iDesign Lab
Welcome to the iDesign Lab a Podcast where creativity and curiosity meet style and design hosted by Tiffany Woolley an Interior Designer, a style enthusiast along with her serial entrepreneur husband Scott. A place where they explore the rich and vibrant world of interior design and it’s constant evolution in style. iDesign Lab is your ultimate Interior design podcast where we explore the rich and vibrant world of design and it’s constant evolution in style and trends. iDesign lab provides industry insight, discussing the latest trends, styles and everything in between to better help you style your life through advice from trend setters, designers, influences, fabricators and manufacturers as well as personal stories that inspire, motivate and excite. Join us on this elevated, informative and lively journey into the world of all things Design. For more information about iDesign Lab and Tiffany & Scott Woolley visit the website at www.twinteriors.com/podcast.
iDesign Lab
The Art of Remembering: How Family Archives Shape Who We Are
Remember when your grandmother could identify every face in those faded photographs from decades past? Those stories, those connections to your ancestry, are vanishing with each passing generation. That's where Hale Shoa comes in - founder of Picturely, a photo organization studio transforming chaotic collections into searchable digital archives that tell your family's unique story.
Hale's journey began as a passion project while working in advertising, evolving into a sophisticated preservation service that rescues memories from dining room tables buried three feet deep in photographs. With expertise in handling collections spanning from 1800s cabinet cards to modern digital chaos, her team doesn't just scan images—they curate, restore, and organize them chronologically, creating a meaningful narrative from what might otherwise be overwhelming disorder.
The podcast reveals fascinating insights about memory preservation that most families never consider. Did you know slides from the 1940s can reveal remarkable detail when properly digitized? Or that professional photo organizers can date photographs by their physical characteristics—deckled edges indicating the 1930s-1950s era, square prints typically from the 1950s-1970s? Hale explains why professional curation matters (your great-grandchildren won't care about random zoo animals) and why proper archiving requires understanding the historical context of each image.
For those with digital overwhelm, Picturely offers solutions for consolidating scattered photos across multiple devices and platforms. Hale shares the critical "3-2-1 backup method" that protects precious memories: three copies of data, in two different locations, with one copy stored off-site. She addresses the infamous "digital black hole" of 2000-2004, when many families lost photographs during the transition from physical to digital preservation.
Whether you're a baby boomer with boxes of slides in the attic, part of the "sandwich generation" managing elderly parents' collections while raising children, or a millennial drowning in hundreds of thousands of digital images, this conversation offers practical guidance for preserving what matters most. Connect with Picturely through their website or social channels and discover how your family's photographic legacy can become an accessible, engaging connection between generations.
Learn more at:
https://twinteriors.com/podcast/
https://scottwoolley.com
This is iDesign Lab, a podcast where creativity and curiosity meet style and design. Curator of interiors, furnishings and lifestyles. 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. 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. And join us on this elevated, informative and lively journey into the world of all things design. 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. From luxury branding to preserving family legacies, hala's mission is powerful to rescue your memories and turn them into timeless, searchable digital archives. You don't want to miss this.
Tiffany Woolley:Welcome to the iDesign Lab podcast. Today we have a very special guest, Halei Shoha, who is the founder and creator of a very exciting company called Picturely. So welcome, Hale, and please introduce yourself to our audience.
Haleh Shoa:Thank you so much for having me. I am Hale Shoa and, yeah, as you mentioned, I'm the CEO and founder of Picturely. It's a photo organization and curation and design studio based in Los Angeles.
Scott Woolley:It's a very interesting company. Tell us a little about the company and what the company does and how it helps people.
Haleh Shoa:Uh-huh. So this was my little passion project back in 2015. I was working with a life coach while I had a very big girl job in advertising. I was the global operations director for Jaguar Land Rover in 2016. And I just really wanted to do my own business. And she kept asking me, like, what do you love doing? And really what it kept boiling down to was family memories and making things with it. So I am very passionate about designing beautiful photo keepsakes like photo books and gallery walls. And then she kept saying, okay, well, let's figure out how to make a business out of it. And I kept thinking who's going to pay me to do photo books? That's so funny, you know. Five employees later, yeah.
Scott Woolley:But you're doing more than just photo books. You're doing photo walls for people's homes, the collages and so forth. You're doing archival for people.
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, that's actually most of our business, is that?
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. 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. She had a very big house in Los Angeles and it had about three feet deep of photos. And then there were adjoining little tables around the dining room which also had three feet deep of photos. And then there were adjoining little tables around the dining room which also had three feet deep, full, full. And and she said, yes, I'd like to do a photo book, but what about all this right? And I thought, oh, so, uh, yeah, I need to dig into archiving and learn how to do that. So I became a certified photo organizer so I am very knowledgeable in how to approach a.
Haleh Shoa:I specialize in large collections. 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. 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. 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.
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.
Haleh Shoa:yeah, so we organize everything chronologically. I was just gonna ask you is it date or exactly? You know there's so many clues and photos. 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. So photos themselves have a lot of clues in them as to when they're from. 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.
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. It's like they forget to you know update it yeah, yeah, exactly yeah. 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. In fact, it gives us a clue to, and how to do other photos that came from that camera.
Tiffany Woolley:Um, so, so, so much research, really with the family itself is involved in this process.
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. 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. We have a lot of clients who are high profile, whether it's in the world of business or fashion or otherwise. 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.
Tiffany Woolley:It's really so necessary. There's really everybody who could benefit from a tool like this. 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?
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. So I highly recommend every catalog to be curated. 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.
Haleh Shoa:But you know your great grandkids are going to be like why? Why is there a photo of an elephant Like right.
Haleh Shoa:Significance. Did they own this elephant? Own this elephant, it's so true. The editing process yes, so my main goal is to make sure I understand how they would want us to edit it for them. We have an amazing team of organizers and curators that you know. 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? 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.
Scott Woolley:So it seems like it's a very timely process. You mentioned a few moments ago you have clients of 300,000 images. 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.
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, I mean, you know that client had an enormous amount of accomplishments they have. They're a very prominent family in Los Angeles. They were extremely political, so they had a lot of fundraisers. You know how, like when dignitaries and politicians visit certain cities, there's always certain families who hold that. You know the fundraising dinners and whatnot. They were part of that sphere. 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. It was really cool and interesting. But you know, it's like what is the saying? How do you eat an elephant one chunk at a time? Right, right, right.
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? You're you know you're dealing with, I hate to say, a mess. To start with, to organize it, are you asking them to possibly organize it a little beforehand?
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. And I'll tell you why it's always a hybrid. Every family or institution has had some semblance of organization with their paperwork, their accomplishments, their files, their photos. 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. So we always start with albums so we can understand their cadence and we can sort of put the timeline. It's much easier for us to put the timeline if a family goes into organize it themselves.
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. Let's say there was a celebration of sorts whether someone's getting married or someone passed.
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. 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.
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? 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? It's always like a random grouping. So it's funny. Like, what does that look like initially? 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. Kind of let go of the process. Trust the expert, if you will. What does that timeline look like for them?
Haleh Shoa:if you will. What does that timeline look like for them? 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. Wow, yeah.
Scott Woolley:That's a lot of content to go through.
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, and do you scan everything.
Tiffany Woolley:How does that work?
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. It could be just an oversight, but sometimes it's a handwritten note that you know we keep. We don't throw. We try not to throw anything out, even when we're deputized. I you know I have clients who are like you can throw out my slides when you're done scanning them. And and and I'm fine with them throwing it out.
Haleh Shoa:In fact, I encourage people to throw out their duplicates and duds and things like that. I don't feel comfortable throwing anything out in the studio because you could have a change of heart.
Scott Woolley:I don't know Right right.
Haleh Shoa:And so, to answer your initial question, we do go through everything, but we do not recommend or scan everything. It's just you know, again, you don't want. You went to Hawaii and you know the sky and the water look beautiful, but why do we have to scan that? You know.
Tiffany Woolley:That makes sense. It really does, and I feel like you need somebody like yourself to actually explain it. 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. Like you can appreciate things from a distance.
Haleh Shoa:Exactly, and you know it's much harder to curate your own collection than it is to curate someone else's. You know, my husband and I went to Mexico and Cuba in 2015. And when I came back, I had his phone, my phone and a camera, and I was so overwhelmed.
Voice over:I thought okay, I don't know, I like all these photos.
Haleh Shoa:I know I gave it to my employees. I'm like you know what. You can curate this for me. That's amazing.
Tiffany Woolley:Because that's what they do. So then, what did they do? Put some in albums for you, print some that go on the wall type of detail, so you have that memory.
Haleh Shoa:They just curated it for me. They took out, you know, they basically five starred what they thought was the great photos.
Tiffany Woolley:Highlight reel.
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, we do a lot of digital organization as well, where we take things from Dropbox, icloud, various sources. Those photo sharing sites, Exactly the shared drives, and we consolidate the digital libraries, take out the duplicates and then we curate. So when I was done taking out the dubs and duplicates for my library, I gave it to them to curate it.
Tiffany Woolley:Wow.
Scott Woolley:You know we love your business model and we love what you're doing with. You know how you're helping families and helping people. You know archiving their memories. You know, for us we're very close to the concept because it's got to be 17 or 18 years ago. We kind of created a similar concept to what you have. 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. They came to me almost at the same time.
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. 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. 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? 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. And I looked at it going, oh my god, what am I doing with all this? But this is what you're doing for families.
Scott Woolley:You know we did, we did the same similar thing for alonzo morning. 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. 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. You know it's very sad. Like you know, we've had a few friends who lost their houses in Los Angeles.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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?
Scott Woolley:digital slideshows each individually. Let's explain that so our listening audience understands. Tell us what you're also doing for people in their homes.
Haleh Shoa:Tell us what you're also doing for people in their homes yeah, in their homes. 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. There are companies who make digital frames. 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.
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. We use Fire Stick.
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, yeah. I mean they all you know.
Scott Woolley:And our pictures come up.
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, exactly, and so it's just so fun. But you know gallery walls, as we've mentioned. I think gallery walls are great, but I do think gallery walls need to be refreshed. Yes even with art, sometimes you just don't see it after a while. 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.
Tiffany Woolley:Museums do that. They move things around. It's a very, you know, typical thing to do. It's like good to remind people of that.
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, I mean, as you know, design is very energetic, you're right.
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. Or you know when I'm designing a photo book, it's always the photo that they would never choose. 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. You know the portrait shots where everyone's looking into the camera. I like the shots when they're not looking into the camera. I like the blurry shots. I like the shots with movement.
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.
Tiffany Woolley:It's just kind of it changes the energy. It changes the energy, exactly like you said I love that and so I.
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. You know, I go like, oh, I didn't even think about this. Um, I designed a gallery wall for a client who just celebrated her 90th birthday. This was a present. Well, the installation was a present for her. She had no idea that she was on vacation when we went into the house and installed everything. It was a very, very large, very, very large. 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. 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. I mean, I get chills talking about Joni.
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. 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? 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?
Haleh Shoa:and I said well, you're moving. Why don't we do a gallery wall of these photos? And we'll mix it with the masks. And let me tell you it was. It's I still. 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.
Tiffany Woolley:This is still my, so that one would be like your favorite to date maybe.
Haleh Shoa:I'm more of a minimalist, like my design. Sense is more of a minimalist, and this wall was definitely not that.
Tiffany Woolley:Oh, that's funny.
Haleh Shoa:So I wouldn't say that I would want that wall in my house. But Joni decided every single thing in the house is white. The couch is white, the walls are white, the floor is white, the walls are white, the floor is white. Everything is white on white, on white, on white.
Scott Woolley:We've seen a few of those houses like that.
Haleh Shoa:And the only huge, ginormous pop would be this wall that you walk into. And so, yeah, I mean this is I. It was a collaborative process. 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. It wasn't exactly what they had approved, but I mean it didn't matter. She was really extremely happy with it.
Scott Woolley:So when you're doing a gallery wall for a house, you're selecting the pictures. Are you also then framing them? Because I know you're installing and putting them up, but are you actually then selecting frames?
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, I mean again, it's a collaborative process. I would suggest certain framing and I've never gotten pushback. 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. I didn't think of that, of that, you know.
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. Oh, a lot of people are not visual. 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? It's completely curated. It depends on what else they have. But is there a certain philosophy that you adhere to or like a certain? Um, I don't know. 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.
Scott Woolley:Or but were you also? You just did one on 3d you did it in 3d on cad and then did a 3d of the wall.
Tiffany Woolley:So the client saw a philosophy that you follow, or a rule of thumb.
Haleh Shoa:I design things in canva, uh-huh, I love canva. 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. And then I ask them to measure everything, including, like the switch.
Voice over:Right the light switches.
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? You know, measure it from this angle and that angle. 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. Where does everything lie?
Scott Woolley:Right, the right perspective.
Tiffany Woolley:Yeah.
Haleh Shoa:Yes, and then I could say you know, is this where your television would be? Because I want to make sure that I did the canvas properly. And once we figure that out, then I put everything on the wall and then they can. 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.
Scott Woolley:Does technology fall in place with what you do? Is it important?
Haleh Shoa:I say to people I own an IT company.
Tiffany Woolley:What's that?
Haleh Shoa:It's that I own an IT company, it's all. I mean, I have a 50 terabyte server onto which we scan everything, because we camera scan. You know, the scans are enormous, right. And then you know, I have another 96 terabyte for all the digital collections that we gather. 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.
Scott Woolley:um, it slips my mind. 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.
Tiffany Woolley:Yeah.
Scott Woolley:And we probably have a hundred Too many pictures, 200 pictures all framed that are on the wall. Too many People love it but it's not. 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. I started taking the pictures and I cannot think of the technology of what we were doing. But we were using a company called Erasma. They were bought by HP and then HP they kind of gave up on the company and they went away. 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. 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.
Haleh Shoa:Oh, I had a client who wanted to do this.
Scott Woolley:I can't think of the name of the technology. It's widely used. 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. It could take you to a website. It could take you to what we use in our house is for video and. And then my kids took these little, my kids took these little crystals and stuck them on all the frames. That would come to life. 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.
Haleh Shoa:I'm going to write this down. Is it still active?
Scott Woolley:Oh, well, erasmus is not. It was a wonderful platform. Like I said, hp bought them and then they abandoned it, like a year or two later. But I'll remember what the technology is and I'll let you know.
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, that would be great. I would love to explore that. Yeah.
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. You get your business through word of mouth. Is it through social media, online platform? And like where does, where do people go to find you?
Haleh Shoa:Well, we're everywhere, we're on all the socials and, of course, we have a website. We have been getting a lot of clients outside of Los Angeles as of late through Google. 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? This is pretty cool and you know, we have clients outside of LA where they fly me to their, which it's actually. It's actually doesn't take that long Again, with clients in LA. I usually spend up to four hours with them, and so it takes about two to three days. 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. So, yeah, so that's always an option is shipped back to us.
Scott Woolley:So yeah, so that's always an option. Are there any challenges in preserving people's memories in the process of what you do?
Haleh Shoa:The challenges are always the tapes, you know. A lot of times they're like well, we don't know what's on this tape, and the tape would be. Well, it's not that.
Tiffany Woolley:Well, we always get that too. A few little Pandora boxes are getting opened up.
Haleh Shoa:It's always a Pandora box Always.
Scott Woolley:There's an enormous amount of different formats of tape.
Haleh Shoa:We handle all.
Scott Woolley:You have all of them.
Haleh Shoa:We handle everything. Everything is handled in-house, except for this kind of film 8mm and 60mm, all that. 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.
Tiffany Woolley:The experts.
Scott Woolley:Exactly so. I'm interested in asking a question. 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. 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?
Haleh Shoa:Shoeboxes and disorganized.
Tiffany Woolley:you know it's like it's a global solution.
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. They were used to the scrapbooks or the albums, Then it went from sticky to slide-ins. We were just used to all that.
Haleh Shoa:And then in 1996, there was an emergence of digital camcorders and cameras, which was intriguing in 1996. We still had that, but maybe we bought it if we were gadgety. But then people didn't know really what to do with the SD cards 1996. 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.
Tiffany Woolley:And that's the little memory card that was me.
Haleh Shoa:And um. So I have a client who had no exaggeration over 800 SD cards cause they didn't know. You can download the information.
Scott Woolley:That's quite an investment in SD cards because they didn't know you could download the information. That's quite an investment in SD cards a huge investment.
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. And that was because they just didn't know how to save their digital files. So it could actually those files could be sort of squirreled in an old computer which we can have that actually happened to us?
Tiffany Woolley:We have like a whole year of trips and travel.
Scott Woolley:It's like a two and a half year period that everything that disappeared is gone.
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, because people didn't know they would change computers. They had no idea. Yeah, we entrusted, it's so sad.
Scott Woolley:I'm going to give you one that's even worse. This is putting it on your computer. Then your computer dies and your hard drive dies, and now everything's gone.
Tiffany Woolley:Yeah, you definitely need backup for your backup when it comes to photography and memories.
Haleh Shoa:Yeah, and this is why we practice the 3-2-1 backup method for all of our clients. Tell us about that. 3-2-1 is three copies of your data in two places, one off-site. So three copies of your data. Two places could be, two different clouds or on external hard drive, and one on the cloud and then one copy off-site. So you get another external hard drive and you put that in the bank or someone else's house Right or at the office. You know if you have access to a different location.
Tiffany Woolley:Makes total sense.
Scott Woolley:Did you come up?
Haleh Shoa:with that. No, the father of metadata well, we kind of call him that. But Peter Crow is who I'm actually going to be seeing in a couple of weeks when I go to conference. He's the one who sort of came up with the 3-to-1 method.
Tiffany Woolley:So is that part of your business plan Like when somebody hires you, that's all. How does the compensation look Like? What does your agreement strategy look like? How does that is there broken up into how many pieces? I mean, it's like, kind of, for me every project is a different scope of work.
Haleh Shoa:Every project is different, so we, so we're. I like to look at my workflow and our studio and what we offer as 360. It's like really, from beginning to end, we have figured it all out for our clients.
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. So in terms of how we price everything, it's really in phases. 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. 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.
Haleh Shoa:I'm not going to sit there and count 80,000 photos three times to make sure it was 80,000. But there's there's tactics that we use. For example, one inch of photos is approximately a hundred photos. 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.
Scott Woolley:No, we don't weigh them.
Haleh Shoa:No, we don't weigh them. If there are old sort of cabinet cards, you know the cabinet cards, the thick ones from the late 1800s to 1910s. You know those, of course, because they're thicker, it's going to one inch of those is going to be less right. You know it's going to be 10 approximately.
Haleh Shoa:It's around a millimeter or so. So we have tactics and then for the albums we sort of do an average of anywhere from three to four per page. We count the pages and we put that in. It's just all approximate. And then we say if you scan your entire library it's going to be this price. But we know it's never going to be that price because we're not going to scan everything.
Haleh Shoa:I don't you know, I always recommend and this floors a lot of people. I say 10 to 20% and they're like wow. You know, I mean think about it.
Tiffany Woolley:Preserving it. 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. People aren't going to want to go through that every single time. You actually would. I think the little bit would be more accessible.
Haleh Shoa:Exactly. Well, it's not, it's. I'm not talking about 10 to 20% from every era. Obviously, if anything is before the 70s, we're going to preserve most of it, because people were more discerning.
Tiffany Woolley:Yeah, definitely it was more discerning.
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.
Tiffany Woolley:So you know so funny yes, there's so much history just in like this conversation alone, of like understanding philosophies.
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.
Scott Woolley:So every single photo, every single video that we have taken has been put onto a family website. 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. So there's an emotional aspect to going back and looking at all of that old, you know, those old memories. So you must experience that with clients that that you have that are probably very excited once they get everything you know absolutely.
Haleh Shoa:There's never a dry eye in the house when you're delivering. I mean, it's just. My favorite form of memory is slides, because a no one has seen them for decades right, you're right. And b you are. You just won't believe the quality it's like. Slides are this magical form of memory that has held its quality since the 40. I mean, I scan slides from the 40s and it you could see the pores if the camera was a good quality.
Tiffany Woolley:You're kidding? Wow, the color and everything.
Haleh Shoa:It's just magical. I mean now, having said that, there are a lot of slides that have lost their glory. 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. But we also color correct everything that we scan.
Tiffany Woolley:That's unbelievable. Yeah, believable. 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.
Scott Woolley:Right? 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.
Haleh Shoa:It's the best.
Scott Woolley:Yeah.
Haleh Shoa:We hold such an amazing piece of equipment in our hand. We do so incredible.
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. And I get to put on that recorder so he doesn't become self conscious. I do audio recording of him. I just kind of slip it right under him as he's telling a story, just so I can have his voice. You know, and um, and it's, it's just. I actually do a lot of uh, workshops on iPhone, um, on little tips and tricks on iPhones.
Tiffany Woolley:That a lot of people don't know about.
Haleh Shoa:That's cool. Yeah, sign up on our mailing list and you'll uh, get a a note of that, but, um, it's just. But, however, we've lost being intentional photographers agreed agreed, without a doubt.
Haleh Shoa:We need to be intentional. We need to make sure that that camera lens is clean before we take a selfie, or, you know, or a or a photograph. 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. There's a carbon footprint of all the things that we're putting in the cloud, you know. So you don't need to have your photos because this is such a fear. 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. So. So I teach a lot about intentionalities when it comes to this.
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. There's very little that's actually a printed photograph or memory. Do you also include like, say, like a newspaper clipping or anything like that? Go into the archive as well? 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?
Scott Woolley:Well, we've taken it from our standpoint as a family to another level. We not only archive every photo, every video, but every award that someone in the family might get. There's a section on our family website for awards, even their report cards. I love that, even their report cards. 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.
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.
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.
Haleh Shoa:Driver's licenses. But definitely accomplishments are huge. 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. 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.
Tiffany Woolley:So that's amazing. 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.
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. You know, I like for a wedding book, I do like to include the vows. I like to include a wedding book, I do like to include the vows I like to include. I mean, if the album pages allow.
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.
Tiffany Woolley:So who do you use to do the books? Do you do print those in house, or how does that? No, no, okay.
Haleh Shoa:We use. Everything I do is everything I do is, uh, through the lens of archival? Okay. So we use um bookmakers that are only provide archival quality, okay. So when a client asked me to do something in Shutterfly, with all due respect, I will say no.
Tiffany Woolley:Right, okay, that's kind of what I was asking in a nice way. Yeah, yeah and again.
Haleh Shoa:No, I mean.
Tiffany Woolley:No.
Haleh Shoa:I get it, I get it. And Shutterfly, it's great for the consumers, it's wonderful Like put your photos in there. I call it the photo jail because trying to get your photos out of Shutterfly is you need. You know you need a court order for that.
Scott Woolley:Right. Well, I'm going to say that that's with a lot of sites, a lot of sharing sites. You know they either own whatever you put up or to get your stuff out. It's so difficult.
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. Google is hard doable and Amazon was really easy and now it's much harder with Amazon. So, yeah, I mean. Oh. So, yes, I only use archival quality, whether it's just getting prints for my clients or doing photo books. We have different tiers for different price levels and they're all archival. But you know, the higher tier just allows for a million different iterations when you say archival, what do you mean by that?
Scott Woolley:The texture of the paper?
Haleh Shoa:The paper is archival quality, meaning it will last. 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. You know, because all the covers have glues on them, right, so the glues won't come apart. 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. But fabric is fabric, right, and most of it is polyester, so it's essentially plastic, so it won't ever degrade. So it's essentially plastic, so it won't ever degrade. 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. It's like family branding.
Tiffany Woolley:It is. Yeah, I know, I just saw that recently too. 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. Literally, the logo became such important facet to the whole. So there's just so much that can be incorporated with intention, as you mentioned before. Yeah, definitely.
Scott Woolley:So where do you see your company in four or five years from now?
Haleh Shoa:years from now, I would like to be able to bestow my knowledge to as many people as possible. 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. 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.
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? Who was this person? 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. 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.
Tiffany Woolley:Do you think this is something that could be franchised? Yeah, absolutely.
Voice over:I think so.
Tiffany Woolley:Yeah, I feel like. 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. I mean, I feel like there's so many busy in this very busy, digital, loud, fast world we live in. You know, it's why people hire interior designers, you hire people to do everything. Why not hire somebody to archive, like you said, your history? 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. And I just know that there's. You know, like most people start with a Shutterfly concept, but very few stick with it as well. It's something that lags tremendously.
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.
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.
Scott Woolley:Oh, totally.
Tiffany Woolley:That's one of the things that we keep, we scan. Yeah, it really is such a brilliant, brilliant business concept. Thank, you.
Scott Woolley:I appreciate that it really is Is your demographic more of the baby boomer generation that has more, because it really is. How do we get the message out to the younger generation that's more savvy with digital and should be?
Tiffany Woolley:Well, and I actually feel like to add on piggyback what you were just saying, scott. So, for example, my grandmother was sick a few years ago. 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. So anytime somebody would go visit my grandmother spend an hour with her. My girls started to want to go hang out at my grandma's. 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.
Haleh Shoa:And it's all in their phone. It's not shared correct.
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.
Haleh Shoa:So our clients that are younger, so millennials right, they are overwhelmed by their digital right. 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? You know right. So you know, we get more of the digital clients of the younger generation, and then the baby boomers have the more. They are the generation who are now empty nesters.
Tiffany Woolley:And they're like OK, what do we do with all this? You know.
Haleh Shoa:Yes, I'm retired, I can pay attention to this right. 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?
Tiffany Woolley:right, right. 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.
Scott Woolley:So people who are listening and watching to this podcast how do they find you?
Haleh Shoa:You can find us, of course, on our website. It's picturelycom P-I-C-T-U-R-L-I no E with an I. I know it's spelled a little weird. I also own picturelycom p-i-c-t-u-r-l-i no e with an I. I know it's spelled a little weird. Um, I also own picturelicom, so if you just go on there, it'll uh put you right to my website. 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.
Tiffany Woolley:Really, really amazing. Really wonderful conversation today.
Scott Woolley:Thank you Thank you so much thank you so much for having you joining us yes, I appreciate you having me.
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.
Haleh Shoa:Oh, amazing yes.
Scott Woolley:So we'll be in touch.
Haleh Shoa:Amazing. 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. It's like how are you going to take all this and make it look like what you're showing me?
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. You know where you realize you're limiting yourself, where you realize you're limiting yourself. 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.
Scott Woolley:Yeah, exactly Well, we appreciate you joining us today. Thank you.
Tiffany Woolley:We'll stay in touch.
Scott Woolley:Yes, definitely. Thank you so much.
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. To learn more about iDesign Lab or TW Interiors, please visit twinteriorscom.
