I’m sitting in our warehouse this Sunday morning, July 13th, surrounded by moving boxes. We just wrapped our team meeting, and I finally have time to share something I’ve been building in the evenings after the kids go to bed.
If you work in home furnishings—whether you’re a buyer, designer, manufacturer, or retailer—you know the morning ritual. Open Furniture Today. Check Home Accents Today. Scan Architectural Digest. Pop over to Apartment Therapy. By the time your coffee’s lukewarm, you’ve got a dozen tabs open and you’re still not sure you caught everything important.
Last month, I decided to come up with a solution. The result? FurniPulse—a simple tool that pulls 19+ furniture industry sources into one clean feed, updated every 20 minutes.
The Pulse of the Business
In the furniture industry, any good company needs to know where the consumer mindset is and what’s happening in the competitive landscape. There’s SO much going on all the time—new collections dropping, trends shifting, competitors making moves, trade shows approaching.
(Quick sidebar: you need to know what’s going on, but you also need your own vision. Like, I check what West Elm is doing, but I’m not trying to BE West Elm, you know? It’s more like… okay, they’re pushing curved sofas hard this season. Good to know. But maybe my customers are still loving their sectionals. You can’t just chase every trend—you’ll drive yourself crazy and lose what makes you unique.)
If I’m being perfectly honest, there’s definitely some FOMO mixed in there too. You see a competitor mentioned in a trade pub and think “what are they up to?” Or a design blog features some trend you haven’t heard of and suddenly you’re wondering if you’re behind the curve.
Every morning, I’d find myself with a dozen tabs open, trying to piece together the full picture. Trade news in one corner telling me about manufacturing changes. Consumer blogs in another showing me how those changes were being spun to the public. Industry announcements scattered across five different sites.
This is just what we do. It’s part professional necessity, part curiosity, part not wanting to be the last one to know something important. But I kept thinking—there has to be a better way to stay connected to all this without the constant tab juggling.
So I thought: why not create this for myself? One place where I could actually feel the rhythm of the industry without the morning scramble. A single feed that shows me both sides of the story—what manufacturers are saying and what consumers are reading.
That’s how FurniPulse was born. Not from crisis or frustration. More from recognizing that this thing we all do—this mix of staying informed and maintaining our own direction—could be simpler.
Building Without Being a Builder
Here’s the part that still amazes me: I built this myself. Me. A furniture guy who couldn’t write a line of code six weeks ago.
With all these AI coding tools dropping—Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT—I started wondering: could I actually build something to solve my own problem? Not hire someone. Not wait six months. Just… build it myself?
So I did. Over the last few weeks, spending a couple hours each evening, I created FurniPulse. The process was surreal. I’m literally talking to these tools using Whisper AI, explaining what I want like I’m training a really smart intern. Share a screenshot here, describe a feature there, and somehow, working code appears.
My wife would find me at 11 PM, muttering at my laptop about RSS feeds and Python scripts. “Are you becoming one of those tech guys?” she’d ask. Maybe I am.
What FurniPulse Actually Does
At its core, FurniPulse is simple:
Every 20 minutes, it automatically:
- Scans 19 trusted sources (and growing)
- Collects fresh articles—currently tracking 239 articles
- Organizes by relevance—Trade news for professionals, Consumer news for enthusiasts
- Delivers instantly—accessible on any device at furnipulse.com
Two viewing modes:
- Trade Mode – Industry news, B2B updates, manufacturing insights, tariff announcements
- Consumer Mode – Design trends, home decor, lifestyle content
The magic is in seeing both perspectives side by side. You start to notice things.
The Patterns You Can’t Unsee
Once I had both trade and consumer feeds in one place, the matrix revealed itself:
The 48-Hour Rule: Trade news hits consumer blogs 48-72 hours later, like clockwork. Tariff announced Monday? By Wednesday, Apartment Therapy has “5 Ways to Style Your Space Before Prices Rise!”
The PR Playbook: Product launches follow a script—leaked photo, official announcement, influencer “surprise” post, consumer blog round-up. Every. Single. Time. Now I can practically predict which stories will blow up.
Market Momentum: Vegas Market prep started ramping up exactly 6 weeks out across every publication. The cascade is so predictable, you could set your calendar by it.
The Translation Gap: What manufacturers call “supply chain optimization” becomes “Why Your Favorite Sofa Might Cost More” in consumer media. Watching how industry jargon gets translated for consumers is a masterclass in communication.
The Technical Journey (For Fellow Non-Techies)
I spent three nights googling “how to parse RSS feeds” before realizing I was massively overthinking it. The fourth night, I had a working prototype.
The tools I used:
- Cursor on my Mac (it’s like VS Code but understands plain English)
- Claude/ChatGPT for problem-solving
- Whisper AI for voice-to-text (because typing is slow when you’re excited)
- Python for the backend (which I learned as I went)
- Some hosting service I still don’t fully understand but it works
I almost gave up when I realized I’d have to manually categorize 47 different publications. Some use “furnishings,” others “furniture,” and don’t get me started on whether “décor” needs an accent. Then I remembered: done is better than perfect.
The biggest surprise? It’s ridiculously cheap to run. Like, less than my monthly coffee budget cheap.
What This Means for Our Industry
We’re at an inflection point. When a furniture guy can build software by talking to AI at 11 PM, what else becomes possible?
Think about all the inefficiencies in our industry:
- Inventory management spreadsheets that haven’t changed since 2003
- Quote processes that still involve three emails and a PDF
- Showroom experiences that ignore everything we know about digital retail
If I can solve my news problem in a few weeks of evenings, what could you build to solve yours?
The Reality Check
FurniPulse isn’t perfect. My wife thinks the name is terrible (she’s probably right). I still manually check Dwell because their RSS feed is broken. Sometimes the categorization is wonky—apparently “ottoman” can mean furniture OR the empire, depending on context.
But every morning when I open one tab instead of twelve, when I catch trends before they hit mainstream, when I save 30 minutes that I can spend on actual business—it’s worth it.
What’s Next
Right now, my goal is simple: get feedback. Is this useful beyond my own morning routine? What sources am I missing? How could it be better?
I’m not thinking about monetization. Maybe sponsors down the line, but that’s a careful road. For now, it costs almost nothing to run, and if it helps others in our industry stay informed, that’s enough.
Once we get through this warehouse move and into fall, I want to create more tools like this. Share what works. Build in public. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the gap between “I wish someone would build…” and “I built…” is smaller than ever.
Try It Yourself
FurniPulse is live at furnipulse.com. It’s free, it’s basic, but it works.
If you’re drowning in furniture industry news every morning, give it a try. And if you know of publications I’m missing, please let me know. Currently tracking 19 sources, but our industry is vast and I’m always looking to improve.
More importantly, if you’ve got your own itch to scratch—that spreadsheet that drives you crazy, that process that wastes hours, that information gap that costs money—maybe it’s time to build your own solution.
All of us are techies now, whether we admit it or not.
Drop me a line at adam@woven.com. I’d love to hear what you think, what you’d build, or just commiserate about the state of RSS feeds in 2024.
Time to get back to these moving boxes. But first, one more coffee and a quick check of FurniPulse. Old habits die hard—they just get more efficient.
—Adem
P.S. – Still looking for someone who can fix Dwell’s RSS feed. Coffee and eternal gratitude await.
Hey, I’ve Been Thinking… 
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