Originally published January 2024 — republished April 2026 with refreshed steps and timings.
The single most common question we get from distributors and decorators is some version of: "How long does this actually take to set up?"
Honest answer: about 22 minutes if you're doing it for the first time. Less once you've done it once.
Here's the actual flow, broken down by minutes spent in each step.
Step 1 — Select 10 products from the marketplace · ⏱ 5 minutes
Open the supplier marketplace. Filter by category, decoration method, brand, or fulfillment partner. Drag 10 products into your store.
You don't need a finished product list to launch. You need 10 items the client will see in the first review — a couple of tees, a polo, a hoodie, a hat, a bag, a drinkware piece, maybe a notebook. Variety up front helps the buyer feel the shape of the store.
Brikl's marketplace carries 4,500+ decorated SKUs across 110+ brands. The filter and search panel does the heavy lifting; you're just curating.
Step 2 — Embellish the 10 products · ⏱ 10 minutes
Apply the client's logo, tagline, or artwork to each product. The design tool lets you place embroidery, screen print, DTF, or sublimation art on the product mockups, with real-time preview of decoration cost and placement.
About a minute per product is the ballpark for the first store. By the third store you'll be faster still. Templates and saved logos compound — the second time you use a logo, it's already in the library.
This is where most of the 22 minutes go, and it's the step that turns a generic catalog into a recognisable brand store.
Step 3 — Configure the pricing · ⏱ 5 minutes
Set retail pricing. Brikl shows you wholesale cost and decoration cost up front. You either set per-product retail or apply a markup percentage across the catalog (most distributors do the latter on the first pass and tune individual items later).
Brikl handles tax, payments, refunds, and Merchant of Record. You don't need a sales tax registration.
Step 4 — Set up the store · ⏱ 2 minutes
Pick a template, drop in the client's logo, and a hero image. The template handles type pairing, button styles, and section spacing automatically.
Hit publish. The store has a public URL the moment you do.
What you have at minute 22
A live, branded storefront with 10 decorated products, retail pricing, a working checkout, and an order routing pipeline that sends production data to the right fulfillment partner the moment a customer pays.
You can send the URL to the client now — same email you'd use to send a proposal. They click. They see a working store with their branding. They place a test order. The conversation changes.
Try it yourself
If you want to time the experience, the fastest way is to start a free account and run through the four steps above with a fictional client (or your own brand). No credit card required, no quotas — you can launch as many test stores as you need to feel confident before showing one to a real customer.
Or if you'd rather see it done first: book a demo and we'll walk you through a real distributor's setup, end to end.
Why "fast" matters more than "feature-rich"
Speed isn't an aesthetic choice. In the promo industry it's a structural advantage — and it's worth understanding why a 22-minute build beats the alternative, even when the alternative has more features on paper.
The promo buying cycle is short and competitive
Most corporate promo briefs land in a distributor's inbox with an implied deadline that's days, not weeks. The buyer wants to see what they're going to get. The first distributor to put a working concept in front of them — not a slide deck, not a quote, an actual storefront — usually wins the account.
Distributors who can stand up a branded store the same day they get the brief don't compete on price. They compete on being the only one who replied with something real. Everyone else is still drafting their PowerPoint.
Feature-richness has a cost
Every additional setup step is another reason for a distributor to put off launching. Stores that need 40 fields filled in, complex theming systems, multi-step approval flows, and a 90-page configuration guide get postponed. Stores that need 10 products, a logo, and a price get launched.
We deliberately optimised Brikl for the second shape. The platform has plenty of advanced configuration available — store-to-client permissions, custom decoration rules, multi-currency, Merchant of Record routing, branded shipping confirmations — but none of it is in the critical path to publishing. You can ship the store without touching most of it.
The 22-minute store is also the 22-minute pitch
When the build is fast, you can build during the discovery call. We've watched distributors share-screen with a prospect, drag products in based on the prospect's reaction, hit publish, and have the prospect place a test order before the call ends.
You can't do that with a tool that takes a week to set up. The whole sales motion changes when launch time collapses.
Iteration is cheaper than perfection
A live store gets feedback. A planning document doesn't. The client looks at the storefront, says "the polo's too expensive" or "we need a women's fit on that tee" — and now you've got a real specification, written by the buyer, that you can act on in another 5 minutes.
The fastest way to know what to build is to build a version of it and let the buyer react.
What this means in practice
For distributors:
- Don't wait for perfect inputs. Pick the 10 best-fit products you can see, embellish, price, publish.
- Treat the first store as a working prototype, not a launch. The buyer's feedback in the first 24 hours is more valuable than another two days of internal polishing.
- Build the second and third stores faster. Templates, saved logos, and a curated product library compound.
For corporate buyers reading this: the distributor who can show you a working store fast isn't cutting corners — they're using a platform that lets them put real product in front of you instead of marketing materials.
The speed is the feature.