Twelve Years In: How AI Changed the Way I Run My Handmade Jewelry Business

I am lying in the grass in my dad's backyard, in the shade, talking this post into my phone while my middle son finishes building a pergola for his grandparents.

I went back to school this year. Twelve years into running this business, I am in the middle of a twelve-week course on running a company with AI. To say I am slightly obsessed is an understatement. Every week I sit down thinking, what could they possibly teach me now. Every week, without fail, I get blown away.

I have never felt more creative than I do right now. And not only more creative. More capable of having the time to be creative, which is a different thing. More capable of learning things I did not think I had the capacity for. Turns out I do.

That is the part I did not see coming.

What it was like before

The data was never missing. It was all there.

It was in QuickBooks, thanks to an incredible bookkeeper who has been with us for nine years. It was in Shopify. It was in Klaviyo. It was in years of spreadsheets. It was in six email accounts full of customer conversations, retailer threads, event details, and more.

All of it was mine. None of it was connected. And I could not have told you how any of it fit together.

It was too much. Not too little. And it was daunting.

I did not have the time or the capacity to connect it. So I made decisions the way most small business owners I know make them. On instinct. On gut. On what I remembered from last season. On how things felt. On whatever was in front of me that day.

I was frozen, and not because I was missing an answer. Because there were too many questions left unanswered and no way to hold them all at once.

What I was wrong about

Last year I made decisions that put too much on my team. We tried a lot of things at once, all of it well meant, all of it aimed at moving the needle.

And I had no way to tell which of it was working.

That is the part that stings. Not that we tried too much. That I could not have told you which of it was worth trying again.

This year is the opposite. Feet back under us. A foundation I can see. And only decisions where I can watch the return.

I can see data daily now

Our books used to take almost a month to close out the month before. Sometimes longer. By the time a number reached me, the moment it described was already over. There was nothing left to react to.

As I write this, we are in the middle of our twelve-day anniversary sale. It is Monday morning. I pulled the numbers on the first three days, sat with them, ran the analytics, and we met and made adjustments to what we are doing for the rest of the run.

That is a whole different beast.

What I want to say first

Tula Blue will be a human-forward company forever. That is not a maybe.

We are about connection. Humans on the front end, real customer service, real creation. Every piece we make is hand spun and hand tied by a real person, nearly twenty women across two Texas workshops. That is never going to change.

The back end is a different story. That is where these tools are helping us, in the part nobody sees.

The part I used to hate, and am starting to love.

Things that started surfacing

I write our blogs twice a week now. It has become one of my favorite things I do, and I did not know that about myself until I started. I love creating. I love writing. Who knew.

I also had no clue what any of it was doing for us until I could measure it, which I have only just started doing.

Sara took over running our Meta ads this year. We had outsourced them before that. Working through the real numbers, she found they had not been performing the way we thought they were. She is on it, and we are going to turn it around.

 

The one where there was nothing to find

We are a production company. And the craziest part is that I have never known exactly what we produce.

We tracked it in clumps. Bracelets. Necklaces. A type of piece, grouped together. Never the actual listing, and absolutely never the length, or the pearl color, or the collection, or the style. When people are paid hourly and making jewelry by hand across two workshops, tracking it any finer than that feels like too heavy a thing to ask of anyone. So we never did.

Twelve years, and I could not have told you what we made last week, or what came out of one workshop versus the other.

So I built an app. I am not a coder. I built it in Replit.

It is a production log, and it connects to our actual Shopify listings, which is the part that makes it work beautifully. Everything we sell has always lived in a few places at once. A bracelet at a market, a bracelet online, a bracelet going out to a retailer. Same bracelet, three sets of records. This year, for the first time, all three come off the same listing. And now our production ties back to that same listing too.

So we can see what is being made, down to the necklace length or the blush oval pearls. 228 listings. 3,481 variations. Broken out however we want to look at it, by workshop, by collection, by style.

We can look any minute of any day and see what we made yesterday, or last week.

That will tell us what supplies we need before we run out instead of after. It tells us what our best sellers are instead of what I assumed they were, and those two lists are not the same. It tells us what to make next, and for a company that makes everything by hand, that is the whole game.

It is new this quarter. I am still building it, still perfecting it. And it is glorious.

The thing I had written off

I first learned about live selling from my son. He was thirteen, selling basketball and football cards on Whatnot at the beginning of this year. I thought it was great for him and not for me. Not because it was a bad idea. Because there was no space in my head for one more thing.

This year I had something to think out loud with. I could ask questions, plan it, learn the platform, work through what I would even say. I went live for the first time on March 31.

It has saved us this year.

We go live on Tula Tuesdays, and starting in August we begin rotating between our workshops. Every other week you will find me and my mom on camera, and our Island Workshop on the Tuesdays in between. Our schedule is on our LIVE page. Come get on the list.

Things that run without me

We were never good at wholesale follow-up. It was not that we did not care. Figuring out who to call next meant going back through years of orders to work out who was due and when they typically ordered, and there was always something more urgent on the plate that day. So it kept sliding. The stores we heard from were the ones we talked to. The quiet ones stayed quiet.

So I built a B2B tracker. It pulls from our B2B site and our B2B email, and it reads seven years of order history to learn the cadence of when each retailer orders and what they reorder. Some stores come back every eight weeks. Some come back every spring. It knows the difference now.

When we switched it on in June, it found 76 shops that had ordered from us more than once and then gone quiet. Not trial orders. Stores that came back, and then stopped, and nobody noticed.

Once a week I trigger it and it hands my team a call board. Who is due. Who needs a check-in. Who told us they wanted an order and never placed it. Nothing gets skipped because nobody had time to go looking for it.

We also have two weekly meetings, marketing and leadership. I feed the transcripts into a running document that updates itself and hands back our active to-dos for the next seven days. It is a spreadsheet for people who hate spreadsheets. I love spreadsheets. Most of my team does not.

And then the one I am proudest of, which I just finished. I wrote a script that lives in my Google account and wakes up every Monday morning before five. It asks Google Search Console how every Tula Blue blog post performed at twenty-eight days and ninety days, then writes the answer into my tracker before I am even awake.

The first Monday it ran, it worked.

Nobody built that connection for me. It did not exist. I built it over a weekend, and analytics used to scare me.

What AI did to my gut

I have always had instincts about this business. Sometimes my gut says no and I cannot tell you why, so the idea sits there anyway, half alive. Sometimes my gut says yes on a hunch and I have nothing to back it up.

Now I can check. And when the answer comes back, good idea or not, I can say so with certainty, nail it down, and move on.

There is no sugarcoating anything anymore. I looked at the real numbers and it was better than the fog.

Twelve years in and I feel like a beginner, in the best way

I am twelve years into building this business and this brand, and I have never felt more like a builder than I do right now.

The thing I did not expect to love is the brain dump. I do not sit down and compose anymore. I talk. Everything in my head, out loud, in whatever order it arrives, and something on the other end sorts it into what I meant.

That is how this post got written.

I am also working harder and longer hours than I have ever worked in my life. Some of that is the course, a hundred percent. Most of it is that I want these systems standing up so badly I can hardly stand it.

I do not expect it to stay like this. That is the whole point. Get the systems built, bring my whole team in to help me run them, and all of us get to spend our time on what we are best at.

 

What none of it touches

The rope is still hand spun and hand tied by real women, in two Texas workshops. Nobody can automate that. Nobody is going to.

The rope is also the reason any of this exists. We spin it ourselves, in-house, nautical-grade and fully waterproof, and it is not the thing holding a piece together. It is the piece. That is what makes jewelry you can swim in and sleep in and leave on, and it is why there is nothing else on the market like it.

I have watched what happens when somebody picks one up at a market and we get to tell them what Tula Blue is about. They get it right away. They love it. That has never been our problem.

Our problem is that most people will never stand in front of our table at a market.

So that is where all of this is pointed. Getting our jewelry seen online the way it gets seen in person. Growing our online sales is the whole focus from here.

And another reason I care so much about the back end is that when it is handled, I get to show up on a Tuesday night having had a great week, and do the part I love, which is connecting and spending time with you live.

Twelve years in. I feel like I am just getting started.

With love, Heather Founder, Tula Blue

 

Want to connect with us live?

We go live on Tula Tuesdays. Come hang out with us, get first look at new pieces, and see the rope up close!