, agenda and deliverables, outline for meetings ahead of time has been big. Putting in a daily stand up, which I’m sure you’re going to talk about at the conference. One-on-ones with your team members on a monthly basis so that you can really touch in on everybody’s emotional state, personal state. Answering questions to make sure their voice feels heard. That’s one of the most important things.

Another book that I’ve read recently that has been really helpful is the book Nonviolent Communication, which kind of sounds like an intimidating title.

James: Is that about gestalt?

Ben: It’s about like how to effectively communicate with others in all kinds of situations. I’m not sure the term that you use.

James: It’s basically a description of that kind of language. It’s talked about in the entrepreneurs’ circles, but gestalt communication. It’s exactly that. It’s some very violent language that’s forceful. “You didn’t think to do this?” Stuff like that. “You must do this.” Or “You must do that.” Or “This is what you should do.” Those sort of word tracks create a horrible reaction with team members because it’s like you’ve taken away their ability to think. You haven’t really considered their point of view.

Ben: Exactly. I mean with NVC, you’re able to like express, “Here’s my needs. When you do this, it makes me feel this way. I need you to do X.” That makes it so much easier to communicate. I found myself sometimes when I’m trying to push, instead I need to just kind of step back and say, “Here’s what I need.” And then you end up having a more genuine conversation back and forth. You can understand their point of view and often get to the outcome that you desire in a much quicker and more peaceful way.

James: We’ll link to an article about gestalt language and why you need to know it. I appreciate the book review as well. I was also wondering if you’re doing anything like 4DX or OKRs. 4 Disciplines of Execution.

Ben: Yeah. I’m midway through that book right now, actually.

James: So it’s all good. That’s all good fun. It’s basically about everyone agreeing on what’s really important and knowing that they have the ability to impact it. And then having regular updates, because you mentioned meetings. If your meetings are based around how we’re moving towards our combined goal. OKR is Objectives and Key Results are what drive companies like Google. So it’s a great topic to get into. But not on this call. So challenges of having those meetings and interactions.

I also found, when you’re doing a new project, you often have to just commit to a lot more energy with regards to especially training and setting up the bumper rails to make sure people don’t slide into the gutters. It’s far more demanding. As my team gets older, as in they’ve been with me between five and seven years, it requires far less energy to run because they’re really on track now. They know exactly what they’re doing. They have context.

I’d be interested in how do you make decisions on what you should spend your day on. Do you have a routine? Is your calendar blocked out like a sad, life-sucking commitment schedule or is it fairly open?

How to spend the day
Ben: [laughs] That’s a good question. It depends on the time of the year and where I am. So like the first two and a half weeks of this year, I went to Bali. I just had almost 20 days by myself in my house with my hammock, and that was my agenda. I had a call activity in the morning and the evening, and I just gave myself that freedom. But for the last 12 days, I’ve been on a city-to-city tour. So I went from San Francisco to LA, to Las Vegas, to New York, to Austin, and I’ve had meetings almost breakfast, lunch, dinner, or conferences every day of the week.

So I kind of go back and forth between these two different paradigms. There’s a really good book on Polarity Management and how you can kind of balance these two parts of you: that part of you that kind of wants to be at a desk working or a part of you that wants to be out networking and how to balance that. Because as an entrepreneur, it can be really tough.

So some of the things that I’ve done to help manage that are I know what are the key meetings that I need to have with all the people on my team every week. And I make a priority to have those. And then I plan those out a week to 10 days in advance. That’s been really helpful. And then incorporating a lot of the most important things in my day that I can’t really go without, from having a little bit of a time by myself to answer and respond to emails, a call to my best friend, making time for a walk on the beach.

If I’m in Florida, I go paddle boarding every morning for an hour and a half and look for manatees and stingrays and starfish. So just incorporating nature into my life is a really important part too. Even though I’m travelling and I’m constantly in different time zones and cities, I try to make sure that those major blocks are kind of checked off on the calendar each week.

James: Yeah. That’s very soulful. I think it reflects through in your product. The thing that I notice about you is your chilled ness and your authenticity. I think you have a good story because it’s true, it’s soulful. You’ve genuinely seen an opportunity to be able to help people. And in order to help people, it’s OK to create value and to reinvest as you grow back into hiring more of the people who you’re helping and to put something good into the lives of your consumers because you’re obviously making a difference to them.

I’m sure some of your customers would buy jewelry because of the cause, marketing, the fact that they’re doing something nice. But the bulk of them are probably buying it because of getting something for themselves. But if everyone can win from that process, then that’s a lovely way to do it.

A recap
Just to recap, you’ve been able to take this as a 21 year old cruising around on your motorbike in Bali, you’ve been able to build this into a large, like a very substantial e-commerce business by setting up standard operating procedures using some tools like Google sites, Slack, and Asana.

You’ve studied and learned things like Work the System. You’ve understood about peak workflows and having time off and resting. You value learning and going to events. I don’t think you’re finished yet. I think you’re still scaling at a massive rate. I will ask you one question around hiring as you grow. How do you know who should hire next? What do you need the most?

Who to hire as you grow
Ben: That’s a really good question. One of the things that I always recommend to people is the iPad Pro. Here’s my product push for Apple. [laughs] The iPad Pro has this app called Paper, and it allows you to draw little circles, and then you can write names and roles in it. It gives you the ability to do org charts in a way that I can’t do on a whiteboard or on a sheet of paper, because on a sheet of paper, you can’t just move things around with your finger. So like, every other week, I’m making org charts and kind of experimenting with, what would it look like if I set up the organization in this way? Or added somebody here? Would that give somebody else more time?

At one point in my organization, we did this project. We had scaled our marketing team quite a bit. We hadn’t yet outsourced much to agencies yet. I wanted to really figure out what everybody on my team was spending their time on. So we started using a tool called Tracking Time that connected with Asana that allowed everybody to track the amount of times they were spending on different projects. That allowed me to say to my photographer or my graphic artist, “Hey, why don’t we go hire you an assistant who can do some of these projects, like our tabletop product photography that’s taking so much time out of your day to allow you to focus on higher level projects?” Things like that. So if I hadn’t done those tracking time things, I wouldn’t have been able to see what was really bogging down the time for my team.

And then just kind of looking to the future and asking other entrepreneurs, “How is your team set up?” And getting them to show you kind of like behind the curtain. That’s been a lot of the inspiration. I’ve shared job descriptions with people, and they’ve shared job descriptions back with me, and that’s helped.

The other thing that I highly recommend in a startup is every quarter, going in and having your team write their own job descriptions and then coming together and tweaking them so that they’re all kind of written in the same format. And you see how everybody’s jobs transition. When you grow as fast as we have, nobody’s doing the same thing quarter to quarter. It’s always evolving.

James: That’s the beauty of having a centralized impact goal. People can come at it from their angle. It’s just so simple, and it makes sense. I love what you’re doing. Gosh, it’s so funny because I always keep mapping my business over and over again when we went through various iterations of up to 10 different profit centers. I literally had to write it on the whiteboard over and over again to just drum it into my head because it’s all virtual. There’s nothing I could touch.

With our team in different various units, etc., it ended up making it easier for us to sell parts of the business because we knew which bits went where. So I’m going to be talking about that in both the team section and scaling a business. I’m just fascinated to see how aligned what you’re talking about is with what I’ve been experiencing. So there must be something to this.

How would you describe SuperFastBusiness Live to someone having already been to one before? What was interesting about the event for you?

Attending SuperFastBusiness Live
Ben: Oh man, the location is awesome, to start. It’s such a beautiful time of the year to be there. But the energy in the room was so cool. Everybody’s so excited to be there. I think, even just if I was in the room and I couldn’t hear anything anybody was talking about on the stage, it would be an incredible experience because you’re able to connect with some of the other people next to you who are opting in to be at this event to say, “Hey, how can I do something different or grow the business that I already have?” I think that expands your mind in so many ways.

Just being such a big conference as far as the speaker lineup goes with such an intimate setting, you have the ability to walk up and talk to the speakers afterwards, which is something that you don’t get to do at a lot of the bigger conferences that I go to in the US. So that was a really neat part of it.

James: Thank you. That’s very kind. Now if someone was interested in exploring Wanderer Bracelets, what is your most popular product? Which product would you direct people to to say, “Hey, get a feel for what we do.”

What to check out at Wanderer Bracelets
Ben: Facebook actually did a case study on us. That’s a cool one to check out. If you just type in Facebook case study Wanderer Bracelets on one of our ad campaigns last year, that’s neat to look up. And then on our product, you can go read our story page and then go to our All Products page.

One of my favorite products is our coordinates bracelet. When I was in college, I had the idea, because I wanted to give all of my buddies the coordinates of our favorite surf spot and I couldn’t find somebody that was making coordinates bracelets. I kind of kept that idea tucked in the back of my mind, and years later when I started this jewelry business, we started laser engraving the bracelets. We would make them in Bali, ship them over, and laser engrave them here in the US. That’s one of my favorites because like right now, I’m wearing the bracelet of where I met one of my best friends back in high school. I gave her a matching bracelet last week. It’s really special for us. I know that has brightened the lives of a lot of people in the US, because it allows them to keep that memory close. Valentine’s Day, those are very popular.

James: Oh, I can imagine.

Ben: A lot of guys scored some bonus points with those bracelets for sure.

James: Well, we’re recording this two weeks after Valentine’s Day, so we probably want to think of the next occasion. But know that if you’re supporting Wanderer Bracelets, you’re supporting villagers and you’re making this a great business.

Ben, thanks for coming along and sharing. This is really just a little window into stuff that we’ll be talking about in a couple of weeks. I want to thank you for putting aside the time. I’ll let you go back to whatever it is you’re up to wherever you are in the world. Look forward to seeing you in a few weeks.

Ben: Thanks so much. Looking forward to it.

James: That was Ben Katzaman from WandererBracelets.com. I’m James Schramko.

James and Ben are at SuperFastBusiness Live this March – learn more from them there

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