On April 12th, the day before our wedding we got all our friends and family together for a hike up Stone Mountain!
Later that evening, we held the rehearsal dinner at our neighborhood clubhouse
We also played a video slideshow highlighting photos of us growing up and then our relationship together.
After a short stint with Dreamhost I am moving over to Steadfast Networks for hosting my sites. I really liked the Dreamhost control panel and getting my sites setup and configured was easy but the server I was running on was sooooooooo slow! The billing disaster in January also did not help things! So I headed over to Web Hosting Talk to read some of the reviews and look for a new host. The hosting business is full of “fly by night” kind of folks so it was important to get some objective 3rd party opinions. The wealth of information on WHT is awesome! I decided to go in a different direction and look for a smaller well respected company that does not offer 1 million Terabytes of space for $10 a month. After reading the reviews I settled on a shared hosting plan from Steadfast. So far I have been really impressed. The sites are much faster and the support tickets I submitted were handled almost instantly with 100% resolution! For a simple blog like this speed is not all that important but when you are playing around with a resource hog like Magento it makes a big difference!
I just switched the DNS so we should be live on the new server shortly!
On February 4th, 2008 I joined Astral Brands as the Director of eCommerce. Astral Brands was a small but growing health and beauty company based in Atlanta. They have three cosmetics brands in their portfolio: Aloette, Pur Minerals, and Cosmedix. The move to Astral Brands was a huge cultural change compared to working at The Home Depot! It was a small, nimble, and entrepreneurial organization that felt a lot more like my work at Gardner’s Supply and Burton Snowboards.
As the Director of eCommerce I had full ownership of the eCommerce P&L. The digital marketing team reported to me and I oversaw all online marketing activities including email, paid search, organic search, affiliate, and social media. In addition to marketing, I also led the customer experience and product management for the eCommerce sites. I worked closely with the eCommerce development team to define and implement all new features and functionality on the site.
In May of 2008, we successfully launched the new PurMinerals.com site and saw significant increases in revenue and conversions on the new site. To help drive more traffic to the site we implemented social media campaigns that dramatically increased customer engagement. At the time, YouTube “how to” product videos were starting to get very popular. We partnered with key influencers to help promote our brands on YouTube and Facebook. One of the bloggers we worked with was Michelle Phan, who currently has 9m subscribers on YouTube! She went on to become one of the most influential beauty influencer in the world!
Unfortunately my time at Astral Brands was short. The 2008 financial meltdown hit them hard and on January 31, 2009 I was laid off along with 30% of the entire company! It was an uncomfortable position to be in, but like most things in life it had a silver lining. Two weeks after I left Astral I joined Case-Mate as the Director of eCommerce!
Next: Director of eCommerce at Case-Mate
Previous: Manager of Online User Experience at The Home Depot
I just updated my LinkedIn profile so I thought I had better get a post up on the blog!
After two and a half years I am leaving Home Depot this Friday to be the Director of Ecommerce for www.astralbrands.com.
So who is Astral Brands?
” Astral Brands is an innovator in the creation and management of consumer lifestyle brands with a business offering that is focused on two core sectors: Astral Health and Beauty and Astral Foods (featuring gourmet food items and large-scale perishable shipping). The Company was established in 1978 and operated as a public company until it was acquired and privatized in 1999 by Christie and Robert Cohen. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Astral Brands has 350 employees in North America”
I am going to be heading up the Ecommerce operations for the Health and Beauty division:
www.aloette.com
www.purminerals.com
www.cosmedix.com
I now have Cosmetics to add to the lineup of Snowboards, Gardening Equipment, and Tools on my resume! I start on February 4th!
I started using Craigslist when I was in Burlington but had limited success in buying/selling as the community was pretty small. You had a lot of college students using it so the apartment and furniture threads were pretty active but that was about it.
When I moved to Atlanta I quickly realized that the size of the Craigslist community here is HUGE. I have had great success in selling stuff on the Atlanta Craiglsist board and have actually found myself using it a lot more that Ebay. There is something to be said for how simple they keep things. It is easy to post, does not cost anything, no shipping to deal with, and people pay you in cash! Compare that with the hassles of Ebay and you can quickly see why Craigslist has taken off. I still use Ebay for niche items that don’t have mass market appeal but for most items it’s Craiglist!
Following up on my WaMu review I wanted to take a minute and review a new money management tool called Mint.com. Mint is an account aggregation service. The concept of financial account aggregation is not a new concept as Yodlee has been offering this service to banks for a number of years. As a basic concept Mint.com is not all that different. They even use the Yodlee service to run the back end of their application.
What makes Mint.com interesting is the customer experience they deliver. I do user experience for a living and can tell Mint has invested heavily in this area. I signed up for an account and was up and running in less than 5 minutes. From sign up to seeing 7 accounts aggregated in one screen took 5 minutes! Now granted, I am an advanced user who already had all my online accounts setup, but still 5 minutes is impressive. I do need to run this through the “Mom” test and see how long it would take my mom to go through and sign up.
Mint’s business model is an interesting one: they sell space to financial institutions that make offers to help you save money. They know the interest rate on your accounts and will make offers from competing banks that offer you a lower interest rate. Since I carry no consumer debt and already have a high yield savings account this feature has no value to me but for some it might be useful. I just hope they can make this model profitable.
Right now Mint only has bank accounts and credit cards included in the aggregation service but they claim to be adding mortgages and others soons. Brokerages and mortgaes would be a great addition!
Categorization is a key concept in all money management software. You want to be able to quickly see at the end of the month where all your money went. They have a super simple interface for categorizing transactions and even putting rules in place so that the same transaction next time is automatically categorized. However, they have one fundamental flaw that really reduces the usefulness of mint: you can’t create custom categories! Hopefully they will add this soon, because after playing with my accounts for 10 minutes I quickly ran into problems with the pre set categories.
Mint also has a simple budgeting system where you can set your budget each month and then track your spending against it. I do my simple budgeting in Excel but I will have to see how usefull this aspect of the service is.
Overall I am impressed so far. I think with a few changes this will really become a great little web app for managing your money.
Back in 2000 I started banking with a little known startup called Lighthouse Bank out of Waltham MA. They were one of the first banks to offer no fee checking, online banking, and ATM reimbursement fees. They had fantastic customer service and were great to work with but they started putting minimums in place. When I moved to Vermont I decided to leave lighthouse and join a local bank (Citizens) that also had online banking. At the same time, I also discovered the new found world of high yield online savings accounts and opened an account with Emigrant Direct. This setup worked great as I had local ATM’s, a free checking and an online savings account earning 5%. The only downside was I had a 3 day delay between transfers.
When I moved to Atlanta it was time to look for a new bank. Here are the key things I look for:
When I started looking around I found that Washington Mutual met all of my criteria. Could a bank really do everything I was looking for??? After 2 years the answer is a resounding YES! WaMu is fantastic! I can’t recommend them enough! I have had nothing but a great experience with them and encourage everybody to sign up for accounts. Make sure you sign up online as they only offer the high yield Savings Account online. There is also a branch right across the street so that makes them super convenient as well!
Wanted to take a minute and wish everybody a happy new year! Here’s to 2008 being better than 2007!
With my move to working more with php and ruby on rails I decided to ditch my windows hosting and move over to Unix and Apache. Most of the active open source projects run better on Apache and the mod_rewrite module is essential for creating easy search engine friendly links. I took a look at a bunch of different providers but settled on Dreamhost. They offer a ton of features for $11 a month and lit looks like they have a pretty good reputation. So far the migration has gone smoothly and everything is up and running. You can get a $50 discount on new hosting contracts if you use promo code: MYDREAM50
Before I started working for Home Depot I was an ASP developer for Gardener’s Supply and Burton Snowboards. I drank a lot of Microsoft kool-aid in those days and was an early adopter of asp.net. Since I was using Microsoft tools at work I never paid attention to any of the open source projects going on in PHP and more recently Ruby on Rails. It was not until I installed WordPress for this blog did I realize how far these applications had come! So I have ditched my Microsoft allegiance and have started working with some great open source projects like modX and Magento. I am exited to start learning some of these new tools and to start working with PHP and Ruby. My first project was to convert my basic consulting website template over to PHP 🙂