March 10, 2026 • 55 mins
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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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_01 (00:01):
Welcome back everybody to In the Loop.
What is up everybody?
My name is Michael Burpo.
Thanks again for listening to Inthe Loop.
This week we're having on CEOand co-founder of PunchMark,
Ross Cochran.
Ross is my boss, and it's reallycool to have him on.
We do this every few months.
(00:22):
Ross's diligent listener of Inthe Loop is probably listening
to this episode.
What's up, Ross?
And we talk all about what'sgoing on at Punchmark.
Talk about some things thatwe're really excited about, like
these payment gateways, and alsothis project that we're working
on together, this uh vendormarketing library, which I am so
excited to share with the restof the world.
Uh, and we also talk about likethe crossroads that we feel like
(00:45):
the jewelry is at right now.
Uh, we actually spend a lot moretime thinking about that than
you'd expect at Punchmark.
We think about like thetechnology landscape and where
Punchmark fits into that kind ofuh puzzle in the jewelry
industry, as well as how we canbetter serve the industry as a
whole uh in our role.
And you know, does that have toadapt?
(01:07):
Every year uh or every fewyears, I feel like Punchmark
kind of has to reinvent itselfand adapt with how technology
changes all the time.
And uh this year is nodifferent.
So please enjoy.
SPEAKER_00 (01:20):
This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the
jewelry industry's favoritewebsite platform and digital
growth agency.
Our mission reaches way beyondtechnology.
With decades of experience andlong-lasting industry
relationships, Punchmark enablesjewelry businesses to flourish
in any marketplace.
We consider our clients ourfriends, as many of them have
(01:41):
been friends way before becomingclients.
PunchMark's own success comesfrom the fact that we have a
much deeper need and obligationto help our friends succeed.
Whether you're looking forbetter e-commerce performance,
business growth, or campaignsthat drive traffic and sales,
Punchmart's website andmarketing services were made
just for you.
It's never too late to transformyour business and stitch
(02:02):
together your digital andphysical world in a way that
achieves tremendous growth andresults.
Schedule a guided demo today atpunchmark.com slash go.
And now back to the show.
SPEAKER_01 (02:21):
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 anepisode since September of last
year, and there's been a lot ofchanges.
And I like to have theseconversations with you uh
because it's very fun to get achance to see what you're
(02:45):
focused on.
I'm focusing on uh one layerdown, and it's maybe my hands
are kind of in the muck, but youget to be in the muck as well,
and also kind of seeing a higheroverview.
Um maybe could you just givelike a little recap on how was
the past uh, I guess, fivemonths since you were on last
(03:05):
time uh with Punchmark and alsojust with life?
SPEAKER_00 (03:09):
Well, um, a lot has changed in the last five months.
Um the biggest thing is that ourcompany, you know, due to
structure, due to um sort ofeliminating all of the things
that were necessities in ourplatform, um and now you know,
(03:31):
going from what you need to doto what you want to do.
So now Punchmark has beenoperating as a what we want to
do for the last probably sixmonths.
Um a little before then too, butwe're we're not really needing
to like fix as many bugs as weused to have to, or uh just do
the regular boring maintenancestuff.
(03:53):
Um so the heaviest lifting we'vebeen able to do has just we're
flying through it.
And and it is it has been adream to be able to release
features that actually matter.
Um, and we haven't had thislevel of speed in a long time.
And I know internal morale isup, client morale is way up.
We we're we're celebrating whatwe call our B back clients.
(04:14):
Uh, these are clients who haveleft Punchmark and then come
back to us.
And I think that's a biggest,the biggest testament to our
what our team has built, whatthe relationships of our
customer support team and thingslike that.
So um Tommy and Brian just cameback, and and Jason and Mana
just came back from a show uhwith Hope, our marketing
manager.
(04:35):
Um, and they they talked aboutanother 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 thingscombined, um it's like you go,
not like work was ever not fun.
I love what I do, but work isjust fun now.
You know, like everything we'reeverything we're we're just
(04:55):
rolling so much.
So, so that's the biggest changerecently is that we are flying
at speeds that we've reallynever been able to achieve
before.
SPEAKER_01 (05:06):
Yeah.
There's two different kind ofparts of that, just to like
clarify for even peoplelistening in.
Uh, I sometimes wonder how muchpeople relate to that uh from a
from a jewelry standpoint.
So for tech people, there'sthere's a couple different
things.
Sometimes we're working onfeatures that are uh we just
call them like infrastructure,and we don't even make
(05:28):
announcements about them becausewe can't.
Because, like, do you reallywant to hear about we spun up
another server or we uh made itso 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 asecond faster, uh, which you're
gonna load all your pagesfaster.
A lot of times, like that getsus fired up, but like we can't
(05:51):
brag about it because uhtruthfully it's just like very
unsexy.
But the other thing I think thatwas really interesting, uh, to
kind of touch on it, where we'rekind of developing features, is
we almost hit it for better orfor worse.
We got into this part of theyear at the end of every year,
uh which is uh right aroundOctober, middle of October,
(06:14):
where we put in almost like acode freeze.
It's not technically a codefreeze, but it kind of acts as
one, where we don't release uhsensitive uh releases uh around
the holidays.
It's no secret that retailers doa ton of their business in in
e-commerce in November andDecember, and we would hate to
interrupt that.
Not that we, you know, wouldever release anything broken,
(06:37):
but it could.
And as a result, a lot of thesethings were just like kind of so
close to being done, and we justdidn't release them before uh
November because we just didn'twant to risk it.
And now we're doing it.
It's January, we're just we wejust dropped in a whole bunch of
stuff.
Um, I wanted to ask you aboutthe one that I think was kind of
I'm most excited about.
(06:57):
It took a lot of work.
Brian's been working on itforever.
I want to talk about paymentgateways.
Uh, maybe not sexy sounding, butcan you um can you kind of
explain what that is and whywe're so excited about it?
SPEAKER_00 (07:09):
Yes.
Um, it's again, like you saidbefore, it's one of the
infrastructural things um thatisn't really like the fun,
interactive, you know, jewelryshopping sort of platform
features.
Um, this is more of like thebaseline of, you know, uh what
happens at the background andhow we connect to other payment
gateways.
So like boring, right?
(07:29):
But uh at the same time, I thinkthe sexiest thing to a business
person is a better PL report.
And if you if you don't createfriction and be at the point of
sale, right?
At the you go where the customeris, like that's step number one
in in marketing and in inbusiness.
But number two is don't get inyour own way, right?
(07:51):
If someone comes up to you andsays, um, hey, I have uh just
rolls of quarters, can I can Ibuy with that?
I mean, that's kind of annoying,but at the same time, you can't
be like, no, we don't takewhat's a quarters here, right?
So we we have we have to gowhere the customer feels
comfortable.
And what's cool about what weI'll I'll paraphrase it with
just the the weight of uh youknow the the integrations that
(08:15):
we're adding to our checkout.
Um number one, Apple Pay.
Um and then Link, Klarna, uhGoogle Pay, um, you know, even
uh, you know, other like uhSamsung Pay, right?
Even things that aren't reallylike widely used.
But we're going if if a customerfeels comfortable there and they
(08:36):
have all their data there, umwhat's cool with Link is if
you're if you've checked outwith Link before anywhere on any
other platform, um your yourstuff is remembered.
So it's just the ease ofcheckout.
And you're like, wait, how is myhow is my card taped?
Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01 (08:52):
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 thejukebox at a bar.
I I get touch tune credits.
I spend 15$15 over the course oflike a blink of an eye.
And that's what people do withjewelry.
It's like impulse.
Oh, I gotta buy this.
SPEAKER_00 (09:09):
Boop, boop, two buttons, double tap, and you're
in.
Right?
I mean, that's the thing is youknow, we joke about good UI.
And what good UI, you know, auser interface, what a good user
experience does is it makes itcould make the you know,
unforgettable moment happenwhere it's like, wait, did I
just buy a piece of jewelry formy wife?
(09:32):
I I guess I did.
I guess I did.
Um, she now has a$2,600bracelet, cool, you know, like
and that's that's what we want.
Like, we don't want it to beoops, right?
But I mean, if if we take allthe friction out of the
experience and make it just soeasy for a customer to buy
something, then hey, that's itmight equate to anywhere from 5%
(09:52):
more sales to 50% more sales.
I mean, who knows?
Sky's the limit, really, on whatthe rate of increase is from
what we've added there.
But um, you know, people havebeen asking, clients have been
asking, it's no secret, uh, forApple Pay and things like that
to be added.
Um, we've had quite a fewdifferent um, you know,
integrations in the past, butthat was one, that was one of
(10:14):
the mic drops that we're lookingto add to the platform.
So anyway, very excited aboutthis.
It's also very streamlined.
Um, and and it's it's like a uhan express checkout that's all
in one page, right?
Whereas before it was like stepone, shipping, step two,
billing, step three.
Like there was it was just too,you know, more friction, right?
You want to make this soseamless so that they enter
(10:35):
something, they click a button,they click another button, and
they're and they're done.
And they have they alreadyordered the piece, you know?
SPEAKER_01 (10:40):
And it's and it comes at a very opportune time.
And I did a whole episode onthis, so I don't need to rehash,
but uh just to kind of compoundon it, I just got the
leaderboard, uh, we call it theleaderboard, um, the e-commerce
report for the punchmarkplatform for the month of
February.
We're recording this on March5th, so I get it on uh the th
(11:02):
the first Thursday of the nextmonth, and it spits everything
out.
And I mean, this is not evenexaggerating.
Uh this February 2026 is up 33and a quarter percent over last
year's February, which is youknow, which was about the same
as the February before that.
(11:23):
And January was up 47% over lathe year before that's uh
January.
And it's just more clients aremaking sales, more clients are
making what we call many sales,that's like 10 or more sales.
And then I'm just thinking it'salso crazy.
The um the average order value,that's what I look at the most
(11:45):
of AOV.
AOV is uh at seven, it's over$700 uh for our platform.
So we only do jewelry, uh, weonly do do jewelry e-commerce,
and as a result, we get a veryuh boiled down look at what the
jewelry industry is showing.
And I think that the$700 AOV isvery telling.
(12:08):
It's that people have a trust incommerce, they are trusting uh
where jewelry's at.
And what's funny is we're seeinglike the same number of sales um
as the year before as far aslike total transactions, but we
are definitely seeing um largertransactions.
So I'm hoping these new paymentgateways will kind of just add
fuel to the fire.
(12:28):
And we haven't even seen likethe full results of them yet.
And I I'm kind of lookingforward to seeing if we get like
a little hockey stick kind ofmotion 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 thehistory as one of the founders
of e-commerce, when Brian, mybrother and our CTO came on
board, um actually quite a longtime before he actually came on
board, um, 2011, he helped usbuild our first e-commerce
engine in our platform.
(12:58):
And the first things that weresold were beads, right?
And these beads were like 68bucks and 86 bucks and 90 bucks,
and that was it.
And it was just little, youknow, little people weren't
really buying jewelry onlineback then.
And yes, it was happening,right?
It was happening on the largerstores, it was happening on some
of the other independent storesthat really set their website up
(13:20):
for perfect e-commerce.
Like you needed to emulate trustlike so much to even be able to
get a purchase over$100.
And the average transaction uhvalue 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 downto maybe$550.
(13:41):
It's you know, but we've watchedit.
I go, I remember when it was$275and 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 awhole podcast episode on it, but
you know, the influence of theprice of gold, things like that
affect everything and the wholeindustry.
(14:02):
Um, but I like to see thatbecause the average order value
is a huge metric that basicallyshows you're getting more for
every single transaction andevery single interaction with
your customers, you're actuallymaking more out of it.
So there's more profitabilityjust by the time propo, you know
what I mean, uh proportion ofhow much you spend time, like if
(14:24):
you're selling a bunch of beadsversus, 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 tome.
I I I'd want to put the watchon, but that's just me, I guess.
I I'm not everybody apparently.
But uh I kind of want to keeptalking about like new things
we're developing because that'skind of how I'm sort of uh
framing this episode.
And one of the things that we'vegotten to work on in is that uh
(14:53):
it's always cool sitting downand working on a project with
you because you have uh like thekeys to to the kingdom, you you
can develop on our what we calladmin, it's our like
infrastructure and you can buildthings at the root.
Whereas if you work with youknow the development team,
sometimes they have to gothrough a whole system.
(15:16):
And a lot of times if we work onsomething together, um, for
example, when we worked in um inHubSpot making these uh drip
campaigns, it was I felt like wewere moving very fast and there
was a lot less red tape.
One of the things that we'reworking on is this vendor
marketing library.
Are you able to set this up andand maybe frame how it's gonna
(15:38):
impact our clients?
SPEAKER_00 (15:39):
Yes, absolutely.
Um, this is something um so justto step back a little bit, back
in 2000, it was around 2011 whenwe started it, Dan uh Dan and I,
um, when the company was onlythat little, um, and we a Jason
came on that year in 2011.
But um around that time, betweenthen and 2012-13, we continued
(16:03):
to refine it, but we created aum uh what we called it a social
distribution network, and it wascalled the retail marketplace.
Vendors would log in, they'd beable to upload their products,
import spreadsheets, uh, andthen manage retailers, and
they'd be able to manage uh, youknow, requests for access to
(16:23):
their assets.
So if somebody said, Hey, I wantaccess to you know, to Corey or
A Jaffee or Kelly Waters, they'dsay, you know, yes, they'd log
in, approve it, et cetera.
And we had a marketing engineback then when a vendor could go
in and add, say, a marketingbanner.
And then when a retailer loggedinto their website, if they were
(16:46):
approved for that brand, they'dbe 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 spotsfor them.
And retail could just easily addthis to their web to their
website with the click of abutton.
Now we're we're rebuilding thatin a much more modern way.
(17:08):
Um, we're not fixing, it's nolonger fixed on very specific
key points of your website, likea homepage banner or a footer
ad, whatever that was in thepast.
Um so so now it's there are justseveral different formats, and
we rebuilt it in a way wherevendors can just log in, upload
(17:28):
whatever you know, marketingassets they have, whether it's
for billboards or whatever, andthen the system just
automatically, you know, puts itin a certain format and saves
it, and then the vendor can addtags like you know, ladies or
engagement or men's or fashionor gemstone.
So what's cool about this is umit's leaning right back into our
(17:53):
vendor relationships and thepower of that, right?
So, you know, you have a lot ofuh sort of a trickle-down
methodology when one uh aone-to-many ratio, when a vendor
logs in and uploads something,they're affecting essentially
500 different retailers who canaccess that.
If a vendor goes in and takes10, 15 minutes, updates one of
(18:15):
their prices, then it affects500 people.
You know, so there's a lot, it'slike a ripple in the water,
right?
You have these vendors now whohave a lot more, let's say,
exposure uh potential.
So they can go on into thevendor portal on punchmark.com,
update their retailers, theirmarketing, their products, their
(18:36):
settings.
Um, and instantly they can see aresponse from that.
And so that's one thing I'm veryexcited about, in addition to
the library, um vendors havingdirect access uh to add and edit
all of their marketingresources.
Um, but in addition to that,being able to have a view of
(18:57):
what consumers are doing withtheir products, right?
So that's so exciting to mebecause while for a read from a
retailer standpoint, retailersdon't really care one way or
another what a vendor sees, butat the same time, this becomes
so much more valuable to thevendor.
So now the vendor'sparticipation level goes up like
(19:18):
150% in some cases, where peopleweren't logging in that often
before.
Now, like we just pulled areport recently, and there were
28 vendors that logged in in thelast week.
And this is very excitingbecause more engagement from
vendors equals more engagementfrom, you know, making sure
products are even that much moreup to date.
(19:39):
New marketing is in there, andretailers are super happy with
the automation um and just thethe mechanics behind the scenes
that are just happening on theirwebsite 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 tobuilding 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 retailerrelationship?
(20:16):
Because what I've learned fromactually talking to people that
are not in the jewelry industry,is that that relationship does
not really exist in otherindustries very often, or uh
I've never heard of it actually.
So, for example, thatrelationship where uh you're
going to be like essentiallyreselling this product, well,
the the vendors one of thevendors I talked to recently,
(20:39):
they were telling me that theyalready have a platform similar
to what we were just talkingabout when it comes to they oh
yeah, we put all of our imagesthere, it's like a drop box, and
then we can see how many timespeople download them.
Well, what's really interestingis that suddenly if you put it
uh in the vendor portal in thismarketing library, uh it already
(21:00):
exists in their assets and theydon't have to go anywhere else.
Then when they're building alanding page for their
engagement rings or theirseasonal collections, they can
just go in and just like see alltheir vendor images, and then
they find the one that they likethe best, and they sort by
engagement and then they'llstart pulling it down, and
hopefully they're updated.
(21:21):
One thing I've learned ismarketing images are so
expensive to make.
I guarantee these vendors arespending uh it's not$1,000 on
these things.
That way they're spending uh, Imean, probably five digits,
maybe even six digits on acampaign.
And using that, what's a betterreturn on investment is people
(21:42):
actually using them and drivinginterest in that product, in
that product line.
And when they start engaging,that's what I have always
wanted.
When I was helping design sitemanager initially with version
six, my goal was I wanted sitemanager to be open on every
retailer's.
Um computer all the time,always.
(22:04):
And I thought that that would beour a wonderful thing, is if
like we just have them open itall the time.
And then with this one, it'slike I want the vendors to be
thinking about the vendor portalall the time.
And if they can just startputting stuff in there, well,
suddenly it's like adding fuelto the fire.
I'm I'm very excited about wherewe're going with it.
(22:26):
I think as people start using itmore, it's just going to propel
itself even more.
SPEAKER_00 (22:30):
Agreed.
And, you know, that's that's avery common problem that we're
solving here, you know, in thesame breath of the a similar
problem that we solve forretailers, where they
historically had to manageseparate inventories, right?
And they have their inventory intheir store and then their
inventory in their website,right?
And we we know that problem, andthat problem still exists for a
lot of retailers who don't havepoint of sale integration, which
(22:53):
is crazy to me.
Just adding, they're just likeindebting themselves with with
work that they're just gonnacontinue to have to do.
And so, in that same sense, withvendors, when you tell a
retailer, the minute you tellsomeone they have to go work, it
you like enslave them to thefuture, 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 Itell 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 yourwebsite.
Super easy.
Now, the retailer sits there andspends 15 minutes, an hour,
three hours getting the stuff ontheir website.
Finally, it's good.
They're like, cool, Imerchandise this, everything's
(23:38):
good.
Next month, the price of goldgoes up goes up to$6,500, right?
Like, what do you do?
Now the retailer's like, no, Igotta spend another five hours
changing these.
Hey, they reach out to thevendor, do you have new prices?
Oh, yeah, you could download thesheet here, and then they have
to download it, and then theyhave to do it again and spend
another, maybe it's only 30minutes this time.
But still, you see the point.
(24:00):
It's if every single vendor whoI've talked to that says, Oh,
yeah, it's the it's the funniestconversation.
First thing they say, they shrugtheir shoulders and say, Oh, we
got that covered.
Yeah, we have a Dropbox with allour stuff.
And then I ask the question, howoften do people actually do use
it when you send it, when yousend the data to someone?
Okay, tell me your success inactually getting this on
(24:22):
websites.
And they'll say, Oh, well, nowthat you say it, probably out of
the last 50 that I sent, I thinkone, I think one person like
it's tremendously like justineffective, right?
So so that's why I'm so happythat we have this system that we
just we help vendors, we helpretailers.
It's same same principle as thecheckout.
(24:42):
Go where the customers go.
The vendors can go where theretailers go.
They're already logging intotheir website.
Now they just have to click abutton and add the banner.
Like it's so anyway, I I'm giddyabout this release because it
means a lot to our vendors andto our retailers, our entire
platform and the ecosystem we'vecreated thus far.
SPEAKER_01 (24:59):
And where I'm I think is it won't even reveal
itself because like immediatelyuntil they go to build
something.
What's fascinating is that weare um starting to market to
vendors, and and like and bymarket, I mean like we do uh
feature releases and emailblasts to our clients.
Uh, and by clients we refer toour retailers, and we're sending
(25:22):
them stuff, hey, new features insite manager, new things.
But then I have started tomarket and send things directly
to our vendors, which issomething we've never really
done before, like the subsect ofemails that we just have never
uh reached out to as often.
I can do it on a one-to-onebasis, but now we're actually
(25:43):
starting to be like, hey, um, wegot a new feature coming, it's
really exciting.
What's fascinating is thatsometimes someone's gonna put
something in there and uh maybethe 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 MichaelJewelers, me, uh, I'm gonna sit
(26:07):
down with um Ross's uh jewelryline, 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 yourimage library.
And then when it goes to buildwith it, they're already there.
And then it's just like, it's aone-stop shop, it's right where
(26:30):
they are, and I'm so excited forthat experience.
I feel like that's the level ofin user experience they use this
term delight.
Um, I can't wait until thatmoment of delight where it's
like, oh, I don't have to go toDropbox and then download things
and then sort through them andthen put them up.
They're right in my my files, myimage library.
And uh that moment is going tobe very soon.
(26:52):
And the first time I see ithappen, 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 atthe fact that we had a proof of
concept where this was workingreally well.
Um, I remember even helping thevendors out and protecting them
when uh, like for instance, wehad a vendor, I think it was
John Hardy, if I remembercorrectly.
They had the rights to usePenelope Cruise in their
(27:17):
marketing.
And it was beautiful ads, right?
There's great, like, as youwould expect, lifestyle images,
very like close shots on thejewelry itself.
Um, and then they had they hadthe rights to use her name and
likeness until like, I don'tknow, March 2015 or 14 or
something like that.
And so they had to take they hadto take that out of everything.
(27:39):
So we had to sort of help thempolice that and and enforce that
and take Penelope Cruise off of500 websites, right?
I mean, maybe not all 500, butwe had a lot of people using it.
And so um anyway, I I I the bothsides of the playing field are
covered here, you know, forvendors who need to maintain
(28:01):
restrictions and you know,strict guidelines on their
assets, especially those thatthey have legal rights to for a
determined amount of time.
And then for vendor forretailers who actually get to
use these and just with theclick of a button.
So um anyway, I think we've goneon a while about this, but I I'm
very excited about um how thiswill replay, considering we've
(28:23):
done this before, but this islike V2, you know, uh a whole
new version of it with AIinjected 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 onit as as well as we could, maybe
like 85% of of possible umlooting of it or taking of it, I
guess, was you know, suddenlypeople had their storefronts
(28:55):
shut down and they needed toswitch to an e-commerce platform
and like take advantage of theonline sphere.
And we were there and we reallyleaned into it.
And now I also think we'reseeing a much it's it's less
visible.
I mean, like COVID was very uhin your face.
I think that right now you'realso seeing that.
(29:15):
I think that 2026 is a very,very uh important year,
impactful year for the jewelryecosystem and for especially for
jewelry tech providers rightnow.
Uh I talked with Dan on I have aone-on-one with him every month,
and uh on Friday I spoke withhim.
I was like, what do you what doyou feel about this right now?
(29:37):
And he's so fired up about aboutAI and how it's changing his
lifestyle, and it's how um andhe just feels like good about
where Punchmark is.
Can you talk to me about whereyou think what you think 2026
will look like from the outside?
Because I I think you might evenhave a a slightly different view
on it, too.
SPEAKER_00 (29:58):
Yes, um, I'm glad you brought up Dan because um,
you know, for those who knowhim, don't know him, uh he and I
founded the company in 2008.
And a lot of our success, infact, I'll just say most of our
success was based on Dan'svision to create just a an
(30:19):
unparalleled experience.
Um, we were making flashwebsites back then, right?
And we had just such a beautifulexperience compared to what was
actually out at that time.
Um, the way this experienceevolved, and the same way Daniel
evolved at the same time, um,has been a beautiful thing.
And watching him as our chiefproduct officer, uh, you know,
(30:43):
basically running the productthrough rigorous uh sort of
gauntlets of uh, you know,different elements that are
added while while technologycontinues to evolve, right?
So 2000 2013, it was like createa mobile version of your site.
And there was like a specialmobile version that only showed
when you were on a mobiledevice.
(31:04):
It was kind of like an app, andand then just responsive design
in 2014-15, and then you know,moving on to new things and all
taking advantage of some of thegroundworks, like the bootstrap
library, the jQuery library.
Dan headed up all of that andhis ability to work with CSS,
cascading style sheets for thosewho don't know, and complex
(31:25):
HTML, um, in addition to beingable to do whatever he wants in
this landscape, right?
Um, also, obviously, credit toour designers that, you know,
have been, you know, pushing alot of the you know beautiful
designs.
And then Dan will style it upand and make it nifty, right?
Um, so through that, and I'm notI'm not discounting Tom either.
Tom is our front-end developerwho does a lot of CSS and things
(31:48):
now, and he's amazing.
Um, but now Dan is you he's likeon steroids now.
You he has interacted with AI ina way that people just wish they
could do.
First of all, Dan has alwaysbeen an absolute workhorse, like
a workhorse.
Yeah.
(32:08):
And he he works too hard.
So um, but he he the stuff hegets done, it's like a
steamroller that just cannot bestopped.
So I wanted to make uh take asecond to kind of you know pay
homage to my co-founder becausehe's he's amazing, right?
Now he has these tools and somany of these new features that
(32:31):
have just rolled out.
He's like, all right, check thisout.
I need a code review on this onewhile 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 tothe street, he always knows what
a system needs.
Um, and when he doesn't know, hefinds out, he researches, he
dives in, he looks at what otherpeople are doing, what other
(32:52):
trends are happening.
And yes, the jewelry tech worldis at a serious crossroads right
now.
Um, we have some new playerscoming into the game, but more
importantly, we have consumerexpectations changing on a daily
basis.
Daily basis.
Consumer experience is changingon a monthly basis, which app
(33:12):
they use.
Now they're using ChatGPT tofind where they where to buy
jewelry.
And and you could say, you know,a consumer might not know what a
you know vintage cathedralsetting is or you know, what a
bangle bracelet is, but if if hestarts talking to his agent and
he and this, he's like, listen,my wife likes these huge
(33:34):
bracelets, and it's like, Ithink you're referring to cuff
bracelets.
Oh, yeah, actually, that soundsabout right.
So a cuff, yeah, sound soundslike an appropriate name.
So anyway, I she likes yellowgold, she likes cuffs.
And she might say, Oh, did youknow, right, that Falls Jewelers
in Canapolis has great cuffbracelets and bangle bracelets,
all in yellow gold.
(33:55):
Would you like to check it out?
And you're like, of course,sure.
And you're gonna trust itbecause this is the agent that
you as a consumer, as uh anovice, you know, poet, you're
you're writing things,co-writing things, it knows you.
So now it's gonna it's gonnamake recommendations that you
trust.
And if it says, go to FallsJewelers, right?
(34:17):
Go to Barnett Jewelers, go toArezzo Jewelers in Chicago, um,
you're it's you're gonna trustit.
You're gonna listen to it.
And even if you go and do yourother searching, I'm like, well,
you know, Claude told me to gohere, so I'm gonna go here, or
Siri told me to go here, so I'mgonna go here.
And AEO is a major, major thingthat you know we're rolling out
(34:40):
in our platform.
Other platforms aren't going tohave this initially, and so
that's just one of the manythings that have just changed
the whole shape of how the techworld is is running in jewelry.
SPEAKER_01 (34:54):
What's really interesting about that, what you
just talked, Sean, you just wentover like the last 15 years of
online business.
You talked about like going inand it's like suddenly mobile,
mobile design.
Well, in 2011, when you guysstarted, mobile shopping was not
(35:15):
uh really a needle mover at all.
But then in 2013 it was, andthere was kind of like a again,
a little fork in the road.
Do we dive into this or do wenot?
Very easily, and many peopledidn't dive into it.
Well, in case you didn't know,mobile shopping accounts for uh
increasingly larger uhproportion of the proportion of
(35:38):
the uh of the online shoppinglandscape, but then it doesn't
stop there.
It was about appearing higher inuh search engines.
Well, maybe you go all in onsearch engines.
Now, in case you didn't know, uhGoogle's lunch is getting eaten
up by these um answer engine opuh answer engines.
So, like when you query a AI,they are answering a question,
(36:04):
and that's kind of what Googlewas 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 AmericanDisabilities Act, I've talked
about ad nauseum in the past,but what's fascinating is that
some uh platforms didn't diveinto it.
It is not sexy, it is notsomething we really can market
(36:27):
that well because it's therules, you have to have it.
Well, Dan just one one or twomonths uh just sat there and
just face tanked it and wentthrough and did all of the work
we had to get done.
But what's really exciting, andto give people kind of a peek
behind the curtain on on this onthe development team right now,
(36:50):
what's fascinating is we'venever had this problem, which is
our current bottleneck is nothow much features we can uh
develop and write, and it's notthe bugs and making sure that
it's the QCing is looking good,it's just making sure that
someone has the time to reviewit and then QC it and then get
(37:11):
it out the door.
So it's it's a different problemthat 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 moredevelopers?
What does that look like?
That was a problem when Istarted.
Like, what if what if Punchmarkjust suddenly had a hundred
million dollars come out of thesky and we just hired a ton of
(37:31):
developers?
Now I don't even think we wouldspend it on developers, we would
probably just have peopleclicking all the buttons and
making sure that it works andthen getting them out the door.
And that is so exciting thatfeatures are ready to come out,
and it's something that I findvery exciting, and I hope that
other people do too, even ifthey're not impacting you on the
(37:53):
day-to-day.
But like, for example, you talkabout AEO, those accordions,
that is the most needle-movingone, and we didn't even talk
about it that much.
Like the fact that it's likehaving 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 youknow just common sense, right?
Have an FAQ page, ask a questionand answer it, right?
Um, don't get crazy, like who'sthe best jeweler in Los Angeles,
right?
It's um that's a little bit, youknow, kind of misleading in a
way.
But if you if you focus on yourstrengths, right?
(38:30):
If you're really good at customjewelry, um, you start creating
an FAQ or the accordion tabs of,you know, like how long does it
take to start a custom jewelryproject?
And like each project is likeyou're giving the you're giving
AI all these tools to have acomprehensive look into your
business.
And, you know, when you saythings like, you know, most
(38:52):
clients will drop off theirpiece and do this and get it
back within like two weeks, andthat's you know, they come in
for the great reveal.
And then you you can word ithowever you want, and AI will
have your back because it likeit it will, if someone asks a
very specific question and says,you know, do you make engage, I
(39:14):
don't know, something crazy.
Like, do you make an engagementring while I wait?
Like, no, you don't.
So maybe one company does thiscrazy thing and can fabricate,
no, I it's probably impossible,but what I'm getting at is if
you have a strength and you showit on your website, you will
come up for that question.
And you might not come up for aquestion that you don't really
(39:36):
care about.
So you it it's it's similar,it's all appropriated based on
like what what your strengthsare.
And if you set up your websiteto 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 apage.
There's a schema and a deepschema that like you need set up
(39:59):
in the background so that AIreally understands that sort of
question-answer uh you knowstructure and and uh
architecture.
SPEAKER_01 (40:08):
Yeah.
It's I I think of it aspositioning.
It's like, you know, we talkabout chess a lot.
Like chess, it's it's not aboutjust the pieces that you have,
it's also about how are theypositioned.
And there's like positions ofstrength and the positions of
weakness.
Well, I I like to think thatPunchmark is doing the
(40:30):
positioning for our clients, andthen it's up to them to move the
pieces around.
But if you have a very, youknow, a secure king and like you
know, your pawn structure iswonderful, well, suddenly the
game feels easier.
And I think that that's kind ofwhere we've gotten with the
developments in the background.
(40:52):
Sometimes I I mean I I think yousee it with with the e-commerce
reports.
Every single we've we've had uhit's just about 12 yeah, 12
months in a row where weoutperformed the year before.
And I I hope that's gonnacontinue.
I I don't know, maybe wecontinue forever.
(41:13):
But it's just really quite uhquite exciting to see how when
you rise to meet technologychange, I think it puts you in a
very strong bargaining position.
And I think that's kind of wherewe'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 havethese conversations with you,
what's getting you fired up?
Because sometimes I feel like weare talking about we're just you
know talking about how awesomewe are and and and and all this
tech advancement.
And sometimes we lose the pointof like, what is your what are
(41:50):
you passionate about in in thebusiness?
Uh can you kind of like maybereveal 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 youknow fancy little things that
we're building, um, that's notthe thing that excites me the
most.
The thing that always excites methe most is client success.
And a lot of people say that.
A lot of people say, oh, we'rewe're you know, we're geared for
(42:18):
our clients, our client'ssuccesses, our own success.
I've I've even said those wordsbefore, and I I truly believe
it.
Um but when when you actuallydouble down on it, when you
actually do the work and theeffort to align your business,
align your success with yourclient's success, um, that
(42:39):
becomes an amazing thing.
We've done that in um certainmilestones, right?
So 2020, when COVID hit, we hadto create a whole service and
ticketing system.
And we we weren't able to keepup before then.
And as soon as we did that, wewe leveled up a lot to help our
clients with the things thatthey needed, like fixing, right?
(43:00):
Now it's not about fixinganymore.
So what's cool about it is we'reanother generation in.
So think about that level ofservice in clients, but the
level of customer service goingup a notch to now what's next.
Same thing that I talked aboutearlier when we started.
We're doing less of what we needto do and more of what we want
to do.
So now it's like, what do youwant to do?
(43:22):
What do you want out of yourbusiness?
You know, and and I I've neverbeen such a big proponent as a
founder about walking away frommy business when I can, because
you want a business that's goingto operate on its own so that
you can enjoy your life withyour kids, with your family,
create experiences, right?
(43:42):
What else are we doing all thisfor?
And I've done several talks ongrowth and you know how to
structure and scale yourbusiness.
And my last talk last year atone of the RJO shows was scaling
your business and regaining yourlife.
And I'm very passionate aboutthat.
So What I'm happiest about isnot only can we create tools
(44:03):
that help people be able to lettheir website run on autopilot,
but the biggest change recentlywas our account management
update, repositioning our entirecompany structure for our client
success, right?
So we're going from reactive toproactive.
SPEAKER_01 (44:21):
Proactive.
Talk about that for a second.
When it comes to that mightsound like a mindset shift, but
there's actually was like actualstructural changes that went
into the team.
And it took like a lot of work,if I remember correctly.
SPEAKER_00 (44:40):
And a lot of time.
This is this is about a year anda half to two years in the
making.
Um, we we had been talking aboutthis for a while, strategizing
about it high-level,brainstorming about it.
And then we'd be like, we're notready for that.
Like it's a big step.
We had to hire around it.
We had to create systems aroundit.
We had to ask customers whatthey wanted.
(45:02):
We had to ask our retailers whatthey essentially wanted and
understand this even more andmore and more.
And finally, um, we were ableto, we had all the strategy
essentially created by, youknow, probably around the last
time we had this podcast, ourlast podcast, um, October,
September, October.
Um, and then we launched it likefirst of the year.
(45:24):
And the biggest change we didwas we hired more tech support
help so that we could take ouraccount managers who were doing
essentially everything, right?
Tech support, client relations,reaching out, answering phone
calls.
They they were doing so muchwork work that they couldn't
(45:45):
think about why they were doingthings and how to help customers
and asking, what do you reallywant out of this?
Right.
So it was like, okay, yeah, Ifixed that.
Now your banner's good, or ohyeah, I fixed that, now your
products are okay.
Like, oh yeah, you had a straycategory on there.
Fix, fix that, done, done withthat.
That was all our accountmanagers were doing.
Now our tech support is stilldoing that actually more rapidly
(46:07):
because of the new pivotalchange and promoting junior as a
ticket team manager.
Um, and then having our accountmanagers do actual proactive
outreach.
And, you know, the the reason wedid this is because this is a
this is a funny sort ofnarrative that that happens.
A retailer will typically, uhnot just retailers, business
(46:30):
owners typically look tostreamline their operations in
the cheapest way possible.
And I and I'm not I'm notdiminishing anybody.
I'm just saying that's we alllook to say, what can we do for
the least amount of money, leastamount of investment?
And sometimes you're like, allright, we're yeah, that's a
hundred bucks a month.
I got four hundred bucks amonth.
Easy.
But then there's opportunitycosts.
Then there's like, what am Ileaving on the table by going
(46:53):
with the cheap route?
So what else is out there?
So they find a website companylike Punchmark that they partner
with and they do more with us.
And they're like, whoa.
So what we're doing now ishere's what's here's what's
ironic about that.
A retailer might say, Yeah, Ihave a website.
Like someone who doesn't have aPunchmark website, they'll say,
Oh, yeah, yeah, I have thatcovered.
I have a website, my website'sgreat.
(47:13):
But they they don't evenunderstand what they're missing
and what's you know, the leadgeneration that's not happening,
the opportunities, theappointments, the walk-ins, the
results, the wish listnotifications, all the things
that are churning in thebackground.
And so people tend to just kindof shrug it away and say, Yeah,
I got that covered.
Now, what our account manager isdoing now is reaching out
(47:35):
because running a retail jewelrybusiness is the most demanding
thing outside of restaurants,probably.
Like anything retail, you'redealing with customers who are
coming into your store.
There's just, there's, there's awhole long, and then you have
services and products and allkinds of other things and
security, right?
You're running an operationthat's pretty multi-pronged.
Now, you don't have all the timeto kind of like step back and
(47:57):
let's let's analyze the websitetoday and see how that's
generating new leads for us.
And let's look for optimizationopportunities and figure out how
our navigation can fit.
Like maybe once in a blue, likemaybe once, twice a year, you're
gonna say, oh, wait, thatcategory's broken and you're
gonna be reactive and you'regonna say, fix that category.
Not like how can we reframe thisin a way that customers are
(48:18):
going to respond andtransactions will increase,
right?
And so, and and then how do youstay on top of every new
feature?
Because if if you're like on uha website platform over here and
they have all these featuresthat they're releasing, you're
how do you stay on top of that?
Yeah, so that's why so evenfirst of all, it's awareness.
Second of all, it's takingadvantage and having the time to
(48:40):
take advantage of it.
Now, the biggest win that ouraccount managers have been able
to achieve is our websitestrategy meetings.
Now, these are gold.
And I say that because we're nowbeing goal-oriented, like I
said, aligning our success withour customer, with our client
success.
Now, there's there's five stepsto this essentially, right?
(49:03):
Being goal-oriented to ourclients.
Like this is what this means.
Step one, we're gonna run anaudit on your website and we're
gonna look, we're gonna do someautomation, we're gonna run some
AI things, we're gonna have somescripts on our on our server
that does things, checks forbroken things, looks for
misspellings.
Oh, you misspelled the wordjewelry on your on your uh
buying goal buying event.
(49:24):
So we're gonna we're gonna lookthose up, find those, identify
those, and then bring those tothe meeting and say, hey, by the
way, we're gonna fix these foryou, like free of charge.
Like this is just an easy win.
So we're gonna run audits, thenin our meeting, we're gonna
collect goals.
Now, this is the most importantpart of it.
To interface with you, we wantto know.
We don't want to sort ofmansplain what we think you
(49:46):
should your business needs.
Although, look, I'm not takinganything away from our crazy
experience you know in theindustry or with tech.
But we can guess and probably beclose.
We'll be close, but we want toknow what you want.
Like, what do you want?
How do you want your business toimprove, to increase?
Um, or do you want to just havea lifestyle business that you
(50:07):
don't even want a revenue goal?
You just want to be able to, youknow, 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 winsthat we found and that you've
might have brought up to us too.
And then step four is coming upwith short and long-term
strategies.
(50:28):
Now, looking at, I mean, it it'sit's easy when you know what
your goals are.
I think one of the hardestthings 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 goingin that direction.
But a lot too many times we'relike, yeah, I might want to do
(50:50):
that.
I might want to carry multiplebrands, I might want to be like
more of a custom shop.
I might want to be, no, there'stoo many might wannabees.
We want to know what your actualgoals are so we can double down,
triple down on those things andhelp you achieve those
digitally.
And then, step five, we rinseand repeat.
We have another website strategymeeting and we check in with you
and say, hey, you mentionedyou're hiring a new salesperson
(51:12):
and a marketing person.
How is that going?
Can we help train that person?
Bring them to our clientworkshop.
Can we, you know, can we are youare you looking for a revenue
increase and what percentage?
And how can we help you getthere?
And then how can we break thisdown in very feasible results
like you how many traffic, youknow, how much traffic does it
(51:32):
take to get there through howmany appointments does it take?
Um, you know, if if you put a aa goal uh number with every
single goal you have, aconversion number, um, you can
kind of you know work the mazebackwards and reverse engineer
your goal to say everyappointment from my website is
(51:53):
worth a thousand bucks.
And if I get one every week,that's another$52,000 a year
that I'm getting from mywebsite.
So there are very simple,tangible things that we can do
here, but we just want to knowyour goals.
So Jason and Mana, our accountmanagement management team, has
been going out and meeting withpeople at trade shows, meeting
with people through Zoom, anddoing an excellent job, just
(52:17):
collecting things, giving someeasy wins.
And from here, I mean, it's allthe 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 beeven that much further along
than we were last time when wewere just collecting the goals
and declaring, you know, ourwishes to the universe of what
(52:38):
we want out of this big thing,right?
SPEAKER_01 (52:40):
And then they can go back and sit down and just be
like, all right, like you saidthat 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 uhthe real true value starts to
kind of reveal itself as you doit a little bit more.
(53:02):
And I think that the first stepwas look for people that are
listening, you guys know it isreally hard changing
infrastructure.
It is like reverting or changingthe course of a river, it's just
grueling and it's a grind.
You have to think of everythingthat could go wrong, and you
need to actually have a day whenyou actually say, now this is
(53:25):
how it's going to be done.
And what's really cool is nowwe're in the part where it's
actually happening.
Jason just went to, or Jason andMana just went to IJO, and they
had like like 15 of thesemeetings each, and they just I
don't envy them on that one, butthey seem like they really enjoy
it.
And I think that that's one ofthose things is like I think
(53:47):
they're gonna be in such highdemand 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 knowthe first half of the podcast
talking about tech and like AIand stuff like that.
The fact that we just made areal pivot into being even more
human, I think that's worth alittle 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 itright there.
I think that this is a goodlittle check-in.
I always like getting excitedabout what we're working on, but
it's also one of those things isuh sometimes we use this
platform to kind of share whatother people are excited about,
and sometimes we don't reallykind of yap about ourselves as
much as we should.
And you know what?
I'm trying to do that a littlebit more this uh this season is
(54:30):
just kind of share what we'restoked about, and there's a lot
to be stoked about.
But anything else before we wrapthis thing up?
I think that's a good note toend it.
Heck yeah.
Well, everybody, thanks so muchfor listening.
We'll be back next week,Tuesday, with another episode.
Cheers.
Bye.
Alright, everybody.
(54:51):
That's another show.
Thanks so much for listening.
This episode was brought to youby Punchmark and produced and
hosted by me, Michael Burpa.
My guest this week was CEO andco-founder of Punchmark, Ross
Cochran.
Also produced the music.
This episode was edited by PaulSuarez.
Thanks so much for listening andleave us feedback on
punchmark.com slash loop.
(55:12):
That's L-O-U-P-E.
Subscribe on all podcastnetworks.
Alright, thanks.
We'll be back next week Tuesdaywith another episode.
Bye.
Welcome back everybody to In the Loop.
What is up everybody?
My name is Michael Burpo.
Thanks again for listening to Inthe Loop.
This week we're having on CEOand co-founder of PunchMark,
Ross Cochran.
Ross is my boss, and it's reallycool to have him on.
We do this every few months.
(00:22):
Ross's diligent listener of Inthe Loop is probably listening
to this episode.
What's up, Ross?
And we talk all about what'sgoing on at Punchmark.
Talk about some things thatwe're really excited about, like
these payment gateways, and alsothis project that we're working
on together, this uh vendormarketing library, which I am so
excited to share with the restof the world.
Uh, and we also talk about likethe crossroads that we feel like
(00:45):
the jewelry is at right now.
Uh, we actually spend a lot moretime thinking about that than
you'd expect at Punchmark.
We think about like thetechnology landscape and where
Punchmark fits into that kind ofuh puzzle in the jewelry
industry, as well as how we canbetter serve the industry as a
whole uh in our role.
And you know, does that have toadapt?
(01:07):
Every year uh or every fewyears, I feel like Punchmark
kind of has to reinvent itselfand adapt with how technology
changes all the time.
And uh this year is nodifferent.
So please enjoy.
SPEAKER_00 (01:20):
This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the
jewelry industry's favoritewebsite platform and digital
growth agency.
Our mission reaches way beyondtechnology.
With decades of experience andlong-lasting industry
relationships, Punchmark enablesjewelry businesses to flourish
in any marketplace.
We consider our clients ourfriends, as many of them have
(01:41):
been friends way before becomingclients.
PunchMark's own success comesfrom the fact that we have a
much deeper need and obligationto help our friends succeed.
Whether you're looking forbetter e-commerce performance,
business growth, or campaignsthat drive traffic and sales,
Punchmart's website andmarketing services were made
just for you.
It's never too late to transformyour business and stitch
(02:02):
together your digital andphysical world in a way that
achieves tremendous growth andresults.
Schedule a guided demo today atpunchmark.com slash go.
And now back to the show.
SPEAKER_01 (02:21):
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 anepisode since September of last
year, and there's been a lot ofchanges.
And I like to have theseconversations with you uh
because it's very fun to get achance to see what you're
(02:45):
focused on.
I'm focusing on uh one layerdown, and it's maybe my hands
are kind of in the muck, but youget to be in the muck as well,
and also kind of seeing a higheroverview.
Um maybe could you just givelike a little recap on how was
the past uh, I guess, fivemonths since you were on last
(03:05):
time uh with Punchmark and alsojust with life?
SPEAKER_00 (03:09):
Well, um, a lot has changed in the last five months.
Um the biggest thing is that ourcompany, you know, due to
structure, due to um sort ofeliminating all of the things
that were necessities in ourplatform, um and now you know,
(03:31):
going from what you need to doto what you want to do.
So now Punchmark has beenoperating as a what we want to
do for the last probably sixmonths.
Um a little before then too, butwe're we're not really needing
to like fix as many bugs as weused to have to, or uh just do
the regular boring maintenancestuff.
(03:53):
Um so the heaviest lifting we'vebeen able to do has just we're
flying through it.
And and it is it has been adream to be able to release
features that actually matter.
Um, and we haven't had thislevel of speed in a long time.
And I know internal morale isup, client morale is way up.
We we're we're celebrating whatwe call our B back clients.
(04:14):
Uh, these are clients who haveleft Punchmark and then come
back to us.
And I think that's a biggest,the biggest testament to our
what our team has built, whatthe relationships of our
customer support team and thingslike that.
So um Tommy and Brian just cameback, and and Jason and Mana
just came back from a show uhwith Hope, our marketing
manager.
(04:35):
Um, and they they talked aboutanother 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 thingscombined, um it's like you go,
not like work was ever not fun.
I love what I do, but work isjust fun now.
You know, like everything we'reeverything we're we're just
(04:55):
rolling so much.
So, so that's the biggest changerecently is that we are flying
at speeds that we've reallynever been able to achieve
before.
SPEAKER_01 (05:06):
Yeah.
There's two different kind ofparts of that, just to like
clarify for even peoplelistening in.
Uh, I sometimes wonder how muchpeople relate to that uh from a
from a jewelry standpoint.
So for tech people, there'sthere's a couple different
things.
Sometimes we're working onfeatures that are uh we just
call them like infrastructure,and we don't even make
(05:28):
announcements about them becausewe can't.
Because, like, do you reallywant to hear about we spun up
another server or we uh made itso 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 asecond faster, uh, which you're
gonna load all your pagesfaster.
A lot of times, like that getsus fired up, but like we can't
(05:51):
brag about it because uhtruthfully it's just like very
unsexy.
But the other thing I think thatwas really interesting, uh, to
kind of touch on it, where we'rekind of developing features, is
we almost hit it for better orfor worse.
We got into this part of theyear at the end of every year,
uh which is uh right aroundOctober, middle of October,
(06:14):
where we put in almost like acode freeze.
It's not technically a codefreeze, but it kind of acts as
one, where we don't release uhsensitive uh releases uh around
the holidays.
It's no secret that retailers doa ton of their business in in
e-commerce in November andDecember, and we would hate to
interrupt that.
Not that we, you know, wouldever release anything broken,
(06:37):
but it could.
And as a result, a lot of thesethings were just like kind of so
close to being done, and we justdidn't release them before uh
November because we just didn'twant to risk it.
And now we're doing it.
It's January, we're just we wejust dropped in a whole bunch of
stuff.
Um, I wanted to ask you aboutthe one that I think was kind of
I'm most excited about.
(06:57):
It took a lot of work.
Brian's been working on itforever.
I want to talk about paymentgateways.
Uh, maybe not sexy sounding, butcan you um can you kind of
explain what that is and whywe're so excited about it?
SPEAKER_00 (07:09):
Yes.
Um, it's again, like you saidbefore, it's one of the
infrastructural things um thatisn't really like the fun,
interactive, you know, jewelryshopping sort of platform
features.
Um, this is more of like thebaseline of, you know, uh what
happens at the background andhow we connect to other payment
gateways.
So like boring, right?
(07:29):
But uh at the same time, I thinkthe sexiest thing to a business
person is a better PL report.
And if you if you don't createfriction and be at the point of
sale, right?
At the you go where the customeris, like that's step number one
in in marketing and in inbusiness.
But number two is don't get inyour own way, right?
(07:51):
If someone comes up to you andsays, um, hey, I have uh just
rolls of quarters, can I can Ibuy with that?
I mean, that's kind of annoying,but at the same time, you can't
be like, no, we don't takewhat's a quarters here, right?
So we we have we have to gowhere the customer feels
comfortable.
And what's cool about what weI'll I'll paraphrase it with
just the the weight of uh youknow the the integrations that
(08:15):
we're adding to our checkout.
Um number one, Apple Pay.
Um and then Link, Klarna, uhGoogle Pay, um, you know, even
uh, you know, other like uhSamsung Pay, right?
Even things that aren't reallylike widely used.
But we're going if if a customerfeels comfortable there and they
(08:36):
have all their data there, umwhat's cool with Link is if
you're if you've checked outwith Link before anywhere on any
other platform, um your yourstuff is remembered.
So it's just the ease ofcheckout.
And you're like, wait, how is myhow is my card taped?
Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01 (08:52):
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 thejukebox at a bar.
I I get touch tune credits.
I spend 15$15 over the course oflike a blink of an eye.
And that's what people do withjewelry.
It's like impulse.
Oh, I gotta buy this.
SPEAKER_00 (09:09):
Boop, boop, two buttons, double tap, and you're
in.
Right?
I mean, that's the thing is youknow, we joke about good UI.
And what good UI, you know, auser interface, what a good user
experience does is it makes itcould make the you know,
unforgettable moment happenwhere it's like, wait, did I
just buy a piece of jewelry formy wife?
(09:32):
I I guess I did.
I guess I did.
Um, she now has a$2,600bracelet, cool, you know, like
and that's that's what we want.
Like, we don't want it to beoops, right?
But I mean, if if we take allthe friction out of the
experience and make it just soeasy for a customer to buy
something, then hey, that's itmight equate to anywhere from 5%
(09:52):
more sales to 50% more sales.
I mean, who knows?
Sky's the limit, really, on whatthe rate of increase is from
what we've added there.
But um, you know, people havebeen asking, clients have been
asking, it's no secret, uh, forApple Pay and things like that
to be added.
Um, we've had quite a fewdifferent um, you know,
integrations in the past, butthat was one, that was one of
(10:14):
the mic drops that we're lookingto add to the platform.
So anyway, very excited aboutthis.
It's also very streamlined.
Um, and and it's it's like a uhan express checkout that's all
in one page, right?
Whereas before it was like stepone, shipping, step two,
billing, step three.
Like there was it was just too,you know, more friction, right?
You want to make this soseamless so that they enter
(10:35):
something, they click a button,they click another button, and
they're and they're done.
And they have they alreadyordered the piece, you know?
SPEAKER_01 (10:40):
And it's and it comes at a very opportune time.
And I did a whole episode onthis, so I don't need to rehash,
but uh just to kind of compoundon it, I just got the
leaderboard, uh, we call it theleaderboard, um, the e-commerce
report for the punchmarkplatform for the month of
February.
We're recording this on March5th, so I get it on uh the th
(11:02):
the first Thursday of the nextmonth, and it spits everything
out.
And I mean, this is not evenexaggerating.
Uh this February 2026 is up 33and a quarter percent over last
year's February, which is youknow, which was about the same
as the February before that.
(11:23):
And January was up 47% over lathe year before that's uh
January.
And it's just more clients aremaking sales, more clients are
making what we call many sales,that's like 10 or more sales.
And then I'm just thinking it'salso crazy.
The um the average order value,that's what I look at the most
(11:45):
of AOV.
AOV is uh at seven, it's over$700 uh for our platform.
So we only do jewelry, uh, weonly do do jewelry e-commerce,
and as a result, we get a veryuh boiled down look at what the
jewelry industry is showing.
And I think that the$700 AOV isvery telling.
(12:08):
It's that people have a trust incommerce, they are trusting uh
where jewelry's at.
And what's funny is we're seeinglike the same number of sales um
as the year before as far aslike total transactions, but we
are definitely seeing um largertransactions.
So I'm hoping these new paymentgateways will kind of just add
fuel to the fire.
(12:28):
And we haven't even seen likethe full results of them yet.
And I I'm kind of lookingforward to seeing if we get like
a little hockey stick kind ofmotion 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 thehistory as one of the founders
of e-commerce, when Brian, mybrother and our CTO came on
board, um actually quite a longtime before he actually came on
board, um, 2011, he helped usbuild our first e-commerce
engine in our platform.
(12:58):
And the first things that weresold were beads, right?
And these beads were like 68bucks and 86 bucks and 90 bucks,
and that was it.
And it was just little, youknow, little people weren't
really buying jewelry onlineback then.
And yes, it was happening,right?
It was happening on the largerstores, it was happening on some
of the other independent storesthat really set their website up
(13:20):
for perfect e-commerce.
Like you needed to emulate trustlike so much to even be able to
get a purchase over$100.
And the average transaction uhvalue 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 downto maybe$550.
(13:41):
It's you know, but we've watchedit.
I go, I remember when it was$275and 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 awhole podcast episode on it, but
you know, the influence of theprice of gold, things like that
affect everything and the wholeindustry.
(14:02):
Um, but I like to see thatbecause the average order value
is a huge metric that basicallyshows you're getting more for
every single transaction andevery single interaction with
your customers, you're actuallymaking more out of it.
So there's more profitabilityjust by the time propo, you know
what I mean, uh proportion ofhow much you spend time, like if
(14:24):
you're selling a bunch of beadsversus, 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 tome.
I I I'd want to put the watchon, but that's just me, I guess.
I I'm not everybody apparently.
But uh I kind of want to keeptalking about like new things
we're developing because that'skind of how I'm sort of uh
framing this episode.
And one of the things that we'vegotten to work on in is that uh
(14:53):
it's always cool sitting downand working on a project with
you because you have uh like thekeys to to the kingdom, you you
can develop on our what we calladmin, it's our like
infrastructure and you can buildthings at the root.
Whereas if you work with youknow the development team,
sometimes they have to gothrough a whole system.
(15:16):
And a lot of times if we work onsomething together, um, for
example, when we worked in um inHubSpot making these uh drip
campaigns, it was I felt like wewere moving very fast and there
was a lot less red tape.
One of the things that we'reworking on is this vendor
marketing library.
Are you able to set this up andand maybe frame how it's gonna
(15:38):
impact our clients?
SPEAKER_00 (15:39):
Yes, absolutely.
Um, this is something um so justto step back a little bit, back
in 2000, it was around 2011 whenwe started it, Dan uh Dan and I,
um, when the company was onlythat little, um, and we a Jason
came on that year in 2011.
But um around that time, betweenthen and 2012-13, we continued
(16:03):
to refine it, but we created aum uh what we called it a social
distribution network, and it wascalled the retail marketplace.
Vendors would log in, they'd beable to upload their products,
import spreadsheets, uh, andthen manage retailers, and
they'd be able to manage uh, youknow, requests for access to
(16:23):
their assets.
So if somebody said, Hey, I wantaccess to you know, to Corey or
A Jaffee or Kelly Waters, they'dsay, you know, yes, they'd log
in, approve it, et cetera.
And we had a marketing engineback then when a vendor could go
in and add, say, a marketingbanner.
And then when a retailer loggedinto their website, if they were
(16:46):
approved for that brand, they'dbe 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 spotsfor them.
And retail could just easily addthis to their web to their
website with the click of abutton.
Now we're we're rebuilding thatin a much more modern way.
(17:08):
Um, we're not fixing, it's nolonger fixed on very specific
key points of your website, likea homepage banner or a footer
ad, whatever that was in thepast.
Um so so now it's there are justseveral different formats, and
we rebuilt it in a way wherevendors can just log in, upload
(17:28):
whatever you know, marketingassets they have, whether it's
for billboards or whatever, andthen the system just
automatically, you know, puts itin a certain format and saves
it, and then the vendor can addtags like you know, ladies or
engagement or men's or fashionor gemstone.
So what's cool about this is umit's leaning right back into our
(17:53):
vendor relationships and thepower of that, right?
So, you know, you have a lot ofuh sort of a trickle-down
methodology when one uh aone-to-many ratio, when a vendor
logs in and uploads something,they're affecting essentially
500 different retailers who canaccess that.
If a vendor goes in and takes10, 15 minutes, updates one of
(18:15):
their prices, then it affects500 people.
You know, so there's a lot, it'slike a ripple in the water,
right?
You have these vendors now whohave a lot more, let's say,
exposure uh potential.
So they can go on into thevendor portal on punchmark.com,
update their retailers, theirmarketing, their products, their
(18:36):
settings.
Um, and instantly they can see aresponse from that.
And so that's one thing I'm veryexcited about, in addition to
the library, um vendors havingdirect access uh to add and edit
all of their marketingresources.
Um, but in addition to that,being able to have a view of
(18:57):
what consumers are doing withtheir products, right?
So that's so exciting to mebecause while for a read from a
retailer standpoint, retailersdon't really care one way or
another what a vendor sees, butat the same time, this becomes
so much more valuable to thevendor.
So now the vendor'sparticipation level goes up like
(19:18):
150% in some cases, where peopleweren't logging in that often
before.
Now, like we just pulled areport recently, and there were
28 vendors that logged in in thelast week.
And this is very excitingbecause more engagement from
vendors equals more engagementfrom, you know, making sure
products are even that much moreup to date.
(19:39):
New marketing is in there, andretailers are super happy with
the automation um and just thethe mechanics behind the scenes
that are just happening on theirwebsite 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 tobuilding 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 retailerrelationship?
(20:16):
Because what I've learned fromactually talking to people that
are not in the jewelry industry,is that that relationship does
not really exist in otherindustries very often, or uh
I've never heard of it actually.
So, for example, thatrelationship where uh you're
going to be like essentiallyreselling this product, well,
the the vendors one of thevendors I talked to recently,
(20:39):
they were telling me that theyalready have a platform similar
to what we were just talkingabout when it comes to they oh
yeah, we put all of our imagesthere, it's like a drop box, and
then we can see how many timespeople download them.
Well, what's really interestingis that suddenly if you put it
uh in the vendor portal in thismarketing library, uh it already
(21:00):
exists in their assets and theydon't have to go anywhere else.
Then when they're building alanding page for their
engagement rings or theirseasonal collections, they can
just go in and just like see alltheir vendor images, and then
they find the one that they likethe best, and they sort by
engagement and then they'llstart pulling it down, and
hopefully they're updated.
(21:21):
One thing I've learned ismarketing images are so
expensive to make.
I guarantee these vendors arespending uh it's not$1,000 on
these things.
That way they're spending uh, Imean, probably five digits,
maybe even six digits on acampaign.
And using that, what's a betterreturn on investment is people
(21:42):
actually using them and drivinginterest in that product, in
that product line.
And when they start engaging,that's what I have always
wanted.
When I was helping design sitemanager initially with version
six, my goal was I wanted sitemanager to be open on every
retailer's.
Um computer all the time,always.
(22:04):
And I thought that that would beour a wonderful thing, is if
like we just have them open itall the time.
And then with this one, it'slike I want the vendors to be
thinking about the vendor portalall the time.
And if they can just startputting stuff in there, well,
suddenly it's like adding fuelto the fire.
I'm I'm very excited about wherewe're going with it.
(22:26):
I think as people start using itmore, it's just going to propel
itself even more.
SPEAKER_00 (22:30):
Agreed.
And, you know, that's that's avery common problem that we're
solving here, you know, in thesame breath of the a similar
problem that we solve forretailers, where they
historically had to manageseparate inventories, right?
And they have their inventory intheir store and then their
inventory in their website,right?
And we we know that problem, andthat problem still exists for a
lot of retailers who don't havepoint of sale integration, which
(22:53):
is crazy to me.
Just adding, they're just likeindebting themselves with with
work that they're just gonnacontinue to have to do.
And so, in that same sense, withvendors, when you tell a
retailer, the minute you tellsomeone they have to go work, it
you like enslave them to thefuture, 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 Itell 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 yourwebsite.
Super easy.
Now, the retailer sits there andspends 15 minutes, an hour,
three hours getting the stuff ontheir website.
Finally, it's good.
They're like, cool, Imerchandise this, everything's
(23:38):
good.
Next month, the price of goldgoes up goes up to$6,500, right?
Like, what do you do?
Now the retailer's like, no, Igotta spend another five hours
changing these.
Hey, they reach out to thevendor, do you have new prices?
Oh, yeah, you could download thesheet here, and then they have
to download it, and then theyhave to do it again and spend
another, maybe it's only 30minutes this time.
But still, you see the point.
(24:00):
It's if every single vendor whoI've talked to that says, Oh,
yeah, it's the it's the funniestconversation.
First thing they say, they shrugtheir shoulders and say, Oh, we
got that covered.
Yeah, we have a Dropbox with allour stuff.
And then I ask the question, howoften do people actually do use
it when you send it, when yousend the data to someone?
Okay, tell me your success inactually getting this on
(24:22):
websites.
And they'll say, Oh, well, nowthat you say it, probably out of
the last 50 that I sent, I thinkone, I think one person like
it's tremendously like justineffective, right?
So so that's why I'm so happythat we have this system that we
just we help vendors, we helpretailers.
It's same same principle as thecheckout.
(24:42):
Go where the customers go.
The vendors can go where theretailers go.
They're already logging intotheir website.
Now they just have to click abutton and add the banner.
Like it's so anyway, I I'm giddyabout this release because it
means a lot to our vendors andto our retailers, our entire
platform and the ecosystem we'vecreated thus far.
SPEAKER_01 (24:59):
And where I'm I think is it won't even reveal
itself because like immediatelyuntil they go to build
something.
What's fascinating is that weare um starting to market to
vendors, and and like and bymarket, I mean like we do uh
feature releases and emailblasts to our clients.
Uh, and by clients we refer toour retailers, and we're sending
(25:22):
them stuff, hey, new features insite manager, new things.
But then I have started tomarket and send things directly
to our vendors, which issomething we've never really
done before, like the subsect ofemails that we just have never
uh reached out to as often.
I can do it on a one-to-onebasis, but now we're actually
(25:43):
starting to be like, hey, um, wegot a new feature coming, it's
really exciting.
What's fascinating is thatsometimes someone's gonna put
something in there and uh maybethe 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 MichaelJewelers, me, uh, I'm gonna sit
(26:07):
down with um Ross's uh jewelryline, 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 yourimage library.
And then when it goes to buildwith it, they're already there.
And then it's just like, it's aone-stop shop, it's right where
(26:30):
they are, and I'm so excited forthat experience.
I feel like that's the level ofin user experience they use this
term delight.
Um, I can't wait until thatmoment of delight where it's
like, oh, I don't have to go toDropbox and then download things
and then sort through them andthen put them up.
They're right in my my files, myimage library.
And uh that moment is going tobe very soon.
(26:52):
And the first time I see ithappen, 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 atthe fact that we had a proof of
concept where this was workingreally well.
Um, I remember even helping thevendors out and protecting them
when uh, like for instance, wehad a vendor, I think it was
John Hardy, if I remembercorrectly.
They had the rights to usePenelope Cruise in their
(27:17):
marketing.
And it was beautiful ads, right?
There's great, like, as youwould expect, lifestyle images,
very like close shots on thejewelry itself.
Um, and then they had they hadthe rights to use her name and
likeness until like, I don'tknow, March 2015 or 14 or
something like that.
And so they had to take they hadto take that out of everything.
(27:39):
So we had to sort of help thempolice that and and enforce that
and take Penelope Cruise off of500 websites, right?
I mean, maybe not all 500, butwe had a lot of people using it.
And so um anyway, I I I the bothsides of the playing field are
covered here, you know, forvendors who need to maintain
(28:01):
restrictions and you know,strict guidelines on their
assets, especially those thatthey have legal rights to for a
determined amount of time.
And then for vendor forretailers who actually get to
use these and just with theclick of a button.
So um anyway, I think we've goneon a while about this, but I I'm
very excited about um how thiswill replay, considering we've
(28:23):
done this before, but this islike V2, you know, uh a whole
new version of it with AIinjected 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 onit as as well as we could, maybe
like 85% of of possible umlooting of it or taking of it, I
guess, was you know, suddenlypeople had their storefronts
(28:55):
shut down and they needed toswitch to an e-commerce platform
and like take advantage of theonline sphere.
And we were there and we reallyleaned into it.
And now I also think we'reseeing a much it's it's less
visible.
I mean, like COVID was very uhin your face.
I think that right now you'realso seeing that.
(29:15):
I think that 2026 is a very,very uh important year,
impactful year for the jewelryecosystem and for especially for
jewelry tech providers rightnow.
Uh I talked with Dan on I have aone-on-one with him every month,
and uh on Friday I spoke withhim.
I was like, what do you what doyou feel about this right now?
(29:37):
And he's so fired up about aboutAI and how it's changing his
lifestyle, and it's how um andhe just feels like good about
where Punchmark is.
Can you talk to me about whereyou think what you think 2026
will look like from the outside?
Because I I think you might evenhave a a slightly different view
on it, too.
SPEAKER_00 (29:58):
Yes, um, I'm glad you brought up Dan because um,
you know, for those who knowhim, don't know him, uh he and I
founded the company in 2008.
And a lot of our success, infact, I'll just say most of our
success was based on Dan'svision to create just a an
(30:19):
unparalleled experience.
Um, we were making flashwebsites back then, right?
And we had just such a beautifulexperience compared to what was
actually out at that time.
Um, the way this experienceevolved, and the same way Daniel
evolved at the same time, um,has been a beautiful thing.
And watching him as our chiefproduct officer, uh, you know,
(30:43):
basically running the productthrough rigorous uh sort of
gauntlets of uh, you know,different elements that are
added while while technologycontinues to evolve, right?
So 2000 2013, it was like createa mobile version of your site.
And there was like a specialmobile version that only showed
when you were on a mobiledevice.
(31:04):
It was kind of like an app, andand then just responsive design
in 2014-15, and then you know,moving on to new things and all
taking advantage of some of thegroundworks, like the bootstrap
library, the jQuery library.
Dan headed up all of that andhis ability to work with CSS,
cascading style sheets for thosewho don't know, and complex
(31:25):
HTML, um, in addition to beingable to do whatever he wants in
this landscape, right?
Um, also, obviously, credit toour designers that, you know,
have been, you know, pushing alot of the you know beautiful
designs.
And then Dan will style it upand and make it nifty, right?
Um, so through that, and I'm notI'm not discounting Tom either.
Tom is our front-end developerwho does a lot of CSS and things
(31:48):
now, and he's amazing.
Um, but now Dan is you he's likeon steroids now.
You he has interacted with AI ina way that people just wish they
could do.
First of all, Dan has alwaysbeen an absolute workhorse, like
a workhorse.
Yeah.
(32:08):
And he he works too hard.
So um, but he he the stuff hegets done, it's like a
steamroller that just cannot bestopped.
So I wanted to make uh take asecond to kind of you know pay
homage to my co-founder becausehe's he's amazing, right?
Now he has these tools and somany of these new features that
(32:31):
have just rolled out.
He's like, all right, check thisout.
I need a code review on this onewhile 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 tothe street, he always knows what
a system needs.
Um, and when he doesn't know, hefinds out, he researches, he
dives in, he looks at what otherpeople are doing, what other
(32:52):
trends are happening.
And yes, the jewelry tech worldis at a serious crossroads right
now.
Um, we have some new playerscoming into the game, but more
importantly, we have consumerexpectations changing on a daily
basis.
Daily basis.
Consumer experience is changingon a monthly basis, which app
(33:12):
they use.
Now they're using ChatGPT tofind where they where to buy
jewelry.
And and you could say, you know,a consumer might not know what a
you know vintage cathedralsetting is or you know, what a
bangle bracelet is, but if if hestarts talking to his agent and
he and this, he's like, listen,my wife likes these huge
(33:34):
bracelets, and it's like, Ithink you're referring to cuff
bracelets.
Oh, yeah, actually, that soundsabout right.
So a cuff, yeah, sound soundslike an appropriate name.
So anyway, I she likes yellowgold, she likes cuffs.
And she might say, Oh, did youknow, right, that Falls Jewelers
in Canapolis has great cuffbracelets and bangle bracelets,
all in yellow gold.
(33:55):
Would you like to check it out?
And you're like, of course,sure.
And you're gonna trust itbecause this is the agent that
you as a consumer, as uh anovice, you know, poet, you're
you're writing things,co-writing things, it knows you.
So now it's gonna it's gonnamake recommendations that you
trust.
And if it says, go to FallsJewelers, right?
(34:17):
Go to Barnett Jewelers, go toArezzo Jewelers in Chicago, um,
you're it's you're gonna trustit.
You're gonna listen to it.
And even if you go and do yourother searching, I'm like, well,
you know, Claude told me to gohere, so I'm gonna go here, or
Siri told me to go here, so I'mgonna go here.
And AEO is a major, major thingthat you know we're rolling out
(34:40):
in our platform.
Other platforms aren't going tohave this initially, and so
that's just one of the manythings that have just changed
the whole shape of how the techworld is is running in jewelry.
SPEAKER_01 (34:54):
What's really interesting about that, what you
just talked, Sean, you just wentover like the last 15 years of
online business.
You talked about like going inand it's like suddenly mobile,
mobile design.
Well, in 2011, when you guysstarted, mobile shopping was not
(35:15):
uh really a needle mover at all.
But then in 2013 it was, andthere was kind of like a again,
a little fork in the road.
Do we dive into this or do wenot?
Very easily, and many peopledidn't dive into it.
Well, in case you didn't know,mobile shopping accounts for uh
increasingly larger uhproportion of the proportion of
(35:38):
the uh of the online shoppinglandscape, but then it doesn't
stop there.
It was about appearing higher inuh search engines.
Well, maybe you go all in onsearch engines.
Now, in case you didn't know, uhGoogle's lunch is getting eaten
up by these um answer engine opuh answer engines.
So, like when you query a AI,they are answering a question,
(36:04):
and that's kind of what Googlewas 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 AmericanDisabilities Act, I've talked
about ad nauseum in the past,but what's fascinating is that
some uh platforms didn't diveinto it.
It is not sexy, it is notsomething we really can market
(36:27):
that well because it's therules, you have to have it.
Well, Dan just one one or twomonths uh just sat there and
just face tanked it and wentthrough and did all of the work
we had to get done.
But what's really exciting, andto give people kind of a peek
behind the curtain on on this onthe development team right now,
(36:50):
what's fascinating is we'venever had this problem, which is
our current bottleneck is nothow much features we can uh
develop and write, and it's notthe bugs and making sure that
it's the QCing is looking good,it's just making sure that
someone has the time to reviewit and then QC it and then get
(37:11):
it out the door.
So it's it's a different problemthat 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 moredevelopers?
What does that look like?
That was a problem when Istarted.
Like, what if what if Punchmarkjust suddenly had a hundred
million dollars come out of thesky and we just hired a ton of
(37:31):
developers?
Now I don't even think we wouldspend it on developers, we would
probably just have peopleclicking all the buttons and
making sure that it works andthen getting them out the door.
And that is so exciting thatfeatures are ready to come out,
and it's something that I findvery exciting, and I hope that
other people do too, even ifthey're not impacting you on the
(37:53):
day-to-day.
But like, for example, you talkabout AEO, those accordions,
that is the most needle-movingone, and we didn't even talk
about it that much.
Like the fact that it's likehaving 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 youknow just common sense, right?
Have an FAQ page, ask a questionand answer it, right?
Um, don't get crazy, like who'sthe best jeweler in Los Angeles,
right?
It's um that's a little bit, youknow, kind of misleading in a
way.
But if you if you focus on yourstrengths, right?
(38:30):
If you're really good at customjewelry, um, you start creating
an FAQ or the accordion tabs of,you know, like how long does it
take to start a custom jewelryproject?
And like each project is likeyou're giving the you're giving
AI all these tools to have acomprehensive look into your
business.
And, you know, when you saythings like, you know, most
(38:52):
clients will drop off theirpiece and do this and get it
back within like two weeks, andthat's you know, they come in
for the great reveal.
And then you you can word ithowever you want, and AI will
have your back because it likeit it will, if someone asks a
very specific question and says,you know, do you make engage, I
(39:14):
don't know, something crazy.
Like, do you make an engagementring while I wait?
Like, no, you don't.
So maybe one company does thiscrazy thing and can fabricate,
no, I it's probably impossible,but what I'm getting at is if
you have a strength and you showit on your website, you will
come up for that question.
And you might not come up for aquestion that you don't really
(39:36):
care about.
So you it it's it's similar,it's all appropriated based on
like what what your strengthsare.
And if you set up your websiteto 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 apage.
There's a schema and a deepschema that like you need set up
(39:59):
in the background so that AIreally understands that sort of
question-answer uh you knowstructure and and uh
architecture.
SPEAKER_01 (40:08):
Yeah.
It's I I think of it aspositioning.
It's like, you know, we talkabout chess a lot.
Like chess, it's it's not aboutjust the pieces that you have,
it's also about how are theypositioned.
And there's like positions ofstrength and the positions of
weakness.
Well, I I like to think thatPunchmark is doing the
(40:30):
positioning for our clients, andthen it's up to them to move the
pieces around.
But if you have a very, youknow, a secure king and like you
know, your pawn structure iswonderful, well, suddenly the
game feels easier.
And I think that that's kind ofwhere we've gotten with the
developments in the background.
(40:52):
Sometimes I I mean I I think yousee it with with the e-commerce
reports.
Every single we've we've had uhit's just about 12 yeah, 12
months in a row where weoutperformed the year before.
And I I hope that's gonnacontinue.
I I don't know, maybe wecontinue forever.
(41:13):
But it's just really quite uhquite exciting to see how when
you rise to meet technologychange, I think it puts you in a
very strong bargaining position.
And I think that's kind of wherewe'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 havethese conversations with you,
what's getting you fired up?
Because sometimes I feel like weare talking about we're just you
know talking about how awesomewe are and and and and all this
tech advancement.
And sometimes we lose the pointof like, what is your what are
(41:50):
you passionate about in in thebusiness?
Uh can you kind of like maybereveal 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 youknow fancy little things that
we're building, um, that's notthe thing that excites me the
most.
The thing that always excites methe most is client success.
And a lot of people say that.
A lot of people say, oh, we'rewe're you know, we're geared for
(42:18):
our clients, our client'ssuccesses, our own success.
I've I've even said those wordsbefore, and I I truly believe
it.
Um but when when you actuallydouble down on it, when you
actually do the work and theeffort to align your business,
align your success with yourclient's success, um, that
(42:39):
becomes an amazing thing.
We've done that in um certainmilestones, right?
So 2020, when COVID hit, we hadto create a whole service and
ticketing system.
And we we weren't able to keepup before then.
And as soon as we did that, wewe leveled up a lot to help our
clients with the things thatthey needed, like fixing, right?
(43:00):
Now it's not about fixinganymore.
So what's cool about it is we'reanother generation in.
So think about that level ofservice in clients, but the
level of customer service goingup a notch to now what's next.
Same thing that I talked aboutearlier when we started.
We're doing less of what we needto do and more of what we want
to do.
So now it's like, what do youwant to do?
(43:22):
What do you want out of yourbusiness?
You know, and and I I've neverbeen such a big proponent as a
founder about walking away frommy business when I can, because
you want a business that's goingto operate on its own so that
you can enjoy your life withyour kids, with your family,
create experiences, right?
(43:42):
What else are we doing all thisfor?
And I've done several talks ongrowth and you know how to
structure and scale yourbusiness.
And my last talk last year atone of the RJO shows was scaling
your business and regaining yourlife.
And I'm very passionate aboutthat.
So What I'm happiest about isnot only can we create tools
(44:03):
that help people be able to lettheir website run on autopilot,
but the biggest change recentlywas our account management
update, repositioning our entirecompany structure for our client
success, right?
So we're going from reactive toproactive.
SPEAKER_01 (44:21):
Proactive.
Talk about that for a second.
When it comes to that mightsound like a mindset shift, but
there's actually was like actualstructural changes that went
into the team.
And it took like a lot of work,if I remember correctly.
SPEAKER_00 (44:40):
And a lot of time.
This is this is about a year anda half to two years in the
making.
Um, we we had been talking aboutthis for a while, strategizing
about it high-level,brainstorming about it.
And then we'd be like, we're notready for that.
Like it's a big step.
We had to hire around it.
We had to create systems aroundit.
We had to ask customers whatthey wanted.
(45:02):
We had to ask our retailers whatthey essentially wanted and
understand this even more andmore and more.
And finally, um, we were ableto, we had all the strategy
essentially created by, youknow, probably around the last
time we had this podcast, ourlast podcast, um, October,
September, October.
Um, and then we launched it likefirst of the year.
(45:24):
And the biggest change we didwas we hired more tech support
help so that we could take ouraccount managers who were doing
essentially everything, right?
Tech support, client relations,reaching out, answering phone
calls.
They they were doing so muchwork work that they couldn't
(45:45):
think about why they were doingthings and how to help customers
and asking, what do you reallywant out of this?
Right.
So it was like, okay, yeah, Ifixed that.
Now your banner's good, or ohyeah, I fixed that, now your
products are okay.
Like, oh yeah, you had a straycategory on there.
Fix, fix that, done, done withthat.
That was all our accountmanagers were doing.
Now our tech support is stilldoing that actually more rapidly
(46:07):
because of the new pivotalchange and promoting junior as a
ticket team manager.
Um, and then having our accountmanagers do actual proactive
outreach.
And, you know, the the reason wedid this is because this is a
this is a funny sort ofnarrative that that happens.
A retailer will typically, uhnot just retailers, business
(46:30):
owners typically look tostreamline their operations in
the cheapest way possible.
And I and I'm not I'm notdiminishing anybody.
I'm just saying that's we alllook to say, what can we do for
the least amount of money, leastamount of investment?
And sometimes you're like, allright, we're yeah, that's a
hundred bucks a month.
I got four hundred bucks amonth.
Easy.
But then there's opportunitycosts.
Then there's like, what am Ileaving on the table by going
(46:53):
with the cheap route?
So what else is out there?
So they find a website companylike Punchmark that they partner
with and they do more with us.
And they're like, whoa.
So what we're doing now ishere's what's here's what's
ironic about that.
A retailer might say, Yeah, Ihave a website.
Like someone who doesn't have aPunchmark website, they'll say,
Oh, yeah, yeah, I have thatcovered.
I have a website, my website'sgreat.
(47:13):
But they they don't evenunderstand what they're missing
and what's you know, the leadgeneration that's not happening,
the opportunities, theappointments, the walk-ins, the
results, the wish listnotifications, all the things
that are churning in thebackground.
And so people tend to just kindof shrug it away and say, Yeah,
I got that covered.
Now, what our account manager isdoing now is reaching out
(47:35):
because running a retail jewelrybusiness is the most demanding
thing outside of restaurants,probably.
Like anything retail, you'redealing with customers who are
coming into your store.
There's just, there's, there's awhole long, and then you have
services and products and allkinds of other things and
security, right?
You're running an operationthat's pretty multi-pronged.
Now, you don't have all the timeto kind of like step back and
(47:57):
let's let's analyze the websitetoday and see how that's
generating new leads for us.
And let's look for optimizationopportunities and figure out how
our navigation can fit.
Like maybe once in a blue, likemaybe once, twice a year, you're
gonna say, oh, wait, thatcategory's broken and you're
gonna be reactive and you'regonna say, fix that category.
Not like how can we reframe thisin a way that customers are
(48:18):
going to respond andtransactions will increase,
right?
And so, and and then how do youstay on top of every new
feature?
Because if if you're like on uha website platform over here and
they have all these featuresthat they're releasing, you're
how do you stay on top of that?
Yeah, so that's why so evenfirst of all, it's awareness.
Second of all, it's takingadvantage and having the time to
(48:40):
take advantage of it.
Now, the biggest win that ouraccount managers have been able
to achieve is our websitestrategy meetings.
Now, these are gold.
And I say that because we're nowbeing goal-oriented, like I
said, aligning our success withour customer, with our client
success.
Now, there's there's five stepsto this essentially, right?
(49:03):
Being goal-oriented to ourclients.
Like this is what this means.
Step one, we're gonna run anaudit on your website and we're
gonna look, we're gonna do someautomation, we're gonna run some
AI things, we're gonna have somescripts on our on our server
that does things, checks forbroken things, looks for
misspellings.
Oh, you misspelled the wordjewelry on your on your uh
buying goal buying event.
(49:24):
So we're gonna we're gonna lookthose up, find those, identify
those, and then bring those tothe meeting and say, hey, by the
way, we're gonna fix these foryou, like free of charge.
Like this is just an easy win.
So we're gonna run audits, thenin our meeting, we're gonna
collect goals.
Now, this is the most importantpart of it.
To interface with you, we wantto know.
We don't want to sort ofmansplain what we think you
(49:46):
should your business needs.
Although, look, I'm not takinganything away from our crazy
experience you know in theindustry or with tech.
But we can guess and probably beclose.
We'll be close, but we want toknow what you want.
Like, what do you want?
How do you want your business toimprove, to increase?
Um, or do you want to just havea lifestyle business that you
(50:07):
don't even want a revenue goal?
You just want to be able to, youknow, 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 winsthat we found and that you've
might have brought up to us too.
And then step four is coming upwith short and long-term
strategies.
(50:28):
Now, looking at, I mean, it it'sit's easy when you know what
your goals are.
I think one of the hardestthings 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 goingin that direction.
But a lot too many times we'relike, yeah, I might want to do
(50:50):
that.
I might want to carry multiplebrands, I might want to be like
more of a custom shop.
I might want to be, no, there'stoo many might wannabees.
We want to know what your actualgoals are so we can double down,
triple down on those things andhelp you achieve those
digitally.
And then, step five, we rinseand repeat.
We have another website strategymeeting and we check in with you
and say, hey, you mentionedyou're hiring a new salesperson
(51:12):
and a marketing person.
How is that going?
Can we help train that person?
Bring them to our clientworkshop.
Can we, you know, can we are youare you looking for a revenue
increase and what percentage?
And how can we help you getthere?
And then how can we break thisdown in very feasible results
like you how many traffic, youknow, how much traffic does it
(51:32):
take to get there through howmany appointments does it take?
Um, you know, if if you put a aa goal uh number with every
single goal you have, aconversion number, um, you can
kind of you know work the mazebackwards and reverse engineer
your goal to say everyappointment from my website is
(51:53):
worth a thousand bucks.
And if I get one every week,that's another$52,000 a year
that I'm getting from mywebsite.
So there are very simple,tangible things that we can do
here, but we just want to knowyour goals.
So Jason and Mana, our accountmanagement management team, has
been going out and meeting withpeople at trade shows, meeting
with people through Zoom, anddoing an excellent job, just
(52:17):
collecting things, giving someeasy wins.
And from here, I mean, it's allthe 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 beeven that much further along
than we were last time when wewere just collecting the goals
and declaring, you know, ourwishes to the universe of what
(52:38):
we want out of this big thing,right?
SPEAKER_01 (52:40):
And then they can go back and sit down and just be
like, all right, like you saidthat 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 uhthe real true value starts to
kind of reveal itself as you doit a little bit more.
(53:02):
And I think that the first stepwas look for people that are
listening, you guys know it isreally hard changing
infrastructure.
It is like reverting or changingthe course of a river, it's just
grueling and it's a grind.
You have to think of everythingthat could go wrong, and you
need to actually have a day whenyou actually say, now this is
(53:25):
how it's going to be done.
And what's really cool is nowwe're in the part where it's
actually happening.
Jason just went to, or Jason andMana just went to IJO, and they
had like like 15 of thesemeetings each, and they just I
don't envy them on that one, butthey seem like they really enjoy
it.
And I think that that's one ofthose things is like I think
(53:47):
they're gonna be in such highdemand 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 knowthe first half of the podcast
talking about tech and like AIand stuff like that.
The fact that we just made areal pivot into being even more
human, I think that's worth alittle 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 itright there.
I think that this is a goodlittle check-in.
I always like getting excitedabout what we're working on, but
it's also one of those things isuh sometimes we use this
platform to kind of share whatother people are excited about,
and sometimes we don't reallykind of yap about ourselves as
much as we should.
And you know what?
I'm trying to do that a littlebit more this uh this season is
(54:30):
just kind of share what we'restoked about, and there's a lot
to be stoked about.
But anything else before we wrapthis thing up?
I think that's a good note toend it.
Heck yeah.
Well, everybody, thanks so muchfor listening.
We'll be back next week,Tuesday, with another episode.
Cheers.
Bye.
Alright, everybody.
(54:51):
That's another show.
Thanks so much for listening.
This episode was brought to youby Punchmark and produced and
hosted by me, Michael Burpa.
My guest this week was CEO andco-founder of Punchmark, Ross
Cochran.
Also produced the music.
This episode was edited by PaulSuarez.
Thanks so much for listening andleave us feedback on
punchmark.com slash loop.
(55:12):
That's L-O-U-P-E.
Subscribe on all podcastnetworks.
Alright, thanks.
We'll be back next week Tuesdaywith another episode.
Bye.
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