Occupation Entrepreneur Website pearlsonly.com | Known for CEO of PearlsOnly.com | |
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Paul Lepa is a Canadian entrepreneur based in Beijing and Canada who is known for his ecommerce business that sells pearls. Ken McElroy, in his book The Sleeping Giant: The Awakening of the Self-Employed Entrepreneur, dedicated the chapter Big Margins Can Mean Big Business to Lepa's story of starting up an internet based pearl business.
Career
Lepa held various positions as a part of his professional career including senior account executive at Telvant in Calgary where he worked on projects in collaboration with Fortune 500 companies, Manager, SCADA and Automation at Koch Industries where his work spanned from feasibility to implementation of projects. He later served as the Director of Global Pipeline Solution Unit at ABB in Mannheim, Germany to work through the Chinese automation market before he moved to China in 2003 to start his career with a multinational corporation.
Lepa learned that pearls from China sold much more expensive in the US when he sent a few strands back home and took the opportunity to venture into an eCommerce business of pearls with internet based sales internationally using Google AdWords and PayPal. Due to the workload from the venture, Lepa decided to quit his day job. By 2004, he had converted the website, pearlsonly.com, that he started for his business to a company with eight employees and $1.2 million in sales.
Lepa's solo venture has resulted in about 100,000 customers and $10 million in sales by 2011 and 250,000 customers and $30 million in sales to date. PearlsOnly has grown internationally and now sells in UK, Canada, Australia in German through country level domain names.