Out of Love, And For Love, with Haleh Shoa

Haleh Shoa, founder and CEO of Picturli, a photo organization and archiving studio that helps families, individuals, and businesses transform their photo collection into one sortable digital library, shares the unique family trauma that led to the start of her company, the lessons she learned from the corporate work with Apple and more, how she’s keeping people’s memories secure in the digital age, a connection to Cher, curating collections spanning almost 180 years, accidentally uncovering secret families, and using technology to uncover hidden history.

Episode Transcript

Gary Michels (00:00):
Welcome to Let's Talk Legacy. I'm your host, Gary

(00:02):
Michels, and today we're reallyexcited to have our guests on
Haleh Shoa is the founder andCEO of Pictuli, a photo
organization and archivingstudio that helps families,
individuals and businessestransform their photo
collections into one sortableDigital Library. She firmly
believes that our familyhistories and personal memories

(00:23):
are some of the most valuabletreasures we can have, and that
preserving and sharing them isessential to leaving a legacy
for future generations. And whenI heard we were going to have
you on as a guest today, I wasexcited, because my my wife and
I have recently been talkingabout this. I know this is a big
thing right now all across theworld of people wanting to put
this stuff together. So tell usa little bit about your story

(00:45):
and how the company got started.

Haleh Shoa (00:47):
Yeah. First of all, Gary, thank you so much for
having me. It's a pleasure to behere. I started Picturli in 2016
for several reasons. One wasthat during the span of my
corporate career as anadvertising executive, every
time I had some slow moments atwork, and because we had really
great equipment, I would bringin the old family albums, and I

(01:09):
would start digitizing those andsort of restoring the cracked
photos and things like that. Andthat was because the importance
of that for me was because myparents left Iran during the
Iranian revolution in 1979 andthey could not take anything
with them except the photoalbums. And so it was like a
couple of suitcases of photoalbums. I always wondered, like,

(01:29):
why are they bringing that? Youknow, because I was only eight,
I didn't have that insight. So Iwas so grateful when I found
myself sort of really wanting toknow my own story and history,
knowing that I probably wouldn'tbe able to go back, and I
haven't been so far.

Gary Michels (01:46):
What was that experience like for them? Did
they ever share that with you?Have you ever gotten into that a
little bit with them?

Haleh Shoa (01:52):
Yeah, we've, we've talked about it, and there's so
many families that share oursort of trauma around that. And
being able, you know, not beingable to take anything with you
and really being stripped ofyour identity. My father was a
pharmacist. He has his PhD inpharmaceuticals, and he had one
of the largest pharmacies inTehran. And there's so many

(02:13):
people like my dad who were juststripped of their identity,
because when he came here, theywould not, you know, in United
States, the standards theydidn't understand, the standards
that my father had studied underat the University of Tehran. So
it's just so much trauma. It'snot just leaving the home that
you've built, it's leaving thebusiness that you built and the

(02:35):
person that you had built for,you know, 50 some odd years. And
we do talk about that. Ofcourse, my dad is still with us.
He's 97 Wow. You know, anyopportunity I get, I do turn on
that recorder, and I really hopethat everyone does this, I just
sort of turn on the recorder, onmy phone, or put the video on

(02:55):
and start asking him questions.

Gary Michels (02:57):
Why do people not do that more? Why do people not
take the time to ask questionsand dig deep into that. What do
they take it for granted? Or isit more of a not knowing, or is
it more of not knowing how? Orsomeday I'll get around to what
do you think that is?

Haleh Shoa (03:14):
I think it's a little bit of everything. It's a
little bit of a fear of steppingover boundaries. Honestly, it's
not knowing how much our elderslove talking about their past
unless it's really mired intrauma. I know that in studying
a lot of you know, just watchingsome documentaries about people

(03:35):
who survived the Holocaust, theynever, ever want to talk about
that. And I understand that,like that level of trauma I get.
But outside of that, I thinkmost people do want to talk
about their trials andtribulations and how they
survived and what theiraccomplishments were. I don't
think there's any human alivethat didn't hasn't experienced
trauma, so it's it's just aboutsort of creating that space in

(04:01):
order to allow for our, youknow, not just our elders, but
even our peers, our spouses, totalk about some of those
questions of you know, What'syour earliest memory? Starting
with that, it's such a great wayto you know, you I can even ask
my husband that, like, What'syour earliest memory? And of
course, the answer changes. Iask them that all the time, the

(04:21):
answer changes often.

Gary Michels (04:23):
That's funny. Well, you actually started off
with a little bit of a differentprofessional background,
spending 27 years as anexecutive creative producer in
advertising for luxury brandssuch as Ritz Carlton. You worked
with Apple, Jaguar, Land Rover.In fact, you led the global
advertising launch of the iPadMini managing assets across five

(04:44):
different continents. How didthe skills you developed in the
ad world contribute to the ideafor Picturli?

Haleh Shoa (04:51):
Well, I think when you're dealing with personal
assets, you know, whatever thatmay be, whether it's a client's
money or their memory. It'sreally private. So the things
that I learned at Apple isreally how to keep my clients
assets behind a very thick wall.We deal with being in Los
Angeles, we deal with a lot ofhigh profile clients, and so

(05:15):
that's something that I have tocreate from the beginning. And
it doesn't even matter, even ifmy clients aren't high, high
profile. I want to make surethat everything that we do
within the boundaries of thestudio is very, very locked. So
that was one of the things, is Ihave great IT team, and that was
from my experience inadvertising. But then in terms
of, like, the aspects of gettingthe work done, taking all the

(05:38):
analog, all the old things thatwe have, like all the old VHS
tapes and high eights and littledigital videos and the various
formats of slides and negativesthat we could have, you know,
inherited from our parents andgrandparents, taking all that to
digital so that we can, youknow, rename and re date those

(05:59):
digital files So it becomes asearchable and sort of a library
that was all sort of learned interms of dealing in operations
and knowing that how to handleassets in general. And of
course, we also manage a lot ofdigital stuff. We've amassed so
much digital we have these oldcomputers, these old iPhones and

(06:20):
old phones in general, and allof these things on various cloud
services, and people don't evenknow. Like, where do I even
start with this? So you know allof that is my essentially, is my
knowledge from learning how tomanage assets when I was working
in advertising.

Gary Michels (06:36):
So digging in a little further, what services
does Picturli offer? Like, whowould benefit the most from
them? Would it be companies?Would it be individuals? And how
does it work?

Haleh Shoa (06:46):
Well, I mean, the service is for people who really
want to be able to pass on thelegacy. That's one of the
aspects. And secondly, forpeople who just want to enjoy
it. I have actually a lot ofclients who don't even have
kids. They just, you know,they're like, you know, I've
lived a long life. I'm 65 and Iwant to see my photos. I want to
see the places that I'vetraveled to. So we help them

(07:08):
gain access to their entirememory box, essentially. So
anything that's analog, right?The albums, the loose photos,
anything that you can touch andfeel, all the tapes, all the
slides, all the negatives, weorganize everything
chronologically, and then wescan it or digitize it or
transfer it. And once thathappens, we rename and redate

(07:30):
the files, and then, with theirdigital stuff, we go through,
download everything, consolidateeverything, and then we curate
that, because we have so manyscreenshots and accidental
things. And, you know, we takephotos of a particular instance,
but then we could have 17 photosof that instance.

Gary Michels (07:46):
It will pick out your screenshots and double
pictures and all that kind ofstuff?

Haleh Shoa (07:50):
Exactly. And then we offer two different platforms
for our actually, threedifferent platforms for our
clients. And then we put all ofthat on the platform where they
can enjoy it, share it, downloadit. And of course, we offer a
lot of various different typesof creative offerings, photo
books, gallery walls, videomontages and so on and so forth.

Gary Michels (08:14):
Awesome. And is it all ages? Is it user
friendly? Is it something that aperson has to put together
themselves, or is there a higherlevel of surface where they can
descend you everything and youguys do it? Or do they have to
have some tech savvy?

Haleh Shoa (08:27):
They don't have to have any tech savvy at all.
Most, a lot of our clients aresort of 60 and older, you know,
they're empty nesters. And youknow, of course, many 60 and 70
year olds could be very techsavvy, but regardless of the
tech savviness, I have clientswho are 85 they're not tech
savvy, and they are elated withthe product that they get. So

(08:48):
I'm, you know, in that sandwichgeneration, I myself. I'm 55 so
I understand, and I'm atechnologist. I've always been a
tech geek, but I understand, youknow, I have a mom is who's 84 a
dad who's 97 and so I understandhow to speak tech to those who
are not techie. I mean, if theywant to hire us as a coach, you

(09:09):
know, we have a coachingprogram. If they wanted to take
this on on their own, we cancoach them along, and we can
give it on a list of equipmentto purchase. But, you know, the
equipment we have in this in mystudio, we camera scan
everything it is at the absolutehighest resolution that you will
ever have your stuff scanned at.And you know, we we also want to
make sure that we are preservingthe best quality of your digital

(09:34):
without going into technicaldetail. Most of us have our
phones and computers optimizedif we're on an iPhone, which
means that we only have accessto a 50% quality of what is on
our phones or computers, becausethere really isn't enough space
on our phones or computers tohave the best quality download.
However, those things arepreserved at the highest quality

(09:56):
in iCloud, and so we get accessto iCloud. When we download the
highest quality.

Gary Michels (10:02):
How do you know like when you send in stuff? How
does your system know when thesepictures were taken, if there
wasn't dates put on them, whenyou said you kind of do them
chronologically? How does thatwork?

Haleh Shoa (10:11):
That's a great question. We start every single
project with a family tree, andwe just get to know what did you
look like when you were five?What did you look like when you
were 10 and 15, and we basicallyguesstimate it based on the
actual photo itself. There's alot of clues in the actual
photos that are from 30s, 40s,50s, 60s, 70s, the hardest

(10:32):
decade, or 80s and 90s, becauseprimarily everything is four by
six, and there's way too much ofit. So we start with the albums
that are already organized,which is why we always tell our
clients, please don't takeanything out of your albums,
because you've already organizedthose somehow that we could use
as clues. We start with thealbums, and we know. So this is,

(10:53):
you know, Eileen fifth birthday,you know, in 1985 and you know.
And now she's eight. So this isthe 1988 you know, and so on and
so forth. We spend a couple ofhours with our clients in the
onboarding process to learn, youknow, who the characters are and
what their date of birth, dateof passing is.

Gary Michels (11:11):
If there's an extended family or a large
group, can people team uptogether and have something put
together like that?

Haleh Shoa (11:17):
Oh yeah, it's so fun. I personally, I come from a
clan. I have 114 cousinsspanning four generations. So I
really, and I know all of them,almost all of them, I don't know
some of their little ones, butso, yeah, I mean, when I have
done, when I did my family sortof Vault, if you will, I have

(11:39):
considered all of that like sowith keywording and tagging, we
are able to really make a anentire collection of a client,
because a lot of times oneperson ends up with all the
family photos. It's usually likethe older sibling that ends up
or maybe the wealthier siblingthat ends up with it so they

(11:59):
could take care of it. The otherfamily members want access to it
as well.

Gary Michels (12:03):
You were talking earlier about security and how
that was so important to you inyour previous roles that you had
with different companies. How doyou maintain the security and
the safety of these pictures anddifferent things that are being
sent to you? What's your processwith that?

Haleh Shoa (12:20):
Well, we don't. We only use local hardware, and we
back it up locally, so we have alocal server, and then we have
local external hard drives thatwe work with.

Gary Michels (12:30):
So privacy and security is a huge deal to you
though.

Haleh Shoa (12:33):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have clients who who
don't even want us to use theexternal hard drives that
anything else is on. So we buythem their own servers. It's
like $2,000 for a client to havetheir own private server.

Gary Michels (12:47):
So you work with some high profile clients. I
understand, are you allowed tosay who and how did they find
you?

Haleh Shoa (12:53):
So in 2022 I worked with a company called Chrome
hearts. They are a $1 billionfashion brand. They make these
incredible jewelry and classesand, you know, really bespoke
stuff that is very low quantity.In fact, they have three
stunning stores in Las Vegas. Itwas a husband and wife team, and

(13:15):
they hired me and my creativedirector at the time to
basically curate 34 years oftheir assets, and they have shot
every single famous person thatever was, particularly if
they're in the music industry.If you see Cher, that's all she
wears, is Chrome hearts. Andthere's, there's some, some of

(13:36):
the really close friends, that'sall they ever wear. Jewelry wise
and clothing wise is theirstuff. That's exclusively how
they sell their stuff. They'revery, very exclusive. And that
project was very like we were ina bunker, and no employee was
allowed to come into thatbunker. It was that exclusive,
yeah, and well, that particularproject was about 1.7 million

(13:58):
files that we had to lookthrough, and we curated out 5000
we curated that so that theycould create their legacy book,
which they I don't think theyare going to do that yet, but at
least we started the project forthem, and we made it a lot
easier for them to be able touse these assets that were all
over the map. They had some oftheir personal stuff in there
with their kids. It was reallycool. It was really incredible.

Gary Michels (14:21):
You've been doing this for a bit now, and is there
a couple success stories or onethat comes to the top of your
mind? Of anybody that thatreally touched your heart, that
really showed the impact of youpreserving these memories?

Haleh Shoa (14:33):
My gosh, so many. One of my earlier clients was an
African American historian, andhis family was from the north,
and they had photos and lettersdating back to the 1800s which
is super rare for AfricanAmericans. And so he decided,
like, you know, let's scan theseand I'm just going to donate
these letters and some of thephotos to the Schomburg

(14:55):
Institute in Washington, DC. Sowe scanned all the letters
first, and it was. From hisgrandfather to his grandmother.
Three weeks after the SchomburgInstitute got these letters,
they called him and said, Wejust got another set of letters.
And it looks like it's yourgrandfather, and it looks like
he had another family. Maybe.What are the odds? What are the
odds?

Gary Michels (15:15):
Wow.

Haleh Shoa (15:16):
Can you believe that?

Gary Michels (15:16):
Wait, he had another family? So in the other
words, he was kind of married totwo people, or what?

Haleh Shoa (15:20):
He had an affair of the heart with one of his
distant cousins that he wroteletters to. And then when they
found when she never hadchildren, and when her kin found
those letters, they donatedthose letters to the shrub
Institute, which is also like,what, it's insane.

Gary Michels (15:37):
Ah, that's crazy.

Haleh Shoa (15:38):
So that is one, one insane story, another success
story was we have a client whohad who has the longest span of
photographs in any of ourcollections. Her span came from
the 1840s until now. So Iliterally had to learn
everything about the history ofphotography with this client's

(16:00):
stuff. And what had happened isher grandmother had gone through
and named a lot of people on theback of the photos. And through
technology, we can actually dofacial recognition. And so we
found out that the grandmotheractually had misnamed so many
people because she couldn't seebut when we scanned it and we
could really hone in on thephoto and really see people's

(16:22):
faces a lot clearer. We couldtell her, well, that's actually
not your great aunt. It's it'sthe other sister. They look
similar, but look, it's theother sister. And she was really
pleased that we were able to dothat, because she's also a sort
of a genealogist, and there's somany success stories. I mean,
like every client is so pleasedthat their stuff is safe.

Gary Michels (16:44):
Yeah, and that's it just brings to life. People
have always said, if there was afire or whatever, where's your
box of photos? Grab that,because there's so much
memories, or memories are justin the palm of your hand, of
your whole life that you'velived. It's so valuable and you
can't replace it.

Haleh Shoa (17:00):
What I really appreciate about clients coming
to us is that they understand,you know, my mom is getting old.
She's losing her memory. We needto get going on this, because I
need to ask her about thesequestions, right?

Gary Michels (17:11):
Yeah. So tell me, what does legacy mean to you, in
general?

Haleh Shoa (17:16):
Leaving a piece of yourself that is filled with
love, that's what that's what itmeans to me. You know, I want my
legacy to when, you know, whenmy nephews grow up and they have
their own kids and grandkids, Iwant them to look back and say,
Wow, she really createdsomething that was really
created out of love and forlove. I mean, really, that's

(17:38):
really why I do this business.It's really a heart based
business. I really want to bringjoy to families and a peace of
mind. So it's the simple answeris, is love.

Gary Michels (17:49):
And it seems like this extends past just your
personal it sounds it's to yourbusiness. Are all of your
employees? Are there things thatyour culture, you've created in
your culture of your employeesand people that work with you.
Is there a legacy that Picturliwants to leave to everybody?

Haleh Shoa (18:05):
You know, I see their humanity coming through
when I go to a client and Idownload them on like, right
now, we're working on a clientwho lost her son at the age of
21 which is the worst thing thatcan ever happen to anyone. So
when I explain the backstory ofhow this happened to this kid.
You know, I see their humanitycoming through, and we really
have to make sure that we holdthe space of no judgment for all

(18:30):
of our clients, regardless oftheir story, regardless of their
background. And so I see thatreally coming through, and I and
I really appreciate that I'vechosen these characters that I
really I love my employees,right?

Gary Michels (18:44):
How do you, you know, a couple last questions
for you, as technology evolves,which it always is, as you know,
how do you see the future ofdigital memory preservation?

Haleh Shoa (18:53):
I mean, I think a lot of AI is already present in
our in our lives right now,there are plenty of programs
that people can download ontheir phones that will help them
curate their sort of, theirlibrary mess. One program in
particular is called Ollie O, L,L, i e, I think, and that's for

(19:14):
iPhones. It basically goesthrough your stuff and says, I
think these are great, but, youknow, maybe these can be
archived. I think AI is gonnareally help us to be better
curators and better organizersof our memories. However, all of
the older stuff that can getdestroyed in a fire, in a flood,
in any kind of a disaster, allof the things that could come

(19:36):
out of a divorce say, you know,there's older couple that's
getting a divorce, and there'sall this fighting that happens
with photos. All of that can bereally mitigated by making sure
your memories that are analogare properly digitized.

Gary Michels (19:51):
Sure. Do you have any future projects that you're
working on right now?

Haleh Shoa (19:56):
I'm working on different packages for clients.
We're doing some dig. Littlepackages that ends up with some
year end photo books. And wehave a lot of clients that
really yearn for year end photobooks, so we're creating
packages around that.

Gary Michels (20:10):
That's really cool, and is most of the stuff
that comes in now for that kindof stuff almost all digital,
because the people do it ontheir phones all the time, is
that the most common thingyou're seeing are there still
people that go get these days,even old fashioned pictures printed?

Haleh Shoa (20:24):
You know what's funny is that my younger
employees, who are in their 20s,mid 20s, they are all about
analog. They only shoot on filmcameras. Apparently, cassettes
are coming back in. Wow,cassette tapes, and there's a
shortage on the market forcassette tapes. They love these
high eight and digital videocameras they're shooting on that

(20:47):
they're really going back to analog.

Gary Michels (20:49):
Wow, that's crazy.

Haleh Shoa (20:51):
It is crazy.

Gary Michels (20:52):
You've been such a joy to talk to. I really felt
like it's just been aconversation, and I am just so
excited myself to look intopicturely more talk with my wife
about it this weekend. And I'msure our listeners, I'm sure are
feeling the same way. How cansomeone get in touch with you?
Check out your company. If theywanted to specifically ask you a

(21:13):
question about their project.How would they reach you?

Haleh Shoa (21:15):
Well, they could visit our website, and I've
created a seven step guide foranyone that wants to get
inspired in order to startorganizing their own photo
collection. And they can visitpicture life curated.com and
they will find all theinformation on how to get a hold
of me and how to download that picturelifecurated.com.

Gary Michels (21:37):
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really
appreciate your time today, thatwas awesome.

Haleh Shoa (21:42):
Thank you so much for having me.