The Dead Pixels Society podcast
News, information and interviews about the photo/imaging business. This is a weekly audio podcast hosted by Gary Pageau, editor of the Dead Pixels Society news site and community.
This podcast is for a business-to-business audience of entrepreneurs and companies in the photo/imaging retail, online, wholesale, mobile, and camera hardware/accessory industries.
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The Dead Pixels Society podcast
Unlocking the Stories Behind Our Possessions: The Artifcts Innovation with Ellen Goodwin
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What if your possessions could tell stories as rich and vivid as your own memories? Join us as we explore this intriguing possibility with Ellen Goodwin, co-founder of Artifcts, a platform revolutionizing how we preserve sentimental value in our belongings. Goodwin shares her personal journey sparked by a poignant experience with inherited belongings, which led to the creation of Artifcts. Discover how this innovative tool blends inventory with personal stories, offering a seamless way to document the emotional significance of items for future generations.
Imagine turning everyday objects, like a brick from a memorable trip, into treasures of emotional significance. We uncover how Artifcts serves diverse users—from parents crafting digital baby books to veterans using the platform for PTSD intervention. Learn about the surprising cognitive and behavioral health benefits, such as assisting those with hoarding tendencies. Even more fascinating is the integration of QR codes, which bridges the gap between digital and physical worlds, aiding users in organizing, decluttering, and preserving cherished stories.
Unlock the secrets of maintaining authenticity in a digital age where technology changes rapidly. Goodwin explains how Artifacts ensures the accessibility and exportability of users' data, keeping it in human-readable formats. Delve into Artifcts' straightforward subscription model, avoiding hidden fees, and explore how it connects with professional fields, including estate planning and insurance. As we discuss its applications in senior communities and the photo organizing industry, you'll see how Artifcts transforms collections into curated, story-rich memories.
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Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Edited by Olivia Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, gary Pegeau. The Dead Pixel Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers.
Gary Pageau:Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Ellen Goodwin, the co-founder of Artifcts. The company's in Washington DC, but Ellen's coming to us from Austin, texas, today. Hi Ellen, how are you today?
Ellen Goodwin:Hey, good morning Gary. Happy to be here.
Gary Pageau:Everyone's going to say what is Artifcts? So let's just get that out of the way first, because it's a relatively new company serving a very long-needed service.
Ellen Goodwin:Yeah, you got that right, Gary. So what is Artifcts? We are where stories and stuff meet. We all collect and accumulate and inherit, or will one day inherit, a lot of stuff.
Gary Pageau:How do.
Ellen Goodwin:We know what it is, why it matters and what we're going to do with it next. So we wanted to make it as simple as social media, but private by default, for you to capture the stories and the memories and the history behind it all, and the value.
Gary Pageau:Tell me a little bit about why the company was founded. You and your co-founder said, saw this as a need. Was there a personal story that jump-started this, or was this a boy? There's a lot of boomers dying and they got a lot of stuff and this is a big market opportunity. What was the reason behind the starting of the company?
Ellen Goodwin:Well, you aren't wrong, there's something like $3 trillion worth of durable assets that the boomers are about to pass down, and that's a terrifying sum of stuff. But yes, it was personal and motivation. My co-founder's mother passed away unexpectedly. She was only 65 years old.
Ellen Goodwin:Motivation my co-founder's mother passed away unexpectedly. She was only 65 years old, she had an estate plan, she had a will, and yet where it said, what are we going to do with your changeable assets? It was blank. And all it said was divide equally among three children, and my co-founder being the eldest and only girl. Her brothers looked at her and said not it, but don't get rid of anything important. And how do you know what that is? And, moreover, ultimately we don't really want the stuff. We want the stories and the memories, but we still have to deal with the stuff in the room. It took her over a year to go through a house, 5,000 square feet of stuff, and make those decisions.
Ellen Goodwin:That's putting your life on pause. That's putting your grief on pause, because you're tumbling through all of this stuff and you're reliving it as you go.
Gary Pageau:It's a very, very painful process and the brothers, of course, said, you know being probably dudes going. I don't want to touch those emotions.
Ellen Goodwin:Oh yeah, they're like good luck with that, right, but that's exactly it and look like we have a stuff problem and we're a very consumeristic society. We accumulate a lot of it at every life milestone. This is not just about growing old and collecting a lot of things. We accumulate throughout our lives. We can transform our relationships to stuff and to each other if we just pause and ask ourselves what is it, why does it matter and what am I going to do with it. And that's what we wanted to bring to people. And my co-founder said look, I don't need an inventory, I don't need to know every spoon sheet lamp in the house and I don't need a journal with stories. I need to literally bring the two together so I can make better decisions about all of it. And that's what she ended up doing. She came to me and she said look, I have this problem and we're going to solve it together. And I said great, what does that look like? And she said that's how you figure out.
Ellen Goodwin:So I'm on the product side, dreaming up how we make this really really easy, and we've done that right. One of our top Artifctors she's 76 years old. She has over 600 Artifcts she's made using our Android app and she's delighted that she did it without any help, like she makes a point about that. So it really was one of those things where we had to make it easy and fun so it can become a part of a habit, right? My husband gave me a new necklace for our anniversary. First thing I did was artifact it, along with the documentation, so if I ever need to sell it or insure it, I have it.
Ellen Goodwin:I also have the great story from my anniversary to go with the necklace when, one day, I give it to my daughter.
Gary Pageau:When you're talking about you know these things, you're not always talking about the monetary value, right? So we're not talking about some of these home inventory things that you see. I mean there's all kinds of apps for that.
Ellen Goodwin:This isn't that right.
Gary Pageau:So let's walk through what Artifact actually does like the process, Because this is an audio podcast. I strongly encourage people to go to your website, which we'll talk about later, to learn more, but talk a little bit about the process, of what people get when they sign up for Artifact.
Ellen Goodwin:Yeah, absolutely so. You'll go to our app or go to our website. You'll create a free account. You can create five Artifcts free to give it a try. But what it's going to have you do is, let's say, you're on a mobile app. My friends always say, oh, it works like a normal app. Yes, it works like a normal app. You know I talk about the sentimental in nature. My daughter made me a card. I was sick, right, so she made me this beautiful card and she gave it to me. So I took a photo of it. I selected that photo, I shared it and I didn't choose Instagram or Facebook. I chose the Artifcts app and I popped that photo of the card in it and I hit record on my phone in the app and I recorded my daughter telling me mom, wishing you well, blah, blah, blah. I have her video there with the card and.
Ellen Goodwin:I save it, I caption the card, I add a few details, I hit save and it goes into my Artifcts collection and now it's one of many Artifcts I have from a moment in my life that was really amazing. And that gives me two things right it captures that moment in time, but also we literally cannot keep everything that comes into our homes. That would be, taken right.
Ellen Goodwin:So at some point you're going to declutter and you're going to downsize, whether you're moving or not, but like you can't keep it all. But this is a way to keep the memories, even if you don't keep the stuff, and it's all instantly organized and shareable and downloadable, so it just puts the utility back in your hands. I don't have to. You know, we tell people you take a lot of photos. You're from the photo industry but you take a photo. We take 5.3 billion photos every day worldwide. That's the number I read.
Ellen Goodwin:The average person takes 20 a day 20 a day, and then that photo that I took of the card would be 20 back, 100 back, thousand back. I forgot I even took the photo, right? I share it or do anything to preserve what it mattered to me. And photos can't talk. I mean we can animate them and do interesting things, right, but no one's going to be able to say. What does your daughter say when she gave you this card?
Ellen Goodwin:no one's going to know that they cannot read my memories yet, but no one can AI their way into my memories that's not me but we can make it really easy to capture it. So when you create artifact after artifact, you build this collection and you can view it in a timeline fashion so you can see moments of your life. I can see when I went to graduate school. I can see when I was traveling throughout Africa right, All of these moments come to life in this timeline and it makes it easy to share too, with like the valuable stuff. I will. I'll make sure it's covered under my insurance policy, I'll send it to my agent, I'll add things into that tangible assets memorandum in my will, so people not only inherit stuff but the stories to go with it and maybe they'll actually want the stuff.
Gary Pageau:Right, because now they know what it means to you, right, exactly when they get the necklace. You know this isn't just the necklace from you know, you picked up on one of your trips, but it was a present from your husband and that was great and there's this whole lovely story behind it and that makes it more meaningful.
Ellen Goodwin:And how great that your legacy is all these stories and memories, and not just a burden that you're passing down to your loved ones. Here is all my stuff. Go figure it out. Like that's not fun. This is a much better opportunity for you.
Gary Pageau:You've been on a great point, because when you mentioned downsizing or that hit home to me, because my wife and I downsized our home. We went from a you know 3,300 square foot home with four bedrooms to, you know, basically, an apartment we're living in right now. We sold, you know, we've downsized the house and everything, and we had bins of stuff that we had saved for the kids, like all their kindergarten artwork, all their stuff, the trophies, the medals, the participation ribbons, the first place ribbons, the you name it. We saved it and then we had the kids over before I moved in. We were like here, take your bin. And they're like what? I don't want this bin. Of course we couldn't get rid of it, so the bins are in our storage unit. And now I'm thinking now I need an artifact thing to artifact these things so I can get rid of the bins.
Ellen Goodwin:One hundred percent, gary, and that is a story we hear probably every week here at Artifacts. And I've actually been working on drawing a cartoon. I've discovered I'm not a cartoonist. I need to hire one. But for exactly that reason it's like look, I saved this all for you. And it's literally a closet and these boxes piled up with, like you know, high school and K through 12 and stuffed animals and all these things, and you're like, no, I don't want it, but it's great if you remember. You know our kids. They don't remember being three, but we can remember for them. We can catch those stories before we donate those items. Right, and we had one father. He actually ended up writing an article for us. He was going through that. Just like you said, he was downsizing. He told his kids you have until this date to come and get your stuff.
Gary Pageau:That's what we did, exactly.
Ellen Goodwin:Yep. And so that date came and he artifacted what he knew about the things that he was getting rid of because they didn't come get him. And then over Thanksgiving he showed his kids his artifacts timeline. He's telling them all these stories and he asked his four kids. He said what did you learn from this? And his eldest said I learned you didn't have a kid named Spencer, and he's like what it's? Because the eldest was the only one that came and got his stuff, so none of it was artifacted. The others got all these great stories, but not the eldest.
Ellen Goodwin:So, he's a little jealous and dad had to go back and create some artifacts for his eldest.
Gary Pageau:That hits home because one of my children is named Spencer, so that's a coincidence, isn't it?
Ellen Goodwin:That's wild. It was not just for the record, everyone, it wasn't Gary. That story was not about Gary.
Gary Pageau:But it sounds very appealing at this point. Anyway so you've got different market segments you can appeal to at this, because it's not just the people who are passing on a legacy, but even just like, like you said, the lower kids. So is this something you discovered or was this part of the pitch when you were, when you were looking for, you know, the 32nd elevator pitch? Was this part of it or did this open up? When you discover it?
Ellen Goodwin:We always envisioned. Look, our slogan at the start was gut stuff. We all do so. We always knew stuff is something that crosses every boundary demographic wise, but you can't build a company going after everybody. That said, this has been an interesting year at Artifacts, so we've received a mom's choice gold award. Why People are using us to create digital baby books, and that's fabulous.
Ellen Goodwin:Why, people are using us to create digital baby books, and that's fabulous. Right, we won a genealogy technology award this year. Why? Because if you're not a genealogist, genealogy software can be really intimidating. It's awful.
Gary Pageau:Sorry, I use Mac Family Tree. It's terrible.
Ellen Goodwin:But getting your family to sign in and look at a family tree or a gallery of hundreds of photos or a gallery of hundreds of documents and putting the burden on them to connect the dots is really, really unpleasant. And so genealogists discovered, oh on, artifacts. Each artifact is a bite-sized story that connects the dots, and I can get my family to pay attention to that right. So we have, along the way, picked up a lot of energy, attention to that right. So we have, along the way, picked up a lot of energy. And even now we just announced we're working with a group of veterans organizations, because experimenting with using artifacting is a PTSD intervention.
Gary Pageau:Sure.
Ellen Goodwin:Not because every artifact by default is private. So you can capture those memories and stories behind photos and medals and uniforms, all of that, and you can share it with whatever community you want to, when you're ready. And that's the key there is finding a safe space. It's the same reason we're doing brain health study right now with UMass Chan Medical School right.
Ellen Goodwin:It's a cognitive health component to what Artifacts is doing, as well as the behavioral health right People struggle with. You know, another spectrum is hoarding disorders, right? How do you help people let go of the things? Well, you can do it by honoring the reason why they kept it in the first place. We all keep it. You know, I interviewed a gentleman, very wealthy individual, and he was enamored with artifacts from his collections. He has a lot of very valuable collections. First thing he wanted to artifact it was a brick and it was the week of bricks. We had three other people Artifcting bricks that week that shared them with us. You know these things that are completely sentimental. It was a trip that he and his wife took for an anniversary and they're rebuilding this pathway and they swiped a brick from it and they keep it and it's a memento of this very big trip that they took. Your kids look in your house and they're going to be like why?
Gary Pageau:do you have a brick?
Ellen Goodwin:Like what's for the brick, dad Come on. But that's another way where we depart, because we actually connect the digital stories with the stuff in the room, because you can print a QR code off of your artifact and actually attach it to the physical item.
Gary Pageau:Right.
Ellen Goodwin:That way, someone comes across dad's brick, they scan it and up pops the story, and that has a lot of legs with it with all of those segments that we just talked about. We have a lot of users who are using those QR codes to help get organized and declutter, to help with managing a move, to help on all these different ways, and so those QR codes that became ubiquitous during COVID era we built that in from the start and we now have actually QR code stickers because people are using them in such a volume and they're like Ellen, it's great that I can print it for free from my artifact. I don't have time to print and cut and stick.
Ellen Goodwin:Can you give me some stickers. So, like we've been watching how our members are using us and trying to make sure that we're meeting them where they're at, to make it easier and easier as they go.
Gary Pageau:One of the other things we've been covering a little bit is, like the photo reminiscent therapy for Alzheimer's patients, right where people can re-engage their brain, if you will, through looking at photos. So I imagine Artifacts could even be part of that process.
Ellen Goodwin:Yeah, absolutely. Our brain health study is using something a little different. We're using biomarkers and voice to detect cognitive health changes. But the NIH has funded multiple studies on reminiscence therapy and there's a lot of hope there. And I tell people it's interesting and you and I were talking before we started recording about these broad questions that come out there that we're supposed to ask our family members to elicit family stories and history and they can be really intimidating, like where do I start with such a big question? Our findings are completely different.
Ellen Goodwin:If you just show someone an object that they have right next to them every day, and so ask them a very simple question, just a truth what is this thing?
Ellen Goodwin:And then they can say, oh, that's a cat, is a cat? Where did it come from? Oh, I carved it. You carved it, yeah, oh, I was 16. And the boys and girls school had just merged together into one high school and we had a shop class with the boys and I carved this cat and the boys still. You know, an object can pull the thread on memory after memory in a really powerful way. And then, on artifacts, you capture that and it's shareable for always and obviously you can attach the story to it.
Ellen Goodwin:So we see that all the time and even in my life. My mother has dementia and we artifact together all the time. It's a safe space. It doesn't have ads, it doesn't have people trying to friend you right.
Ellen Goodwin:Isn't these like hidden chats where they're swapping information? It's a safe space and it's a happy space. Right, I can sit there and go from story to story to story. She can listen to audio and video. She can, you know, call to me, Do you remember? Yes, I remember. You know like it's a safe space, friendly one, and you can step out of that role of caregiver and you can just be mother-daughter again and that's really, really powerful.
Gary Pageau:Now, does your mom go back and revisit things she's already artifacted, or is that Over and over?
Ellen Goodwin:Yeah, and that's part of it. You know people with dementia. There's a reason they like to look at photographs and images in general, but the ones that have the reminiscence therapy power that they're researching are not general images. It's not here's a dog, here is your dog, that you have.
Ellen Goodwin:That's the more powerful image is something very personal, and so all of the artifacts are personal. She's not browsing through generic ones that the public have made. She's in her own collection and things people have shared with her. So these all evoke memories for her and very positive emotions.
Gary Pageau:So this is like a private network storage sharing thing. How is your plan to keep this in perpetuity? I guess that's a word I cannot pronounce, but I think you understood what I just said. You know that's the other piece of it, right? Is you hope this is here for generations? What is your plan for that as a company?
Ellen Goodwin:Well, I think that you know. It's interesting when we were about to launch, when the heic files all of a sudden were the default on our phones, when the HEIC files all of a sudden were the default on our phones and we immediately had to adapt.
Ellen Goodwin:Now, not all technology has. Like, I upload my accounting receipts and it still won't take a HEIC file, and it's been three years, like what on earth. But I think part of the answer is adaptation. We're digitally native. We're going to keep adapting and we're even, you know, looking at other things right now, like how do we bring in hidden watermarks to protect the content that people add into the artifacts, right? So part of it is adapting.
Ellen Goodwin:We will never tell anyone that something's permanent or forever, because there's no such thing. We don't know what forever means, right, as a human species. But we'll continue adapting, as technology does. And, furthermore, our technology is built with a couple of defaults in it. One there's legacy contacts, right, a primary and a secondary. So if we don't hear from you or something happens, your artifacts can be transferred and they can live on, they can be frozen in place, right, there's choices. But you know, I would hope every company, I don't care how big you are or how small, has an exit plan. If we needed to exit, the first thing we do is contact all of our members and say these are valuable, these artifacts you've created. Here are any number of ways you can take them with you.
Gary Pageau:Right.
Ellen Goodwin:That's the responsibility of every company is to know how you protect the value of what your users have created.
Gary Pageau:Yeah, that's what I was getting to is that you know, even though you're a private vault I don't want to use the word vault, but a private environment and it's personal and private it is exportable. Yep absolutely Unlike a lot of other things which we will not mention. You know it's not a proprietary database, you can still get. Will not mention, Right, you know it's not a proprietary database, you can still get at your stuff.
Ellen Goodwin:Exactly, and then human intelligible formats.
Ellen Goodwin:This is not a proprietary format this is you can take it as a PDF, you can zip it and take down your original photos, videos, audio documents in their original formats. We don't compress them. You know how many times people complain to us oh, I put this in photo in Facebook and now it's pixelated. I'm like, well, yeah, they compressed it when you uploaded it right, and so people lose the value of their assets. And so at Artifacts, we're like, yeah, we are not doing that. You can download it in its original format, take it back, and that supports a lot of other things too, but it makes it easy to work with as well. So a lot of other things too, but it makes it easy to work with as well. So a lot of our members we now you can print your artifacts to a book if you want, with our custom designer, and it makes it easy to do things like that too. We don't want you to feel locked in.
Gary Pageau:Right and that's where I was kind of getting to is that you know output is a piece of this and of course my audience loves the output piece. I can imagine there's a lot of actually opportunities where people could create collections of things. Let's say, you know grandma's woodshop projects, you know her cats and all her things and you could just create a little thing just to have it, just have a tangible thing. So you know not that your Web site and app aren't great, but you know it would be nice just to have a tangible thing you can touch and this does allow for that. Do you plan on expanding that sort of opportunity?
Ellen Goodwin:Yeah, and that's something that you know. I attended the Visual First Conference, which is a big photography industry conference, and you were there, and it's definitely an area where making that easier and easier. We know partners that support an API, so our members can simply export artifacts into a book builder and build their own books if they wanted to.
Gary Pageau:And put that QR code next to the.
Ellen Goodwin:That's right.
Gary Pageau:And that's how our books are designed right.
Ellen Goodwin:So right now, if you do it with our partner right now, you know she does the layout for you, but you can choose do I want the QR codes, and obviously then you're reading the story up, pops audio and video as well. It also means you can edit and add to it without you know. You don't have to reprint the book necessarily immediately. Ultimately, you might have volumes one, two, three, four over time. I was thinking about that myself.
Ellen Goodwin:I've artifacted all the ornaments on my Christmas tree right, Tell the stories behind them, but I get new ones every year, so ultimately I'd need a volume two for all those ornaments or things like that, and so I do think that that's an area of overlap with folks in the photo industry, and I mentioned another, which is, you know, the whole build of watermark things discreetly as well as things. But there's a lot of crossover for us. We're never going to be that we have no desire to help people post-process photographs or anything like that. That's not what we're here for.
Gary Pageau:And that actually kind of violates the authenticity of the artifact is if you're laying on some filters and some crazy stuff on there.
Ellen Goodwin:That's exactly right. People are coming to us for authenticity, right, they're just. That's not what they're here for in the artifacts community.
Gary Pageau:So what's the business? I mean, I understand the business model is a subscription, but just can you just kind of walk us through what that looks like? Is there an annual fee or a startup fee or a per gig fee, or what's the?
Ellen Goodwin:Absolutely Well and a lot of thought went into that right, because what we observed in the industry is there's a lot of nickel and diming going on. Really, I'm shocked. It can be hard to know at the end of this what am I actually paying? And that is not something we wanted to deal with. So at Artifacts, anyone can come to Artifacts A-R-T-I-F-C-T-Scom. We took out that second A.
Ellen Goodwin:Anyone can go to Artifactscom, create a free account and you can create up to five artifacts free. This does two things. One, you can try us for free, Try us on our mobile app, Try us on your tablet, Try us on your laptop. But it also means that anyone can have a free account and view the private artifacts someone might share with them. So that's how we make sure that you can have that privacy guarantee. Then we have two tiers we have a $45 a year for 30 artifacts and we have an unlimited for 119. And that unlimited also gives you three accounts to give away. So it's actually four accounts for $119. This is how people who maybe have dementia and don't have a credit card anymore this might be my brother, who would put everything in a dumpster, so I can get him involved and add to stories with me, so that's a very, very affordable option as well. But we also work directly with insurance companies, estate planners and those who want their clients to be using artifacts for different purposes, right.
Erin Manning:If you're an insurance company.
Ellen Goodwin:You want to make sure people are properly covered and you want to make sure they can file claims very quickly, right? They've already artifacted them. It's really easy to do Same with estate planning. Like they want to have really good conversations with you. What matters? What motivates you? What do you want to have really good conversations with you? What matters? What motivates you? What do you want to do with everything down the line philosophically right? If you're into philanthropy, I want to know that. So Artifcting opens up really great conversations that way as well. So we do work on you know, in even senior communities, it's a great gift for someone who's moving in because they have to downsize to get there right moving in because they have to downsize to get there right.
Ellen Goodwin:Gifting artifacts to those you know communities and people on their way is a lovely way to engage them before they move in and know them better and help them in that process. We also have an artifacts for professionals. A lot of professionals are now using artifacting. They're doing Artifcting as a service.
Ellen Goodwin:So, someone who's organizing in your home and helping you declutter. If I'm helping, I'm a move manager, I'm a desk Whatever your service is, you can now actually do Artifcting for your clients, which has been. It was an innovation that we released just this year.
Gary Pageau:Yeah, that's. I think that's where I first ran into you was, or the company was, at the photo managers conference. That's right. Yeah, Kathy Nelson has kind of built that whole photo organizing business model around, you know, for years and she's been doing a great job with that because that's really something people needed but didn't know they needed.
Ellen Goodwin:Exactly. Oh yeah, and a lot of our, our, our already pros do come from the photo organizing industry, because, look, you get your 150,000 photos organized. Now what?
Erin Manning:Right.
Ellen Goodwin:How do you? You know, as a, as an adult child, I don't want to inherit 150,000 photos and have to figure out what any of them mean, right Like I would love to have the best of artifacted with the stories behind it. Not every photo is worth a thousand words in the class.
Gary Pageau:Bite your tongue.
Ellen Goodwin:I know. The example I love to give is, you know, my kid. She's 14. I have a million photos of this kid swimming right here at UT Austin. But there's that one photo when she got her, you know, swim time and like how do you remember in the you know all of those photos in one moment and pair it with a video of the swim, and right, like, how do you actually preserve those moments and make those photos even more valuable?
Gary Pageau:Yeah, because I do think it could lead to, you know, the actual dispensing of the actual physical prints once the people I mean I know that's part of the culling process that photo managers do and again it's just taking up space and clutter because people just can't let go of the physical prints that they had printed decades ago which, again, at the time, was the only copy. So they did have a lot more value.
Ellen Goodwin:Absolutely.
Gary Pageau:And Kathy.
Ellen Goodwin:Nelson of the Photo Managers has a great she teaches in her coursework she talks about it's okay to have a box of those photos and put a label on it that says I couldn't get rid of it, but I'm okay, if you do right, Giving the next generation that permission slip. And you know, when you create an artifact, one of the optional fields that we include on the short form is called in the future. In the dropdown it says I want to sell it, I want to bequeath it, I want to donate it. One of the options is as you wish, I stole it from the princess bride, right? I won't haunt you. Don't keep this in storage for the next 30 years. Do what you want with it. You have my permission, that's you know. That's the beauty of artifacts. Is that resonance of like changing our relationships to our stuff and really considering what it means to us.
Gary Pageau:Because really what matters is the emotional connection and the story, not the actual object itself.
Ellen Goodwin:Yep, and let's. Of course. You know that vase that looks like your daughter made. It is actually a $45,000 piece of artwork. Please don't put it in the donation bin. And now you know you're welcome.
Gary Pageau:I imagine there's quite a few of those kind of stories. Oh, there is.
Ellen Goodwin:All the time. I actually did a concierge artifacting session here in Austin and the gentleman and I were working through all the things he wanted to artifact and one of them was a $45,000 vase that looked like my daughter made it and he's like be careful with that one. And I was like, okay, you take it off the shelf, I'll take it off, but you would never know and that's the topic that we get on as well, gary is this intergenerational wealth transfer? It's a wealth in terms of the stories and the emotional and sentimental value, but literally you can have hidden value in your home that you don't even know. Tell your loved ones. This is why it mattered to me, or didn't? I just held on to the thing. But, fyi, it's really valuable if you don't want to sell it right.
Ellen Goodwin:This is another way that artifacts is a gift to your loved ones is cluing them into something valuable.
Gary Pageau:Or, on the other thing, people are holding on to things that they think are valuable and they're not. You know those precious moments, figures that were hot, for you know how many years are. You know people thought they were collectibles and they would be worth something right?
Ellen Goodwin:Oh, there's examples like the All the Time or the person who had this Woodstock ticket and thought it was worth a fortune but didn't realize that people like just went into the event and left them in the field and people collected all of the tickets and they flooded the market with them and they're worthless, so you know like and that's one of the areas where, at Artifacts, we are innovating on using image recognition to give people factual information about things that they're artifcting, because you don't always even know what something is and with AI they can give you a clue.
Ellen Goodwin:But you can also go into you know there's a lot of great resources that can look at price histories on things and you can get that like reality check. And so sorry, I know you think this thing is worth a fortune and it went for eBay on $5 yesterday. We're sorry, at least you know. Yeah, exactly, and you can wrestle with your emotional attachment Right.
Gary Pageau:Well, that's great. You've mentioned it a couple times, but for the last time. Where can people go for more information to reach out to, if they're interested in partnering or learning more or just want to sign up for artifacts? Where can they go? What's the direction you want to point them to?
Ellen Goodwin:Google will lead you astray with trying to spell our name. It's A-R-T-I-F-C-T-S artifactscom. We took out the second A because we wanted you to think about artifacts. But look what you artifact is something meaningful to you. So we took out that second A to reinforce that. Go to Artifcts. com, create a free account, give it a try. You just never know, I think, with any product until you try it. So that's what I recommend. I also recommend downloading the app. I usually make my artifcts on the app because I'm working with photos and videos already on my phone and then I go to the desktop to add in on a bigger screen more detail. Go, try us out. Reach out to hello at artifcts. com if you're interested in partnering with us or in package deals on memberships. We've had a lot of those inquiries during the holidays.
Gary Pageau:I imagine sure.
Ellen Goodwin:Yeah, absolutely Awesome.
Gary Pageau:Well, yeah, absolutely Awesome. Well, great, Ellen, thanks for spending time with us today, and it's great getting to learn more about artifacts and hearing about your family, and I appreciate the time. Thank you so much.
Ellen Goodwin:Thank you for having me, Gary.
Erin Manning:Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.
