Street: So you’re an intern. What are you doing?
Grace Guan: I’m working at Joyus. We call ourselves the web’s first shoppable video magazine. Our three verticals are beauty products, fashion products, and health and fitness products. We produce video for every product that we merchandise, so there’s a video production team, a video editing team, a studio, and then there are all the other traditional elements of an e-commerce company. So merchandising, marketing,…all that kind of stuff. I’m on the merchandising team.
Street: And what does that entail?
GG: An overarching project that I’ve been working on for most of the summer has been putting together a strategy for a beauty sampling program we’re thinking about launching. So that’s been researching what’s in the market currently, seeing what aspects that we might want to include in our sampling, and then seeing how many we’ll want and how many we’ll be able to do. Andputting that all together in a strategic timeline.
Other than that, I contact vendors, manage some sales, deal with samples, and sometimes I’m in the warehouse, stuff like that.There are days, usually on Mondays, when they’re like “Ahh! We need you guys down at the warehouse to help with packing!” because the warehouse can’t pack all the shipments going out…so then it’s just like a bunch of “Alright, I’m going to pack some product today…” But it’s also cool, to literally put together the thing that’s going to the customer.
Street: Where are you located? What’s the office like?
GG: It’s in San Francisco. In a mini high rise, like five floors. It’s just one giant office space, and everyone’s just in the same room together, except for the studios. The studios are a separate part, and there are just a lot of other offices…We’re across from data offices, which is typical tech stuff.
Street: And the office dynamic?
GG: It’s super fun. They definitely don’t just treat me like an intern—they treat me just like another member of the team…who’s just younger. And more temporary. There’s never been any getting of coffee—we actually have a fully stocked fridge, which has been one of the best things ever. I’m always snacking.
Street: Do you have your own desk? What’s on it?
GG: Yeah, I have my laptop on it, and stacks of magazines, because we had to order a bunch of old magazines to see what the editorial for this time last year was, this season. So I’ve got stacks and stacks of like Self, and Allure, and Vogue… And I have a completely blank wall in front of me, so my supervisor was like “You should decorate that! It looks really boring!” So now it has a bunch of magazines ripped out and stuff like that all over my wall. It’s become my space!
Street: Is it a very fashionable office?
GG: It’s honestly pretty casual. I think it has to do with San Francisco probably—I don’t know! I was expecting to have to dress up a lot more, but I think that’s much more of a NY kind of thing. Everyone was just like “wear what you feel comfortable in, be comfortable.” Everyone is stylish, but not over the top ridiculous.
Street: So no fashion divas?
GG: I think with a startup, you get less of the typical diva type things and in San Francsico, too. We call this one guy the office bully—he’s the closest thing to a diva. He's not at all an actual office bully, he just teases everyone.
Street: But…do they give you samples?
GG: YES. One of the things I did at the beginning was put together a sample sale of all our leftover samples that we didn’t end up using. There was so much stuff, and the beginning, to me and the other intern, they were like “Thanks for doing all this, please, take 10-15 items! Take whatever you want!” Lots of free stuff.
Street: Does it seem like something you want to pursue after Penn?
GG: That’s a good question…I think it’s definitely made me really interested in the startup world, because it’s nice not being in a corporate setting and having to jump through all these hoops in order to figure something out. My desk is literally right next to the CEO’s, and that would definitely not be the case anywhere else. I like the more intimate company setting.
Street: Have you gotten to be there for any of the photo or video shoots?
GG: Yeah, I get to sit in on video shoots if I want to. I’ve never been a part of a video production company or anything like that, so it’s really interesting seeing what goes into that and then the finished product after all the editing and product imaging are put together. I got to be in my first video yesterday...pretending to product test.
Street: Sounds pretty glamorous…any downsides?
GG: Gross story—we had rats invade our inventory! We couldn’t go to the warehouse because it was rat infested and they had to throw out tons and tons of inventory…unforeseen startup problems!
