As the primary blogger and company founder, I thought I would share a bit more about myself in hopes of finding like minded people to follow this blog. I would like to be your friend.
My drive in creating coolproducts.com is that I like to give meaningful gifts but I hate all the time it takes. I have four great adult children, a wonderful wife, close relatives and a home where we all gather from time to time. We have our problems like everyone else but it’s great being together in the good ole U.S.A.
I’m very thankful to my friends, customers, visitors and associates for joining me on this cool products journey. Each contributes more than they know towards helping me to make this happen. I’m proud of our “part time” product finders as we steam ahead towards 20,000 products. We are focused on aggregating a catalog of “cool” and we feel the site has the potential to be the most comprehensive catalog of gift ideas on the web. We feature 1000s of the best products from 1000s of merchants. Most of our 650 categories are overflowing with great product ideas. Soon, they all will be. Many of the items are located by a user community (aka; crowd sourcing) and many are located by our passionate merchandising team and product editors. We’re always looking for help (hint, hint) maybe opportunity is knocking.
I’m not a preachy environmentalist, but I believe in climate change and I’m worried about it for my kids. I’m a member of the local (Lawrence, KS) Sierra Club. My club recently asked me to represent us in a community contest known as the “Take Charge Challenge”. We are competing against our neighbor Manhattan, KS to see which community can reduce its energy consumption the most. The winning community will receive a $100,000 grant for an energy efficiency project. I wish every city had something like this going on. I know a Harvard Graduate student is studying our efforts, hopefully to pass the idea around.
I would like to have a small piece of land someday where I could care for two or three horses. Currently I live in a college town of about 100,000. I try to work out daily with a group of friends for an hour before heading into work. I try to read a book every two weeks. I love reading about business, futurism and social media. Right now I’m into Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel. Wonderful vision of the new world we live in.
My first business was a six state professional commencement and marathon photography firm. It was fun and rewarding and I miss it sometimes. With 100 photographers we served 400 universities, colleges and high schools in various capacities as well as collegiate sports teams and high profile marathons. It was go-go-go. You know – we took the picture you get when you receive your diploma or approach the finish line.
It had transformed into digital imagery and was almost purely driven by online sales. The pictures were still delivered by mail, but the webs convenience made the business soar. Wow, I thought, the Internet really is cool.
There you go. Some background on me.
