Wholesale David's AW News: Leaving on a Jet Plane - Ancient Wisdom

Greetings from Bali,

Little sad because this is my last day of this asia trip. But also looking forward to getting back to Europe - later this evening I will catch a Turkish airways flight to Istanbul, then change there for Malaga, Spain.

It's been an epic journey - starting 6 months ago.. and travelling to Bali, Java, Nepal, India, China and back to Bali.. Many new products, sourced, designed, ordered and on the way (hopefully) to your shops and stores. Toni from Spain came for part of the trip, Tomas from Slovakia and Sandra (our talented designer) came for the China and Bali parts of the trip. Thank you to them all for their epic contributions. You can catch up last week newslleter here.

Also a special thank you to Bondhan our Indonesia main man, who has been a big part in the developing travel videos - you can follow on YouTube.

Last week I was telling you about Blitar City and drum making artisans.. if you missed it you can catch up here.. Or see the YouTube video that Bodhan crafted here. And as a bonus you can see Bondhan playing the drums..

AI changes everything.

On this trip I have been trying to develop skills as a YouTuber.. I am quite a shy person, and really didn't want to go down that route, but so many friends, customers and my team kept banging on about it that I had to try.. it's a lot harder than I realised.. before we used to just use YouTube as a convenient place to store clips, and the occasional "Can you Sell this Video" which I want to develop more..

The marketing world is changing so fast.. before we just did SEO and a bit of Google adwords and your customers came.. and we kept a relationship via newsletters like this. But gradually google decreased the amount of space for natural listings and pushed paid content.. until users got fed up.. and now they have an alternative, AI.. I for one rarely use google now ( I use perplexity and ChatGBT4o) .

This last three weeks Tomas and the digital marketing team here in Bali. AW-Advantage.com have been working hard to understand and pivit.. Basically if you are not prepared to spend a high proportion of your sales on google ad's then you need to do SEO or OFE Optimize for Everything.. including or especially AI. and social media.. and I would argue information media.. because YouTube is not really social media, you can't socialise much there.. but you can soak up News, Information and Entertainment.

Check out our Java Village of Stone YouTube also..

New Dropshipping Site in the works..

We had five or six developers working on an updated Dropshipping Website.. for a longtime.. One thing Tomas and I have been doing (with Raul our IT wizard) is getting this project over the line.

There is definitely a resurgence in dropshipping, we are getting more and more customers on AW-Dropshipping.com doing really well on the site, even though the user experience could be better.. and we are working on it.. we think by the end of the month, we can release a major upgrade.

Meanwhile back in the UK..

Lots of Indian stock has been rolling into our warehouse.. Rodrigo and the team are working hard to get everything online.. And some of these lines are beautiful and on trend.

I'm particularly excited to see the Iconic Jute Bags.. A lot of work went into this range.. we tried to bring you ethically sourced Indian cotton at Chinese polycotton prices..put a good range by the till nicely displayed and I believe a good proportion of customers will buy.. Everyone needs a bag and these are stylish, funny and cool at no brainer retail prices.

See details below.

Fathers day is almost here.. and we have the deals and the trending stuff you need to wow your customers..

Anyway have a lovely weekend.. I'm just off to the airport..

David