Brikl and The Vernon Company Win the First PromoStandards Hack-A-Thon

A team of five Brikl staff and Lisa Hubbard of The Vernon Company has won first place in the first-ever PromoStandards Hack-A-Thon. Our working demo showed that a platform can integrate with PromoStandards in 90 seconds.

The challenge

PromoStandards, the nonprofit that standardizes how suppliers and distributors exchange data, ran its first virtual Hack-A-Thon from September 19 to 26, sponsored by Essent. Seven teams took part, with more than 50 participants from 33 companies around the world.

The brief was practical: find a better way to integrate with PromoStandards. Three things make that harder than it should be today: its use of SOAP technology, its API design and its API documentation.

Each team had ten minutes to pitch. Judges scored problem statement clarity, presentation creativity and technical feasibility. PromoStandards named the winners on November 8, and PPAI also covered the win.

What we built

Our team, The Adaptors, built a working demo rather than a concept. It showed an integration with PromoStandards completed in 90 seconds.

The approach is designed to complement the systems companies already run, including e-commerce sites, platforms and enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs). Through it, users can:

• Search products
• Refresh inventory
• Submit purchase orders

Each of these happens in milliseconds.

The team: Brikl and The Vernon Company

The Vernon Company was central to this win. Lisa Hubbard, its vice president of sales and marketing, brought the view of a distributor to a team of technology people. She describes herself as neither a tech person nor a developer, and that was exactly the value: she kept the work tied to what users and customers need.

Lisa's message to the industry is direct: "It's critical that we lean into technology to help us scale our businesses."

Why it matters

Digital transformation in promotional products will take cooperation. This event showed that competitors can work on a shared problem: the runner-up team, Promofound, brought together people from Essent, ZOOMcatalog, Thumbprint and Facilisgroup.

A faster path to PromoStandards helps everyone in the supply chain. When integration takes seconds instead of a long project, more suppliers and distributors can connect, and products, inventory and orders can move between them with less friction.

Thank you to PromoStandards and Essent for hosting the event, to every team that took part, and to Lisa and The Vernon Company for joining us.

You can watch The Adaptors' full presentation on YouTube, or read PromoStandards' own write-up of the event.

About Brikl

Brikl is a commerce platform for branded merchandise, built for scale. Founded in 2019, Brikl helps distributors, decorators and suppliers, as well as organizations and creators, launch online stores and sell promotional products, decorated apparel and teamwear.

The platform brings storefronts, supplier connections and order flows together in one place, so merch programs can grow without adding manual work.

Sources

• Brikl Wins First-Ever PromoStandards Challenge, PPAI, November 14, 2022
• PromoStandards' 2022 Hack-A-Thon, PromoStandards, November 10, 2022
• PromoStandards Announces Hack-A-Thon Winning Teams, PromoStandards, November 16, 2022