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Did you know that we have a Facebook page? Well, a lot of people and businesses do, but this year we are celebrating our 20th anniversary and we have taken advantage of Facebook’s ‘LIVE’ feature to let you celebrate with us.

Our first Facebook Live Event takes you into the mysterious and rarely before seen world of a small business office. We show off some of our brand new products, give you a Video Studio Tour, Office Tour with some employees, and a Birthday Celebration for a special little guy!

Our PulseTVDeals page has over 32,500 fans, but if you are not one of them you can still watch the video by clicking the link below. You’ll meet the people behind PulseTV.com and the Deal of the Day, and the most important person in the entire office; the Customer Service manager.

Watch the PulseTV Facebook LIVE event

On Sunday, May 1, 2016, PulseTV.com took part in the Tinley Park Fire Department and the Tinley Park Fire Prevention Bureau’s 4th Annual Run For Your Life Safety 5K Run/Walk.

This was our second time participating in the 5K, but this year was our first time as a sponsor.

This year $20,000 was raised to benefit the Illinois Fire Safety Alliances “Camp I Am Me” Burn Camp.

We made up around 50 of the nearly 600 runners and walkers that participated. We’re very proud to be part of such a wonderful event and look forward to contributing to its success next year.

PulseTV is always on the lookout for the next great product to bring to your attention. Recently we visited the International Home + Housewares Show. According to Housewares.org, “The IH+H Show features more than 2,100 exhibitors from over 40 countries and more than 62,000 total attendees from over 125 countries. The Show brings buyers and sellers together to create the home + housewares industry’s key marketplace!”

Not only did we get to see many of the wonderful products on display, we were also treated to demonstrations of several of the items. In the picture above, on the left hand side, you can see Anisa and company experiencing a first-hand demo.

We picked up quite a few items which are going up on our site daily so be sure to checking in frequently.

My 20 year-old daughter asked me to bring her one of our dashboard cameras.

“What do you need a dash cam for?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? Haven’t you seen all the dash cam footage of Russian meteor, plane crashes, murders…”

I squirmed a little. “No,” I said. “I’m not into pop-culture.”

“What does pop-culture have to do with dash cam footage?”

She then pulled out her phone, typed something really fast and pulled up a wide variety of dash cam footage. She showed me accidents, a shooting, two meteors and a drunk guy getting arrested.

“That’s all real life shot on a dashboard camera, Dad.”

“Ok, I’ll bring you one. What do you hope to capture on it?”

“Nothing interesting, I hope.”

Here are a few of the dash-cam videos we watched:

The boss once said, ‘We have to fail faster.’ It sounds a little counter-intuitive for a business model when you first hear it. The purpose of a business is to succeed, not to fail. But in application it makes a certain kind of sense.

For an e-commerce company like PulseTV.com success means connecting our customers with products they want to buy. Not exactly an easy thing since the interest of buyers is notoriously fickle. I would hate to admit how much guess work actually goes into finding successful products. That is why it is important to fail and fail fast, because the successes, when they come, are what keep the customers happy and coming back.

And we have had more than our share failures. The hair highlighters are a great example. At a trade show somewhere one of our buyers found a vendor who was willing to sell us tubes of hair highlighter for practically the cost of the product. The highlighter was a water soluble coloring that you could brush into your hair to create accents and highlights, and then simply wash out with shampoo. Safe, simple and fun. We figured it would be huge with teenagers and younger people.

For the price the vendor was offering we committed to tens of thousands of units. And while the highlighters sold, they weren’t the hit we needed them to be to justify the huge purchase we made. We ended up with thousands of them. That is just one example of many.

But what pays for the failures are the successes. Like Smitty’s Glass Wax for example. It is not a very exciting or unusual product, just something you rub on eye glasses or glass screens to keep them from smudging or smearing, but the customers love it. I can’t even tell you how many units we have sold over the years. Sometimes we have trouble keeping it in stock.

Unfortunately it is impossible to differentiate between the hair highlighters from the glass wax when looking for new products. But we keep trying, and sometimes we fail and sometimes we succeed. But the customers know we are always looking to bring them products they need and want. And that is part of what keeps them coming to PulseTV.com.

How many people have heard of PulseTV.com? As an e-commerce company it is not a giant, like Amazon or eBay, but it is remarkable in that it is one of the few companies that started in the wild and heady heyday of e-commerce, when almost anybody with a clever idea and their own website could become a paper millionaire, and survived the collapse of the “dot-com” bubble in the early 2000s.

So the real question is; how?

PulseTV.com was established in 1996 in the suburbs of Chicago, IL and began by selling videos via direct response television advertising. Since then the company has evolved into an e-commerce retailer, selling a wide variety of products including; DVDs, apparel, jewelry, personal accessories, toys, small electronics and housewares. Currently located in Tinley Park, IL, PulseTV.com has combined an expanding online retail presence with aggressive discounts and qualified, opt-in email marketing to stay competitive and continue to grow.

PulseTV.com has adapted to the online marketplace by constantly innovating. At one point the company hosted and distributed the largest catalog of email newsletters – or e-zines – on the Internet, with clients such as Microsoft, Intel and Dell. As Pulsetv’s e-commerce division grew, the company dramatically expanded its own online retail presence, attracting customers by constantly adding new products and offering large discounts on everyday products.

Most recently we have begun producing in-house videos, using demonstrations to supplement product descriptions and help our customers visualize how the products work. Our customers tell us they like the videos as it aides in making a buying decision, but they love the videos for giving them a sense of who’s behind the company they are buying from.

We’re glad to be here and excited that you’ve found us at www.pulsetv.com. Now head on over and check out what’s new.