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The Art of Remembering: How Family Archives Shape Who We Are · The iDesign Lab Podcast

0:00
Voice over: This is iDesign Lab, a podcast where creativity and curiosity meet style and design.
0:05
Voice over: Curator of interiors, furnishings and lifestyles.
0:09
Voice over: Hosted by Tiffany Woolley, an interior designer and a style enthusiast, along with her serial entrepreneur husband Scott, idesign Lab is your ultimate design podcast where we explore the rich and vibrant world of design and its constant evolution in style and trends.
0:25
Voice over: Idesign Lab provides industry insight, discussing the latest trends, styles and everything in between to better help you style your life, through advice from trendsetters, designers, influencers, innovators, fabricators and manufacturers, as well as personal stories that inspire, motivate and excite.
0:43
Voice over: And join us on this elevated, informative and lively journey into the world of all things design.
0:49
Voice over: On today's episode of the iDesign Lab, we welcome the incredible Hale Shoa, founder and CEO of Picturely, where photo chaos meets storytelling magic.
0:59
Voice over: From luxury branding to preserving family legacies, hala's mission is powerful to rescue your memories and turn them into timeless, searchable digital archives.
1:09
Voice over: You don't want to miss this.
1:11
Tiffany Woolley: Welcome to the iDesign Lab podcast.
1:14
Tiffany Woolley: Today we have a very special guest, Halei Shoha, who is the founder and creator of a very exciting company called Picturely.
1:23
Tiffany Woolley: So welcome, Hale, and please introduce yourself to our audience.
1:29
Haleh Shoa: Thank you so much for having me.
1:31
Haleh Shoa: I am Hale Shoa and, yeah, as you mentioned, I'm the CEO and founder of Picturely.
1:36
Haleh Shoa: It's a photo organization and curation and design studio based in Los Angeles.
1:45
Scott Woolley: It's a very interesting company.
1:46
Scott Woolley: Tell us a little about the company and what the company does and how it helps people.
1:52
Haleh Shoa: Uh-huh.
1:52
Haleh Shoa: So this was my little passion project back in 2015.
1:57
Haleh Shoa: I was working with a life coach while I had a very big girl job in advertising.
2:01
Haleh Shoa: I was the global operations director for Jaguar Land Rover in 2016.
2:07
Haleh Shoa: And I just really wanted to do my own business.
2:10
Haleh Shoa: And she kept asking me, like, what do you love doing?
2:13
Haleh Shoa: And really what it kept boiling down to was family memories and making things with it.
2:19
Haleh Shoa: So I am very passionate about designing beautiful photo keepsakes like photo books and gallery walls.
2:27
Haleh Shoa: And then she kept saying, okay, well, let's figure out how to make a business out of it.
2:33
Haleh Shoa: And I kept thinking who's going to pay me to do photo books?
2:35
Haleh Shoa: That's so funny, you know.
2:37
Haleh Shoa: Five employees later, yeah.
2:40
Scott Woolley: But you're doing more than just photo books.
2:42
Scott Woolley: You're doing photo walls for people's homes, the collages and so forth.
2:48
Scott Woolley: You're doing archival for people.
2:52
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, that's actually most of our business, is that?
2:55
Haleh Shoa: So my first client I'm sorry, no, no, go ahead my first client out the gate who wanted to do a photo book.
3:03
Haleh Shoa: I went to her house to sort of assess what she has and she took me into her dining room, which her dining room was about, I want to say it was about 24 feet long, it was very large.
3:16
Haleh Shoa: She had a very big house in Los Angeles and it had about three feet deep of photos.
3:23
Haleh Shoa: And then there were adjoining little tables around the dining room which also had three feet deep of photos.
3:25
Haleh Shoa: And then there were adjoining little tables around the dining room which also had three feet deep, full, full.
3:29
Haleh Shoa: And and she said, yes, I'd like to do a photo book, but what about all this right?
3:36
Haleh Shoa: And I thought, oh, so, uh, yeah, I need to dig into archiving and learn how to do that.
3:40
Haleh Shoa: So I became a certified photo organizer so I am very knowledgeable in how to approach a.
3:53
Haleh Shoa: I specialize in large collections.
3:55
Haleh Shoa: We just happen to get a lot of large collections of people saying you know, I have so many photo books and scrapbooks from 1800s, all the way to the 1940s.
4:06
Haleh Shoa: You know, I have so many things on tape from the 80s, 90s and 2000s, I just don't even know how to approach this.
4:12
Haleh Shoa: I don't even know what to do with all this, so it's really important to be able to organize a collection in a way that the family can access it, in a way that's searchable and sortable, and so that's our expertise, in order to be able to provide an archive to them.
4:33
Scott Woolley: So a person who has photos, videos, film that they've had since they're a kid or their grandparents or their parents gave them, you're able to take all of that and basically digitize it catalog it like digital cataloging, I guess exactly.
4:51
Haleh Shoa: yeah, so we organize everything chronologically.
4:54
Haleh Shoa: I was just gonna ask you is it date or exactly?
4:58
Haleh Shoa: You know there's so many clues and photos.
5:00
Haleh Shoa: You know the photos themselves, you know, with the deckled edges being from the 30s all the way to the early 50s, and then the square photos are from the sort of mid to late 50s to early 70s.
5:12
Haleh Shoa: So photos themselves have a lot of clues in them as to when they're from.
5:17
Haleh Shoa: And of course, we start every project with a family tree so that we can see, you know, when the grandmother was born, when they got married, when the you know when they passed, because we always come across photos that are wrongly dated whether the camera had a wrong date on it and so the stamp on the photo is incorrect.
5:39
Haleh Shoa: I remember those days when you didn't update that exactly yeah, a lot of people are like, yeah, I just bought a new camera.
5:47
Haleh Shoa: It's like they forget to you know update it yeah, yeah, exactly yeah.
5:52
Haleh Shoa: So you know, and that's why you know, if we come across a photo that has grandpa in it that stated 1998 on the the stamp on the photo, but grandpa died in 1993, we, we know that, that's you know.
6:04
Haleh Shoa: In fact, it gives us a clue to, and how to do other photos that came from that camera.
6:10
Tiffany Woolley: Um, so, so, so much research, really with the family itself is involved in this process.
6:19
Haleh Shoa: You know you would think, uh, I've become so good at, in terms of, like, how to interview a client Right that we spent two to four hours with a client and that's really all a client can handle.
6:31
Haleh Shoa: Going through memories is, I mean, unless it's like a very large archive and by large I mean like 300,000 or more Then but even then it's just understanding what the cadence was.
6:46
Haleh Shoa: We have a lot of clients who are high profile, whether it's in the world of business or fashion or otherwise.
6:55
Haleh Shoa: So our approach to those types of clients is a little different, because now we're getting into their business acumen and understanding their accomplishments and what the timeline of that would be.
7:13
Tiffany Woolley: It's really so necessary.
7:14
Tiffany Woolley: There's really everybody who could benefit from a tool like this.
7:18
Tiffany Woolley: So when you spend that initial three hours or less with the client, is this something that people can access for the foreseeable future and add to?
7:31
Haleh Shoa: Well, yeah, I mean the three to four hour initial thing is for me to understand their goals and also just kind of skim through some of their albums and some of their memories to sort of assess the way we would curate.
7:46
Haleh Shoa: So I highly recommend every catalog to be curated.
7:50
Haleh Shoa: There are there's no reason for us to keep and scan photos that, let's say, you went to the zoo in the nineties and you took a bunch of images of the animals and those were amazing in the 90s, because then you make a little photo book and then you'd be like then that's the elephant and that's the giraffe, and the kids will love it.
8:13
Haleh Shoa: But you know your great grandkids are going to be like why?
8:15
Haleh Shoa: Why is there a photo of an elephant Like right.
8:18
Haleh Shoa: Significance.
8:19
Haleh Shoa: Did they own this elephant?
8:21
Haleh Shoa: Own this elephant, it's so true.
8:29
Haleh Shoa: The editing process yes, so my main goal is to make sure I understand how they would want us to edit it for them.
8:32
Haleh Shoa: We have an amazing team of organizers and curators that you know.
8:37
Haleh Shoa: We've all worked together to really understand what to keep and what not to keep, and so we curate every collection and in that three to four hours is when I'm sort of assessing, you know, do they want to keep more or less?
8:51
Haleh Shoa: And yeah, and some families want to keep everything A lot of times the ones who have suffered an untimely death, whether it's of a spouse or if it's of a parent, and they're still grieving that tends to lean into really wanting to keep everything.
9:10
Scott Woolley: So it seems like it's a very timely process.
9:13
Scott Woolley: You mentioned a few moments ago you have clients of 300,000 images.
9:18
Scott Woolley: That's an enormous amount of images to go through and to call through and then to figure out which ones you're going to keep and which ones you're not for the client.
9:29
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, I mean, you know that client had an enormous amount of accomplishments they have.
9:35
Haleh Shoa: They're a very prominent family in Los Angeles.
9:38
Haleh Shoa: They were extremely political, so they had a lot of fundraisers.
9:44
Haleh Shoa: You know how, like when dignitaries and politicians visit certain cities, there's always certain families who hold that.
9:53
Haleh Shoa: You know the fundraising dinners and whatnot.
9:55
Haleh Shoa: They were part of that sphere.
9:58
Haleh Shoa: So there was a lot of figuring out what the data of so-and-so visiting is and it was just fun, you know, because you get to see a lot of, you know again, like kings and queens and dignitaries and politicians visiting their home.
10:13
Haleh Shoa: It was really cool and interesting.
10:17
Haleh Shoa: But you know, it's like what is the saying?
10:21
Haleh Shoa: How do you eat an elephant one chunk at a time?
10:23
Haleh Shoa: Right, right, right.
10:26
Scott Woolley: So when you have a new client that comes in and they're bringing you or you're going and picking up after you're meeting with them, all of this you know, photography and film and video and so forth is most of it like organized or that people are giving it to you, or is it like in shoe boxes that?
10:45
Scott Woolley: You're you know you're dealing with, I hate to say, a mess.
10:50
Scott Woolley: To start with, to organize it, are you asking them to possibly organize it a little beforehand?
10:58
Haleh Shoa: No, I would prefer for them not to actually, and I'll tell you why it's always a hybrid Not to actually.
11:04
Haleh Shoa: And I'll tell you why it's always a hybrid.
11:07
Haleh Shoa: Every family or institution has had some semblance of organization with their paperwork, their accomplishments, their files, their photos.
11:21
Haleh Shoa: We always start every the organization process always starts with albums, and that is because there was some semblance of a reason why certain photos or memories were in that album, whether it is of a travel or of, you know, the first year of a kid, or just a year's worth of their photos for the family.
11:40
Haleh Shoa: So we always start with albums so we can understand their cadence and we can sort of put the timeline.
11:45
Haleh Shoa: It's much easier for us to put the timeline if a family goes into organize it themselves.
11:51
Haleh Shoa: What ends up happening is that they will take things out of albums that could have helped us with the clues and now it's going to take us a lot longer to be able to figure that out, whereas we can easily figure that out by going through an album, and every family has a shoebox of loose photos, and often that is either photos that are the most precious because they went.
12:16
Haleh Shoa: Let's say there was a celebration of sorts whether someone's getting married or someone passed.
12:21
Haleh Shoa: They go through the albums and take out the best of, and then it's never going to go back in the albums again.
12:26
Haleh Shoa: Um, so those, those photos are either the duds and duplicates that they didn't put in albums or they were the best of that.
12:36
Tiffany Woolley: They took out of albums to make something with it so it's funny because, as you're saying, all those you know the loose pictures and taking them out for certain events or what have you?
12:45
Tiffany Woolley: I I mean that's almost what I would say most people do, even myself in my business when you're kind of helping people through a move and taking photos to display, you know within, you know cabinetry designs and millwork, what have you?
13:01
Tiffany Woolley: It's always like a random grouping.
13:03
Tiffany Woolley: So it's funny.
13:05
Tiffany Woolley: Like, what does that look like initially?
13:08
Tiffany Woolley: So for these people, like I understand, like the timeline, I guess, is where I'm going Like, so initially, they're going to handle this over to you.
13:16
Tiffany Woolley: Kind of let go of the process.
13:19
Tiffany Woolley: Trust the expert, if you will.
13:20
Tiffany Woolley: What does that timeline look like for them?
13:28
Haleh Shoa: if you will.
13:28
Haleh Shoa: What does that timeline look like for them?
13:30
Haleh Shoa: We've gotten to a point where we can finish a fairly large collection, and we consider a large collection anything over 20,000 assets within a month.
13:37
Haleh Shoa: Wow, yeah.
13:40
Scott Woolley: That's a lot of content to go through.
13:43
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, and do you scan everything.
13:46
Tiffany Woolley: How does that work?
13:49
Haleh Shoa: We curate everything, meaning we go through every single item that we've picked up, including receipts, because sometimes receipts could have there's a reason why someone saved a receipt.
14:00
Haleh Shoa: It could be just an oversight, but sometimes it's a handwritten note that you know we keep.
14:06
Haleh Shoa: We don't throw.
14:08
Haleh Shoa: We try not to throw anything out, even when we're deputized.
14:12
Haleh Shoa: I you know I have clients who are like you can throw out my slides when you're done scanning them.
14:17
Haleh Shoa: And and and I'm fine with them throwing it out.
14:22
Haleh Shoa: In fact, I encourage people to throw out their duplicates and duds and things like that.
14:26
Haleh Shoa: I don't feel comfortable throwing anything out in the studio because you could have a change of heart.
14:34
Scott Woolley: I don't know Right right.
14:37
Haleh Shoa: And so, to answer your initial question, we do go through everything, but we do not recommend or scan everything.
14:43
Haleh Shoa: It's just you know, again, you don't want.
14:45
Haleh Shoa: You went to Hawaii and you know the sky and the water look beautiful, but why do we have to scan that?
14:51
Haleh Shoa: You know.
14:52
Tiffany Woolley: That makes sense.
14:53
Tiffany Woolley: It really does, and I feel like you need somebody like yourself to actually explain it.
14:58
Tiffany Woolley: It's kind of like when a client hires us to do interior design for residents I mean they definitely need, I always say you can love a lot of furniture, but doesn't mean it's all going to work in your house.
15:09
Tiffany Woolley: Like you can appreciate things from a distance.
15:12
Haleh Shoa: Exactly, and you know it's much harder to curate your own collection than it is to curate someone else's.
15:19
Haleh Shoa: You know, my husband and I went to Mexico and Cuba in 2015.
15:23
Haleh Shoa: And when I came back, I had his phone, my phone and a camera, and I was so overwhelmed.
15:29
Voice over: I thought okay, I don't know, I like all these photos.
15:32
Haleh Shoa: I know I gave it to my employees.
15:35
Haleh Shoa: I'm like you know what.
15:36
Haleh Shoa: You can curate this for me.
15:37
Haleh Shoa: That's amazing.
15:38
Tiffany Woolley: Because that's what they do.
15:39
Tiffany Woolley: So then, what did they do?
15:40
Tiffany Woolley: Put some in albums for you, print some that go on the wall type of detail, so you have that memory.
15:50
Haleh Shoa: They just curated it for me.
15:50
Haleh Shoa: They took out, you know, they basically five starred what they thought was the great photos.
15:55
Tiffany Woolley: Highlight reel.
15:56
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, we do a lot of digital organization as well, where we take things from Dropbox, icloud, various sources.
16:06
Haleh Shoa: Those photo sharing sites, Exactly the shared drives, and we consolidate the digital libraries, take out the duplicates and then we curate.
16:15
Haleh Shoa: So when I was done taking out the dubs and duplicates for my library, I gave it to them to curate it.
16:23
Tiffany Woolley: Wow.
16:24
Scott Woolley: You know we love your business model and we love what you're doing with.
16:28
Scott Woolley: You know how you're helping families and helping people.
16:30
Scott Woolley: You know archiving their memories.
16:32
Scott Woolley: You know, for us we're very close to the concept because it's got to be 17 or 18 years ago.
16:40
Scott Woolley: We kind of created a similar concept to what you have.
16:45
Scott Woolley: It was really based off of that because I had a very large production company and I actually had two friends who came to me, both professional athletes, dan Marino and Alonzo Mourning.
16:55
Scott Woolley: They came to me almost at the same time.
16:57
Scott Woolley: Dan came to me, past NFL football quarterback and said that he had all of the video since he was a young boy in elementary school playing football, and his father had kept every single video that he had shot of him as a boy in every single game he ever played elementary, junior, high school, college and he came to me and said hey, I want to.
17:21
Scott Woolley: Can we digitize all this, because it's all on all these tapes and it took us, I forget, a number of months to do it.
17:29
Scott Woolley: And while we were doing that, his wife, claire, came to me and said I have all these photos in the house, can you digitize them?
17:37
Scott Woolley: I said sure, she showed up with two of her sons in two cars and they had taken all the pictures off the walls with the frames and brought must have been 200 pictures and frames, say.
17:50
Scott Woolley: And I looked at it going, oh my god, what am I doing with all this?
17:53
Scott Woolley: But this is what you're doing for families.
17:57
Scott Woolley: You know we did, we did the same similar thing for alonzo morning.
18:00
Scott Woolley: We turned it into a business like what you have, but we kind of went away from it because of other interests and other things we were doing and I haven't really seen any company that's doing what you're doing.
18:12
Scott Woolley: You know we talked earlier about the fact that you know just the natural disasters and things that are happening in this country and around the world.
18:22
Scott Woolley: You know it's very sad.
18:24
Scott Woolley: Like you know, we've had a few friends who lost their houses in Los Angeles.
18:29
Tiffany Woolley: Well, and they lose everything from like the things that their kids created at school, like little mementos that— Right, and your business.
18:36
Scott Woolley: It's like everyone should know about it, because everyone should be utilizing your business to save their memories, to put them in.
18:45
Scott Woolley: You know, you could put it in the cloud, you could put it on a thumb drive or a small little drive that you could put in a safe deposit box, just so you have it.
18:53
Scott Woolley: But you're also you're taking people's photography and so forth, which is another kind of that's what I was going to say.
19:00
Tiffany Woolley: Let's talk about the design side of it Like, once you've organized and that's all completed, what is your approach for designing the gallery wall photo books?
19:13
Scott Woolley: digital slideshows each individually.
19:16
Scott Woolley: Let's explain that so our listening audience understands.
19:19
Scott Woolley: Tell us what you're also doing for people in their homes.
19:23
Haleh Shoa: Tell us what you're also doing for people in their homes yeah, in their homes.
19:26
Haleh Shoa: You know, a lot of times they, you know, the low-hanging fruit is I want to be able to watch this on my television, which, of course, then we can help them set that up or provide a digital frame.
19:41
Haleh Shoa: There are companies who make digital frames.
19:43
Haleh Shoa: There's pros and cons with all of them, and we've worked with pretty much all the big digital frame companies and that's always really fun and I have our memories sort of playing in the background on the TV and I just never know what year is going to come up Right.
20:02
Scott Woolley: We do the same thing in our house, when the screensaver, I'll say, goes on, for you know, I think we use YouTube TV, or I forget which one.
20:12
Scott Woolley: We use Fire Stick.
20:14
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, yeah.
20:14
Haleh Shoa: I mean they all you know.
20:16
Scott Woolley: And our pictures come up.
20:17
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, exactly, and so it's just so fun.
20:20
Haleh Shoa: But you know gallery walls, as we've mentioned.
20:24
Haleh Shoa: I think gallery walls are great, but I do think gallery walls need to be refreshed.
20:29
Haleh Shoa: Yes even with art, sometimes you just don't see it after a while.
20:33
Haleh Shoa: You know which I always think like it's nice to do a refresher of art and the way that things are placed in a home every two years, maybe.
20:51
Tiffany Woolley: Museums do that.
20:51
Tiffany Woolley: They move things around.
20:53
Tiffany Woolley: It's a very, you know, typical thing to do.
20:56
Tiffany Woolley: It's like good to remind people of that.
21:00
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, I mean, as you know, design is very energetic, you're right.
21:05
Haleh Shoa: I feel like and I'm sure you can agree with this, that you know there's a ping that hits us when we meet a client.
21:12
Haleh Shoa: Or you know when I'm designing a photo book, it's always the photo that they would never choose.
21:19
Haleh Shoa: Like when I am doing a wedding book, I often say just give me everything, because they're just going to give me the most obvious photos.
21:26
Haleh Shoa: You know the portrait shots where everyone's looking into the camera.
21:29
Haleh Shoa: I like the shots when they're not looking into the camera.
21:33
Haleh Shoa: I like the blurry shots.
21:35
Haleh Shoa: I like the shots with movement.
21:40
Scott Woolley: And most of those are more memorable and more fun to look at as well yeah, I mean exactly, you know um when repositioning things breathes new life into them as well.
21:52
Tiffany Woolley: It's just kind of it changes the energy.
21:54
Tiffany Woolley: It changes the energy, exactly like you said I love that and so I.
22:00
Haleh Shoa: So my goal and my so it's not even a goal, it's really my intention when I'm designing something for a client is to make sure, obviously, to bring joy, as, as I'm sure you do as well, is to bring joy and just like a sense of awe.
22:16
Haleh Shoa: You know, I go like, oh, I didn't even think about this.
22:18
Haleh Shoa: Um, I designed a gallery wall for a client who just celebrated her 90th birthday.
22:24
Haleh Shoa: This was a present.
22:28
Haleh Shoa: Well, the installation was a present for her.
22:31
Haleh Shoa: She had no idea that she was on vacation when we went into the house and installed everything.
22:35
Haleh Shoa: It was a very, very large, very, very large.
22:47
Haleh Shoa: Um, in her previous home where she lived for about 60 years, wow, she had this gallery wall that her husband had put up in the 70s of all their travels.
22:51
Haleh Shoa: And let me tell you, this woman, who was a coco chanel model, um, blonde, and her husband was very successful businessman, and yet they went to like places like Bornea for a month and back packed where they didn't shower for a month Unbelievable.
23:12
Haleh Shoa: I mean, I get chills talking about Joni.
23:16
Haleh Shoa: I love Joni and you know they went to, you know, just back, you know places where they were hanging out with the Aboriginals and just really deep into the Amazon Like incredible, incredible off the beaten track journey.
23:36
Haleh Shoa: So I was so inspired by this wall because in another room they had a entire room of masks and I thought, okay, do you just want me to scan these 404?
23:47
Haleh Shoa: You know pictures that have been so degraded in color because they were not in archival whatever they were just in this terrible frames and um, and she goes what do you have in mind?
23:59
Haleh Shoa: and I said well, you're moving.
24:01
Haleh Shoa: Why don't we do a gallery wall of these photos?
24:03
Haleh Shoa: And we'll mix it with the masks.
24:05
Haleh Shoa: And let me tell you it was.
24:07
Haleh Shoa: It's I still.
24:09
Haleh Shoa: I mean, I go there at least twice a year because we are continuing small little projects here and there and every time I walk in I'm like this is so amazing.
24:19
Tiffany Woolley: This is still my, so that one would be like your favorite to date maybe.
24:24
Haleh Shoa: I'm more of a minimalist, like my design.
24:26
Haleh Shoa: Sense is more of a minimalist, and this wall was definitely not that.
24:32
Tiffany Woolley: Oh, that's funny.
24:33
Haleh Shoa: So I wouldn't say that I would want that wall in my house.
24:35
Haleh Shoa: But Joni decided every single thing in the house is white.
24:41
Haleh Shoa: The couch is white, the walls are white, the floor is white, the walls are white, the floor is white.
24:43
Haleh Shoa: Everything is white on white, on white, on white.
24:47
Scott Woolley: We've seen a few of those houses like that.
24:51
Haleh Shoa: And the only huge, ginormous pop would be this wall that you walk into.
24:56
Haleh Shoa: And so, yeah, I mean this is I.
25:01
Haleh Shoa: It was a collaborative process.
25:03
Haleh Shoa: I was able to show them basically the layout and the design, but when we went to actually install this, some of the masks in transit had broken, so I had to.
25:15
Haleh Shoa: It wasn't exactly what they had approved, but I mean it didn't matter.
25:20
Haleh Shoa: She was really extremely happy with it.
25:24
Scott Woolley: So when you're doing a gallery wall for a house, you're selecting the pictures.
25:28
Scott Woolley: Are you also then framing them?
25:30
Scott Woolley: Because I know you're installing and putting them up, but are you actually then selecting frames?
25:38
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, I mean again, it's a collaborative process.
25:40
Haleh Shoa: I would suggest certain framing and I've never gotten pushback.
25:46
Haleh Shoa: And I explained like I think this needs to have a pop of color in the mat for these reasons and I send pictures from the framer and they usually go.
25:56
Haleh Shoa: I didn't think of that, of that, you know.
26:06
Tiffany Woolley: um, I, I, I like to push the boundaries and even when they don't see, except a lot of people aren't visual.
26:08
Tiffany Woolley: Oh, a lot of people are not visual.
26:10
Tiffany Woolley: Do you follow a certain process or do you have a certain philosophy when it comes to gallery walls, as far as the sizing of the photos, or do you change up like it's, or is each one completely curated on their own?
26:24
Tiffany Woolley: It's completely curated.
26:26
Tiffany Woolley: It depends on what else they have.
26:27
Tiffany Woolley: But is there a certain philosophy that you adhere to or like a certain?
26:33
Tiffany Woolley: Um, I don't know.
26:34
Tiffany Woolley: I know, when I'm laying art on walls, I lay them on the floor for example, first and I know a lot of people do templates now.
26:41
Scott Woolley: Or but were you also?
26:43
Scott Woolley: You just did one on 3d you did it in 3d on cad and then did a 3d of the wall.
26:48
Tiffany Woolley: So the client saw a philosophy that you follow, or a rule of thumb.
26:53
Haleh Shoa: I design things in canva, uh-huh, I love canva.
26:56
Haleh Shoa: What a fabulous little addition that is so I do the you know I, when I go to someone's house, or if I'm doing it remotely, I ask them to send me a photo stepping away from the wall so I could see all corners of that wall.
27:13
Haleh Shoa: And then I ask them to measure everything, including, like the switch.
27:18
Voice over: Right the light switches.
27:21
Haleh Shoa: You know I need to put that on my camber, essentially on the canvas right, and then, once I know what the measurements are, you know if there's a television, where's that place?
27:34
Haleh Shoa: You know, measure it from this angle and that angle.
27:37
Haleh Shoa: So I set up all the furniture in camva and I usually put a height of a person that is the same height as my client Right and so that they could see if they're standing next to that wall.
27:53
Haleh Shoa: Where does everything lie?
27:55
Scott Woolley: Right, the right perspective.
27:57
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah.
27:57
Haleh Shoa: Yes, and then I could say you know, is this where your television would be?
28:02
Haleh Shoa: Because I want to make sure that I did the canvas properly.
28:05
Haleh Shoa: And once we figure that out, then I put everything on the wall and then they can.
28:09
Haleh Shoa: So, but to answer your question, I like to design a gallery wall, first looking at what they have, and then I can add different things, you know, and work with the sizing and things like that.
28:26
Scott Woolley: Does technology fall in place with what you do?
28:30
Scott Woolley: Is it important?
28:34
Haleh Shoa: I say to people I own an IT company.
28:36
Tiffany Woolley: What's that?
28:40
Haleh Shoa: It's that I own an IT company, it's all.
28:49
Haleh Shoa: I mean, I have a 50 terabyte server onto which we scan everything, because we camera scan.
28:52
Haleh Shoa: You know, the scans are enormous, right.
28:55
Haleh Shoa: And then you know, I have another 96 terabyte for all the digital collections that we gather.
29:02
Haleh Shoa: 96 terabyte for all the digital collections that we gather because, um, you know, we need, we need a really fast computer and a very, very large hard drive for all those iClouds and, you know, google photos and so much information you know, there's a, there's a, there's a technology I cannot think of the name of it.
29:20
Scott Woolley: um, it slips my mind.
29:22
Scott Woolley: Right now, we, in our house, we have a wall of photos, I'd say the room is the hallway, is 20 feet long, 25 feet.
29:31
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah.
29:32
Scott Woolley: And we probably have a hundred Too many pictures, 200 pictures all framed that are on the wall.
29:37
Scott Woolley: Too many People love it but it's not.
29:39
Scott Woolley: And a few years ago I kind of what you just said a few minutes ago about changing things and being sort of stale and stagnant.
29:47
Scott Woolley: I started taking the pictures and I cannot think of the technology of what we were doing.
29:52
Scott Woolley: But we were using a company called Erasma.
29:55
Scott Woolley: They were bought by HP and then HP they kind of gave up on the company and they went away.
30:01
Scott Woolley: But I don't know if you've used this kind of technology with any of your clients that we use the photo as almost like a QR code.
30:10
Scott Woolley: So when you took your phone, if you had the software on your phone and you put it on the picture, that picture would then turn to life with a video that matched the picture.
30:24
Haleh Shoa: Oh, I had a client who wanted to do this.
30:26
Scott Woolley: I can't think of the name of the technology.
30:30
Scott Woolley: It's widely used.
30:32
Scott Woolley: The Rolling Stones used it for a concert tour to promote their tour, and I got involved in it because I had a client Office Depot and we used it in Office Depot and I wish I could think of the name of the technology that exists that you could take a picture and that becomes sort of the QR code that ignites or starts whatever you want.
30:57
Scott Woolley: It could take you to a website.
30:58
Scott Woolley: It could take you to what we use in our house is for video and.
31:02
Scott Woolley: And then my kids took these little, my kids took these little crystals and stuck them on all the frames.
31:09
Scott Woolley: That would come to life.
31:12
Scott Woolley: So when friends and relatives and whatnot came to the house they could take their cell phone out, download the software from Erasmus and watch the picture come to life.
31:23
Haleh Shoa: I'm going to write this down.
31:24
Haleh Shoa: Is it still active?
31:25
Scott Woolley: Oh, well, erasmus is not.
31:27
Scott Woolley: It was a wonderful platform.
31:29
Scott Woolley: Like I said, hp bought them and then they abandoned it, like a year or two later.
31:34
Scott Woolley: But I'll remember what the technology is and I'll let you know.
31:41
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, that would be great.
31:42
Haleh Shoa: I would love to explore that.
31:44
Haleh Shoa: Yeah.
31:45
Tiffany Woolley: And as we're talking about technology and you mentioned, you know sometimes your clients are not in the same town or area as you do.
31:55
Tiffany Woolley: You get your business through word of mouth.
31:58
Tiffany Woolley: Is it through social media, online platform?
32:01
Tiffany Woolley: And like where does, where do people go to find you?
32:07
Haleh Shoa: Well, we're everywhere, we're on all the socials and, of course, we have a website.
32:12
Haleh Shoa: We have been getting a lot of clients outside of Los Angeles as of late through Google.
32:17
Haleh Shoa: They just find me on Google, amazing, yeah, and I just did my own little tweaks on SEO and I thought wait, what's happening?
32:25
Haleh Shoa: This is pretty cool and you know, we have clients outside of LA where they fly me to their, which it's actually.
32:36
Haleh Shoa: It's actually doesn't take that long Again, with clients in LA.
32:41
Haleh Shoa: I usually spend up to four hours with them, and so it takes about two to three days.
32:47
Haleh Shoa: You know, I fly and then the next day we start assessing and working with, you know, ups to start boxing their memories to ship back to us.
32:58
Haleh Shoa: So, yeah, so that's always an option is shipped back to us.
33:02
Scott Woolley: So yeah, so that's always an option.
33:04
Scott Woolley: Are there any challenges in preserving people's memories in the process of what you do?
33:10
Haleh Shoa: The challenges are always the tapes, you know.
33:13
Haleh Shoa: A lot of times they're like well, we don't know what's on this tape, and the tape would be.
33:17
Haleh Shoa: Well, it's not that.
33:18
Tiffany Woolley: Well, we always get that too.
33:19
Tiffany Woolley: A few little Pandora boxes are getting opened up.
33:25
Haleh Shoa: It's always a Pandora box Always.
33:31
Scott Woolley: There's an enormous amount of different formats of tape.
33:35
Haleh Shoa: We handle all.
33:36
Scott Woolley: You have all of them.
33:38
Haleh Shoa: We handle everything.
33:39
Haleh Shoa: Everything is handled in-house, except for this kind of film 8mm and 60mm, all that.
33:47
Haleh Shoa: I just decided not to purchase that equipment because, again, I live in Los Angeles and there are so many amazing vendors that can do a phenomenal job where I don't have to do this.
34:01
Tiffany Woolley: The experts.
34:02
Scott Woolley: Exactly so.
34:03
Scott Woolley: I'm interested in asking a question.
34:05
Scott Woolley: The fact that you do work and you have clients all over the world is from a standpoint from dealing with people all over the world.
34:13
Scott Woolley: Do people handle their memories, their photos in different ways in different areas of the world, or is everyone kind of the same, just in shoeboxes and disorganized with it?
34:26
Haleh Shoa: Shoeboxes and disorganized.
34:28
Tiffany Woolley: you know it's like it's a global solution.
34:32
Haleh Shoa: You know, here's the thing Everybody was very used to and we are probably of the same generation and we know this to be true Everyone was used to the analog.
34:43
Haleh Shoa: They were used to the scrapbooks or the albums, Then it went from sticky to slide-ins.
34:48
Haleh Shoa: We were just used to all that.
34:50
Haleh Shoa: And then in 1996, there was an emergence of digital camcorders and cameras, which was intriguing in 1996.
34:58
Haleh Shoa: We still had that, but maybe we bought it if we were gadgety.
35:02
Haleh Shoa: But then people didn't know really what to do with the SD cards 1996.
35:04
Haleh Shoa: We still had that, but maybe we bought it if we were gadgety, Right, and then um so, but then people didn't know really what to do with the SD cards.
35:08
Tiffany Woolley: And that's the little memory card that was me.
35:13
Haleh Shoa: And um.
35:14
Haleh Shoa: So I have a client who had no exaggeration over 800 SD cards cause they didn't know.
35:20
Haleh Shoa: You can download the information.
35:21
Scott Woolley: That's quite an investment in SD cards because they didn't know you could download the information.
35:23
Scott Woolley: That's quite an investment in SD cards a huge investment.
35:28
Haleh Shoa: So then then it became uh, you know there's a term, it's it's in 2004, it's called the digital black hole, where so many families don't have assets from 2000 to 2004.
35:41
Haleh Shoa: And that was because they just didn't know how to save their digital files.
35:47
Haleh Shoa: So it could actually those files could be sort of squirreled in an old computer which we can have that actually happened to us?
35:55
Tiffany Woolley: We have like a whole year of trips and travel.
35:59
Scott Woolley: It's like a two and a half year period that everything that disappeared is gone.
36:05
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, because people didn't know they would change computers.
36:08
Haleh Shoa: They had no idea.
36:09
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, we entrusted, it's so sad.
36:13
Scott Woolley: I'm going to give you one that's even worse.
36:14
Scott Woolley: This is putting it on your computer.
36:16
Scott Woolley: Then your computer dies and your hard drive dies, and now everything's gone.
36:23
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, you definitely need backup for your backup when it comes to photography and memories.
36:29
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, and this is why we practice the 3-2-1 backup method for all of our clients.
36:33
Haleh Shoa: Tell us about that.
36:34
Haleh Shoa: 3-2-1 is three copies of your data in two places, one off-site.
36:42
Haleh Shoa: So three copies of your data.
36:45
Haleh Shoa: Two places could be, two different clouds or on external hard drive, and one on the cloud and then one copy off-site.
36:54
Haleh Shoa: So you get another external hard drive and you put that in the bank or someone else's house Right or at the office.
37:02
Haleh Shoa: You know if you have access to a different location.
37:05
Tiffany Woolley: Makes total sense.
37:07
Scott Woolley: Did you come up?
37:08
Haleh Shoa: with that.
37:08
Haleh Shoa: No, the father of metadata well, we kind of call him that.
37:15
Haleh Shoa: But Peter Crow is who I'm actually going to be seeing in a couple of weeks when I go to conference.
37:22
Haleh Shoa: He's the one who sort of came up with the 3-to-1 method.
37:26
Tiffany Woolley: So is that part of your business plan Like when somebody hires you, that's all.
37:31
Tiffany Woolley: How does the compensation look Like?
37:34
Tiffany Woolley: What does your agreement strategy look like?
37:38
Tiffany Woolley: How does that is there broken up into how many pieces?
37:42
Tiffany Woolley: I mean, it's like, kind of, for me every project is a different scope of work.
37:48
Haleh Shoa: Every project is different, so we, so we're.
37:52
Haleh Shoa: I like to look at my workflow and our studio and what we offer as 360.
37:58
Haleh Shoa: It's like really, from beginning to end, we have figured it all out for our clients.
38:03
Haleh Shoa: So the way we deliver files is that we come up with a platform and I sort of give them a showcase of different platforms that we've created for our clients and I go through the pros and cons of those platforms with them and then they choose a platform and then we set that up for them and then, of course, they get a couple of thumb drives from us as well, or hard drives, depending on how large the collection is, and they can keep one in-house and back that up on their computers and keep one off-site.
38:37
Haleh Shoa: So in terms of how we price everything, it's really in phases.
38:41
Haleh Shoa: In terms of how we price everything, it's really in phases, although I've gotten pretty good at being able to tell someone their collection is $10,000, $20,000, $50,000, whatever it is.
38:54
Haleh Shoa: We basically we bring everything in the office and we count everything and the estimate I provide has the count and the counts are approximate.
39:06
Haleh Shoa: I'm not going to sit there and count 80,000 photos three times to make sure it was 80,000.
39:11
Haleh Shoa: But there's there's tactics that we use.
39:15
Haleh Shoa: For example, one inch of photos is approximately a hundred photos.
39:19
Haleh Shoa: Okay, one inch of slides is approximately 20 slides, so you don't weigh them slides is approximately 20 slides, so you don't weigh them.
39:26
Scott Woolley: No, we don't weigh them.
39:28
Haleh Shoa: No, we don't weigh them.
39:29
Haleh Shoa: If there are old sort of cabinet cards, you know the cabinet cards, the thick ones from the late 1800s to 1910s.
39:37
Haleh Shoa: You know those, of course, because they're thicker, it's going to one inch of those is going to be less right.
39:43
Haleh Shoa: You know it's going to be 10 approximately.
39:45
Haleh Shoa: It's around a millimeter or so.
39:47
Haleh Shoa: So we have tactics and then for the albums we sort of do an average of anywhere from three to four per page.
39:56
Haleh Shoa: We count the pages and we put that in.
39:59
Haleh Shoa: It's just all approximate.
40:01
Haleh Shoa: And then we say if you scan your entire library it's going to be this price.
40:07
Haleh Shoa: But we know it's never going to be that price because we're not going to scan everything.
40:12
Haleh Shoa: I don't you know, I always recommend and this floors a lot of people.
40:17
Haleh Shoa: I say 10 to 20% and they're like wow.
40:19
Haleh Shoa: You know, I mean think about it.
40:25
Tiffany Woolley: Preserving it.
40:26
Tiffany Woolley: It's different, Like you're preserving God forbid, you know, and you're preserving it for people to actually be able to use and look at and frequent versus.
40:35
Tiffany Woolley: People aren't going to want to go through that every single time.
40:38
Tiffany Woolley: You actually would.
40:39
Tiffany Woolley: I think the little bit would be more accessible.
40:43
Haleh Shoa: Exactly.
40:44
Haleh Shoa: Well, it's not, it's.
40:46
Haleh Shoa: I'm not talking about 10 to 20% from every era.
40:48
Haleh Shoa: Obviously, if anything is before the 70s, we're going to preserve most of it, because people were more discerning.
40:55
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, definitely it was more discerning.
40:58
Haleh Shoa: In the 70s, people started taking a lot of photos and then forget about the 80s and 90s, because that was when you got one print and then you got like three for free.
41:08
Tiffany Woolley: So you know so funny yes, there's so much history just in like this conversation alone, of like understanding philosophies.
41:19
Scott Woolley: Right, yeah, absolutely, you have to understand the mindset we we mentioned to you before we started the podcast today that you know we as a family have been digitizing all of our memories since our first child was born 18 years ago.
41:37
Scott Woolley: So every single photo, every single video that we have taken has been put onto a family website.
41:43
Scott Woolley: And one thing that we have found because of that and Tiffany and I talk about this every so often is that it really brings the family together so much more because when we have family over or we're just on a Saturday night with our kids and there's not a great movie to watch, let's turn on the photo memories and we'll sit there for a number of hours going through those photos and, like you know, our kids just love it like going through our wedding photos and so forth and the wedding videos.
42:15
Scott Woolley: So there's an emotional aspect to going back and looking at all of that old, you know, those old memories.
42:23
Scott Woolley: So you must experience that with clients that that you have that are probably very excited once they get everything you know absolutely.
42:31
Haleh Shoa: There's never a dry eye in the house when you're delivering.
42:35
Haleh Shoa: I mean, it's just.
42:36
Haleh Shoa: My favorite form of memory is slides, because a no one has seen them for decades right, you're right.
42:43
Haleh Shoa: And b you are.
42:46
Haleh Shoa: You just won't believe the quality it's like.
42:48
Haleh Shoa: Slides are this magical form of memory that has held its quality since the 40.
42:57
Haleh Shoa: I mean, I scan slides from the 40s and it you could see the pores if the camera was a good quality.
43:02
Tiffany Woolley: You're kidding?
43:04
Tiffany Woolley: Wow, the color and everything.
43:08
Haleh Shoa: It's just magical.
43:09
Haleh Shoa: I mean now, having said that, there are a lot of slides that have lost their glory.
43:14
Haleh Shoa: But our scanning price includes not only the high-quality scan, but we of course rotate and crop everything, and of course we rename the file and redate it so that it's searchable and sortable.
43:31
Haleh Shoa: But we also color correct everything that we scan.
43:35
Tiffany Woolley: That's unbelievable.
43:36
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, believable.
43:37
Tiffany Woolley: That's really because I know even Scott, when he goes through our pictures, you know, and with the kids, if we're traveling, he's always wanting the pictures horizontal, but the kids want vertical because that's what goes on social media, one of those that's a modern problem.
43:57
Scott Woolley: Right?
43:57
Scott Woolley: Well, because we watched them as a family, like I just said, on the big screen TV and I think that a picture in a widescreen format is so much better than looking at it vertical, because from your cell phone you're seeing so much of what the memory is.
44:17
Haleh Shoa: It's the best.
44:18
Scott Woolley: Yeah.
44:20
Haleh Shoa: We hold such an amazing piece of equipment in our hand.
44:23
Haleh Shoa: We do so incredible.
44:26
Haleh Shoa: I mean, I run my business on this thing Right, and I'm a phenomenal photographer on it and I'm a great videographer and I get to, you know, my dad's 97.
44:36
Haleh Shoa: And I get to put on that recorder so he doesn't become self conscious.
44:40
Haleh Shoa: I do audio recording of him.
44:42
Haleh Shoa: I just kind of slip it right under him as he's telling a story, just so I can have his voice.
44:48
Haleh Shoa: You know, and um, and it's, it's just.
44:52
Haleh Shoa: I actually do a lot of uh, workshops on iPhone, um, on little tips and tricks on iPhones.
45:00
Tiffany Woolley: That a lot of people don't know about.
45:01
Haleh Shoa: That's cool.
45:02
Haleh Shoa: Yeah, sign up on our mailing list and you'll uh, get a a note of that, but, um, it's just.
45:10
Haleh Shoa: But, however, we've lost being intentional photographers agreed agreed, without a doubt.
45:18
Haleh Shoa: We need to be intentional.
45:20
Haleh Shoa: We need to make sure that that camera lens is clean before we take a selfie, or, you know, or a or a photograph.
45:26
Haleh Shoa: I get too many photos where everything's blurry because the fingerprints are all over the camera lens, either in the front or in the back, and you know you need to be intentional about taking photos.
45:37
Haleh Shoa: There's a carbon footprint of all the things that we're putting in the cloud, you know.
45:43
Haleh Shoa: So you don't need to have your photos because this is such a fear.
45:48
Haleh Shoa: People have squirreled their photos in every all over and and then they become overwhelmed and they don't know what they have and it's not consolidated.
45:58
Haleh Shoa: So.
45:58
Haleh Shoa: So I teach a lot about intentionalities when it comes to this.
46:03
Tiffany Woolley: Well, and even with, like you know, I'm sure, as you get more modern clientele, or I should say younger clientele as your business evolves, like this generation, everything is digital.
46:15
Tiffany Woolley: There's very little that's actually a printed photograph or memory.
46:22
Tiffany Woolley: Do you also include like, say, like a newspaper clipping or anything like that?
46:31
Tiffany Woolley: Go into the archive as well?
46:34
Tiffany Woolley: Like you know, we also save every time the kids are in a competition or like if they give a you know at church, they'll give a pamphlet out who's singing?
46:43
Scott Woolley: Well, we've taken it from our standpoint as a family to another level.
46:47
Scott Woolley: We not only archive every photo, every video, but every award that someone in the family might get.
46:53
Scott Woolley: There's a section on our family website for awards, even their report cards.
46:58
Scott Woolley: I love that, even their report cards.
47:00
Scott Woolley: I'm digitizing and putting it up there because, you know, in 20 years, when our kids have kids, they can go back and with their kids looking at hey look, this is what I got as grades in third grade or sixth grade.
47:12
Tiffany Woolley: Well, and I also found, as they need pictures for certain events or certain things, you know, things it's very easy to be, go get those pictures of right off the website Right.
47:24
Haleh Shoa: That's that, yeah, and to answer your question, yes to all of that awards um old passports oh, that's a good one too it's so fun to scan old passports of you know grandpa, who's been gone since the 90s, and we find his passport, and it's like from the 20s you know vintage, yeah, driver's licenses, all those.
47:44
Haleh Shoa: Driver's licenses.
47:45
Haleh Shoa: But definitely accomplishments are huge.
47:47
Haleh Shoa: You know, we have a lot of clients whose parents that have passed had enormous accomplishments and there's a lot of newspaper clippings and we just did a book of just.
47:59
Haleh Shoa: My client is now 75, and so her dad has been gone for a while, but I just created a book for her of just her father's accomplishments.
48:11
Tiffany Woolley: So that's amazing.
48:11
Tiffany Woolley: So once you actually go through the cataloging and that curating you can constantly, I guess clients can come back to you and be like, oh, can we now do this and now add on that yeah, we do a lot of year end books.
48:27
Haleh Shoa: Okay, so I, for me, that's gold, you know, you know, and and I, my approach to doing celebratory books is a little different.
48:39
Haleh Shoa: You know, I like for a wedding book, I do like to include the vows.
48:44
Haleh Shoa: I like to include a wedding book, I do like to include the vows I like to include.
48:51
Haleh Shoa: I mean, if the album pages allow.
48:57
Haleh Shoa: I like to include anything about their engagement, just so, it's the journey of their wedding, yes, and then, of course, if they went on a honeymoon, and again, if the book allows, because books only have certain amount of pages, you know, maybe include something that is of the journey of their, their whole getting married and their union Right.
49:17
Tiffany Woolley: So who do you use to do the books?
49:18
Tiffany Woolley: Do you do print those in house, or how does that?
49:21
Tiffany Woolley: No, no, okay.
49:22
Haleh Shoa: We use.
49:23
Haleh Shoa: Everything I do is everything I do is, uh, through the lens of archival?
49:27
Haleh Shoa: Okay.
49:28
Haleh Shoa: So we use um bookmakers that are only provide archival quality, okay.
49:34
Haleh Shoa: So when a client asked me to do something in Shutterfly, with all due respect, I will say no.
49:39
Tiffany Woolley: Right, okay, that's kind of what I was asking in a nice way.
49:43
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, yeah and again.
49:46
Haleh Shoa: No, I mean.
49:47
Tiffany Woolley: No.
49:47
Haleh Shoa: I get it, I get it.
49:48
Haleh Shoa: And Shutterfly, it's great for the consumers, it's wonderful Like put your photos in there.
49:54
Haleh Shoa: I call it the photo jail because trying to get your photos out of Shutterfly is you need.
50:01
Haleh Shoa: You know you need a court order for that.
50:03
Scott Woolley: Right.
50:04
Scott Woolley: Well, I'm going to say that that's with a lot of sites, a lot of sharing sites.
50:09
Scott Woolley: You know they either own whatever you put up or to get your stuff out.
50:14
Scott Woolley: It's so difficult.
50:17
Haleh Shoa: Yes, yeah, I mean, apple makes it really easy and again, because it's all about privacy for that company and I hope they never change that policy Shutterfly is the absolute worst.
50:31
Haleh Shoa: Google is hard doable and Amazon was really easy and now it's much harder with Amazon.
50:39
Haleh Shoa: So, yeah, I mean.
50:42
Haleh Shoa: Oh.
50:45
Haleh Shoa: So, yes, I only use archival quality, whether it's just getting prints for my clients or doing photo books.
50:52
Haleh Shoa: We have different tiers for different price levels and they're all archival.
50:57
Haleh Shoa: But you know, the higher tier just allows for a million different iterations when you say archival, what do you mean by that?
51:08
Scott Woolley: The texture of the paper?
51:11
Haleh Shoa: The paper is archival quality, meaning it will last.
51:14
Haleh Shoa: They guarantee one company guarantees it for up to 100 years that it won't fade or degrade and that the glues won't come apart.
51:24
Haleh Shoa: You know, because all the covers have glues on them, right, so the glues won't come apart.
51:26
Haleh Shoa: You know, because you know, all the covers have glues on them, right, so the glues are archival, the print is archival and I don't think you could do fabric that's archival.
51:37
Haleh Shoa: But fabric is fabric, right, and most of it is polyester, so it's essentially plastic, so it won't ever degrade.
51:45
Haleh Shoa: So it's essentially plastic, so it won't ever degrade.
51:48
Haleh Shoa: Wow, but yeah, and you know, I like to design and I do design logos, sort of family logos for the websites that we design, and the same logo goes on all their books.
52:01
Haleh Shoa: It's like family branding.
52:04
Tiffany Woolley: It is.
52:05
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, I know, I just saw that recently too.
52:07
Tiffany Woolley: I read in a magazine of like a couple who had a second or has a second home and they created a logo and a name for the house and then a certain colorway and they used it on everything from their napkins to the bikes they use on that property, their cars.
52:23
Tiffany Woolley: Literally, the logo became such important facet to the whole.
52:29
Tiffany Woolley: So there's just so much that can be incorporated with intention, as you mentioned before.
52:34
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, definitely.
52:38
Scott Woolley: So where do you see your company in four or five years from now?
52:52
Haleh Shoa: years from now, I would like to be able to bestow my knowledge to as many people as possible.
52:54
Haleh Shoa: That's really my intention is to teach people the importance of not only saving their memories, but, you know, for me it's the gateway to our ancestors.
53:05
Haleh Shoa: For sure, our history, our history, and I know that there is no human alive that is at least my age that hasn't experienced some level of trauma, and whether that is through the family or through just the world in general.
53:25
Haleh Shoa: For example, when I was nine years old, I was in the middle of the Iranian revolution, right and crazy my story, my personal story, is that we, you know, my parents, had to leave, flee, essentially to this country, and my mom only brought the family photo books, and that's how I, you know that's another reason why I started this business is because I started to question like, who was was?
53:48
Haleh Shoa: Who was this person?
53:49
Haleh Shoa: Oh, it's my dad's uncle, who I've only met once and I kind of sort of remember, but not really, and so it's the gateway through to my where I come from and the why, and so I just want people to be inspired.
54:02
Haleh Shoa: So, in five years from now, I hope that I can inspire as many people to take their memories more seriously and take an action towards saving them and preserving them.
54:16
Tiffany Woolley: Do you think this is something that could be franchised?
54:19
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, absolutely.
54:21
Voice over: I think so.
54:22
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, I feel like.
54:23
Tiffany Woolley: I mean, I feel like just even after today's conversation sharing information with you, I don't know if you'd even be able to keep up with the intake.
54:31
Tiffany Woolley: I mean, I feel like there's so many busy in this very busy, digital, loud, fast world we live in.
54:39
Tiffany Woolley: You know, it's why people hire interior designers, you hire people to do everything.
54:43
Tiffany Woolley: Why not hire somebody to archive, like you said, your history?
54:47
Tiffany Woolley: When you were had to flee the, what was the most important thing you had you know to take and that was your memories and your history.
54:54
Tiffany Woolley: And I just know that there's.
54:56
Tiffany Woolley: You know, like most people start with a Shutterfly concept, but very few stick with it as well.
55:02
Tiffany Woolley: It's something that lags tremendously.
55:07
Haleh Shoa: I mean, you could start with the Shutterfly concept and you can certainly continue that, but that's not going to preserve your great grandmother's photos Correct, and her stories Correct, and merge them, and merge them.
55:37
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, I mean this is again, the 360 is this idea of everything that's important to you right the report cards, the passports, the old driver's licenses and then all the children's art.
55:41
Scott Woolley: Oh, totally.
55:43
Tiffany Woolley: That's one of the things that we keep, we scan.
55:44
Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, it really is such a brilliant, brilliant business concept.
55:50
Tiffany Woolley: Thank, you.
55:51
Scott Woolley: I appreciate that it really is Is your demographic more of the baby boomer generation that has more, because it really is.
56:00
Scott Woolley: How do we get the message out to the younger generation that's more savvy with digital and should be?
56:07
Tiffany Woolley: Well, and I actually feel like to add on piggyback what you were just saying, scott.
56:11
Tiffany Woolley: So, for example, my grandmother was sick a few years ago.
56:14
Tiffany Woolley: She's older, lived an amazing life, has amazing history archive and my aunt took a lot of that and made books that she would keep on the cocktail table.
56:26
Tiffany Woolley: So anytime somebody would go visit my grandmother spend an hour with her.
56:30
Tiffany Woolley: My girls started to want to go hang out at my grandma's.
56:33
Tiffany Woolley: They could look at those old photos again and see all these old memories and pictures where this new generation it's all in a phone.
56:44
Haleh Shoa: And it's all in their phone.
56:45
Haleh Shoa: It's not shared correct.
56:48
Tiffany Woolley: So there's the whole next generation of your market is really being able to tap into this next group and, you know, frame a freaking picture, you know, put one on the nightstand and hang things on the wall and and create, like you know, these books or things that can be shared.
57:11
Haleh Shoa: So our clients that are younger, so millennials right, they are overwhelmed by their digital right.
57:21
Haleh Shoa: So we get a lot of clients that are like I have 10,000 photos, but my wife has 300,000 photos, and how do we merge that?
57:29
Haleh Shoa: You know right.
57:29
Haleh Shoa: So you know, we get more of the digital clients of the younger generation, and then the baby boomers have the more.
57:37
Haleh Shoa: They are the generation who are now empty nesters.
57:41
Tiffany Woolley: And they're like OK, what do we do with all this?
57:43
Tiffany Woolley: You know.
57:44
Haleh Shoa: Yes, I'm retired, I can pay attention to this right.
57:48
Haleh Shoa: And then we get clients that are in the sandwich generation, where they're like I'm really overwhelmed, my mom just died and I have teenagers and I don't know what to do here, right, you know?
57:59
Tiffany Woolley: right, right.
58:00
Tiffany Woolley: Well, the good news is is that your business is here to help all that and facilitate that, and I would think that this has so much growth potential.
58:09
Scott Woolley: So people who are listening and watching to this podcast how do they find you?
58:20
Haleh Shoa: You can find us, of course, on our website.
58:21
Haleh Shoa: It's picturelycom P-I-C-T-U-R-L-I no E with an I.
58:25
Haleh Shoa: I know it's spelled a little weird.
58:30
Haleh Shoa: I also own picturelycom p-i-c-t-u-r-l-i no e with an I.
58:31
Haleh Shoa: I know it's spelled a little weird.
58:32
Haleh Shoa: Um, I also own picturelicom, so if you just go on there, it'll uh put you right to my website.
58:35
Haleh Shoa: Um, we're on facebook and instagram and I'm starting to post some content to youtube and, of course, on our website, you can sign up for a newsletter, where you, you know I do the newsletters, so I write information that I think is helpful for people to be inspired by and, of course, we will talk about some workshops that are coming up as well.
58:59
Tiffany Woolley: Really, really amazing.
59:01
Tiffany Woolley: Really wonderful conversation today.
59:04
Scott Woolley: Thank you Thank you so much thank you so much for having you joining us yes, I appreciate you having me.
59:12
Tiffany Woolley: It's been wonderful talking to you I look forward to keeping up this conversation, too, in the future and we will definitely we have a few ideas that we want to run by you.
59:24
Haleh Shoa: Oh, amazing yes.
59:26
Scott Woolley: So we'll be in touch.
59:27
Haleh Shoa: Amazing.
59:28
Haleh Shoa: It's so validating when someone really understands like every level of detail that has gone into my thought process, you know, because a lot of people are like I just don't know how this works and honestly, it makes sense that they don't know, because it's so overwhelming.
59:47
Haleh Shoa: It's like how are you going to take all this and make it look like what you're showing me?
59:52
Tiffany Woolley: And I think, like in what my business is too, it's something people think oh, I can do myself, I can do it myself, I don't, I don't need to.
1:00:01
Tiffany Woolley: You know where you realize you're limiting yourself, where you realize you're limiting yourself.
1:00:05
Tiffany Woolley: If you can bring an expert in that genre into the fold, I mean, just think of how much better the end result will be.
1:00:15
Scott Woolley: Yeah, exactly Well, we appreciate you joining us today.
1:00:20
Scott Woolley: Thank you.
1:00:22
Tiffany Woolley: We'll stay in touch.
1:00:23
Scott Woolley: Yes, definitely.
1:00:24
Scott Woolley: Thank you so much.
1:00:25
Voice over: Thank you so much Bye-bye, it was a pleasure iDesign Labs Podcast is an SW Group production in association with the Five Star and TW Interiors.
1:00:36
Voice over: To learn more about iDesign Lab or TW Interiors, please visit twinteriorscom.