Nobody knew anything, and nobody could check

When I started selling pearls in the late 1990s, there was almost nothing about them online. What little existed had been written by people trying to move product.

I ran into it constantly. Someone would come to me already certain that cultured pearls aren't real pearls, or that a pearl farm drops a grain of sand into an oyster and waits. Neither is true. But it didn't matter what was true, because there was nowhere to go and check.

And look at who was on the other side of that conversation. I was a flight attendant selling pearls I'd bought on layovers in China. They had a family jeweler they'd trusted for twenty years, or a friend who'd read something once. I had no way to prove I wasn't just some guy on the internet making things up.

So I started writing. How pearls are farmed. The different types and where they come from. What determines quality and what doesn't.

I could have put all of it on Pearl Paradise. I decided not to.

If the point was to give people something they could trust, it couldn't live on a website trying to sell them a necklace. It needed its own home, where anyone could find it and read it with no sales pitch attached.

Pearl-Guide went live in February 2004.

Then I built a forum and sat in it alone

The discussion board went up that June.

The reasoning was simple. Writing articles is talking at a wall. If people could ask me directly, I could answer the actual question instead of guessing at what it might be.

The first two accounts ever registered on Pearl-Guide were both mine. Member one and member two.

Then nothing happened. I posted short pieces and stray thoughts about pearls, and for weeks it was just me. No members. No questions. A man typing into an empty room about nacre.

Eventually a question arrived. Then another. I answered every one. Some people asked and left. Some stayed and asked another. And at some point it stopped being a help desk and became a place where people knew each other.

Caitlin

Caitlin Williams joined on December 11, 2004.

She was a grandmother near Tucson who wanted to buy pearls for her daughter, something worth passing down, and she was doing her homework about it. She was feisty. She asked a lot of questions.

Then she started answering other people's. Then she started reading books, reviewing them, tracking down scientific papers most of the trade had never heard of. Caitlin became one of the most knowledgeable pearl people I have ever met, and she did it in public, on this forum, in front of everybody.

That's the part I'd like a new member to notice. She didn't arrive an expert. She arrived with a question.

She posted 8,502 times. She and I traveled to the Sea of Cortez pearl farm together, and every year we'd meet at the Tucson show and lead a group of members through the whole floor, stopping at every pearl vendor to see what was new. We called them pearl walks.

Her account of the Sea of Cortez trip is better than mine. She called it The Case of the Purloined Pearls. If you read one thing on this site to understand what Pearl-Guide is, read that instead of this.

Caitlin passed away in 2017. Members remembering her.

Who runs the place

Here is the member list, sorted by number of posts.

Douglas McLaurin is one of the original Sea of Cortez pearl farmers, posting from Hermosillo. I met him here. He took over as administrator after Caitlin, he still runs the forum day to day, and he has become one of my closest friends in the world.

Loretta posts as Pearl Dreams, from Connecticut. She's a moderator and the second most prolific member in the site's history, with nearly eleven thousand posts. She's retired, and she's an expert in exactly the way Caitlin was. Not because it's her job. Because she lives and breathes this.

Pattye sits at the top of that list with more than eleven thousand posts of her own.

That's the whole thing, really. That's why it worked. Everyone here shares the same slightly unreasonable passion for pearls, and standing comes from what you've learned and shared, not from what you do for a living.

Over the years we've been joined by farmers, wholesalers, traders and auction buyers from every level of the industry, sitting in the same threads as someone asking about their grandmother's necklace. Both of them learn something. Usually the professional learns more than they expected.

Dubai, and what came out of it

In February 2009 the pearl world went to Dubai. The inaugural World Pearl Forum, at the Atlantis on Palm Jumeirah. I went and talked about selling pearls online.

There was a long thread about it here beforehand, and Mike Rivers' position was that flying to the Persian Gulf seemed like a lot of effort just to be in a room together.

Mike posted here as Mikeyy. He was a shell diver from the Midwest who ran a company selling nuclei to pearl farmers. His user title on this forum was Pearl Diver, which suited him.

The Ruckus

Five months later, in July 2009, about thirty of us met in Marina del Rey.

It wasn't called the Ruckus yet. The first one went out as the ICPGC, the International Consequential Pearl-Guide Convention, which was Mike taking the mickey out of the World Pearl Forum. Within about a day everyone was calling it the Ruckus instead, and that's the name that stuck for ten years.

Friday was dinner at The Warehouse over the water. Saturday was the gem faire in Santa Monica and then a party at the Pearl Paradise office that ran to midnight. Sunday morning was show and tell. Bring your pearls, put them on the table, everybody look.

We did it every summer for ten years. We rented houses in Hollywood, Malibu, the Palisades. There were talks, and there was a suitcase of loose pearls on a table somewhere at all times. The largest had around seventy-five people and we took over a hotel in Marina del Rey and chartered a boat.

In 2013 Hisano and I got married in Santa Barbara. Mike officiated. Several dozen forum members came. We didn't hold a Ruckus that summer, and we didn't need to. We just called the wedding a ruckus and everyone understood.

We built a website about pearls and it turned into the people who came to our wedding.

Mike passed away some years later.

The last one was in 2018. We stopped just before Covid. Hisano and I needed a break, because it had become like planning a wedding once a year, with caterers and speakers and mansions.

It didn't end. Sarah Canizzaro of Kojima Pearl, a Ruckus regular, picked it up and now hosts Pearls by the Bay in San Francisco. We go every year, along with a lot of the old crowd.

The school

In 2016 I was on vacation in Tahiti when it struck me that this industry still had no real education in it. Not a structured one. You learned pearls by apprenticeship or by accident.

I took the idea to the Cultured Pearl Association of America. They liked it, and then they told me to go do it myself.

The first person I called was Caitlin.

She built the first outline and did an enormous amount of the underlying research. For months the two of us traded notes back and forth, privately, the same way we'd been arguing about pearls in public here for a decade. I wrote the course from her outline over about six months of nights and weekends.

Then I did the obvious thing. I handed the draft to the members here.

They went through it line by line. Typos everywhere. Passages that made sense to me and to nobody else. Claims that needed a source or needed cutting. A course like that needs peer review, and it's hard to picture a better panel than a forum full of collectors, dealers, farmers, traders and appraisers who'd been arguing about this material for a decade and had no reason to be polite.

That became Pearls As One. The Cultured Pearl Association of America adopted it. Producers in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Fiji, China and Indonesia and the government of French Polynesia backed it. It was translated into nine languages beyond English, and more than 60,000 questions and answers have gone through its comments since the first one on July 18, 2016. Douglas and I have answered most of them personally.

The dedication to Caitlin is the first page of the course and it will stay there.

What this place gave back

I'll be plain about something people usually get backwards.

Pearl-Guide is one of the main reasons I've been successful in this business. Not a hobby alongside it. A cause of it. Everything I know about pearls that's worth knowing, I learned faster because I had to explain it to somebody here first.

I worked that out in 2004, the same year somebody coined the phrase "social media." What works is not putting ads in front of people. It's being useful, in public, over and over, for years, and letting that be the whole strategy.

I have friends all over the world I met on this forum. When I travel, I see them.