Winner, Consumer Products
Kim Pedersen cut his teeth in the lighting industry in 1979 when he answered an ad and became a lighting salesman who sold light bulbs door to door throughout the Midwest. Three years later, he relocated to Dallas and began working for a national lighting distributor.
By 1995, Pedersen was feeling the entrepreneurial itch and founded his own small lighting company, but it wasn’t what he wanted it to be. On the advice of his nephew, Pedersen adapted the company to the Web, and the next year, 1000bulbs.com was born. It employed a unique website design and a different work force that was more geared to servicing customers.
“1000bulbs became my child,” Pedersen says. “I routinely spent over 80 hours a week for 15 years focusing on grooming the website and the company to grow and succeed.”
But the early days weren’t easy. The Web was a nascent technology industry and building a business in that space had its obstacles, among them a lack of funds and lack of operating space.
So Pedersen focused on areas of weaknesses that he saw in competitors, such as insufficient customer service and inadequate inventory and technology budgets, and set out to exploit them.
He tinkered with the business as he went along, evolving as the Internet evolved and improving as customer tastes, wants and needs changed. And he recognized the importance of continuous learning, understanding that he would need to keep digesting information about how the Web worked and best practices for doing business online.
By investing in technology, Pedersen has developed a user-friendly website and back-end system that easily handles more than 3,000 calls per day and a warehouse that manages up to 1,700 orders each day.
Over the years, these initiatives have helped Pedersen build 1000bulbs.com into a vibrant business that employs more than 100 people, carries thousands of household items from simple light bulbs to cutting-edge specialty lighting products and has been recognized as one of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies in America.
How to reach: 1000bulbs.com, www.1000bulbs.com
