‘The Adaptors’ Announced as the Winners of PromoStandards’ First-Ever Hackathon

The Adaptors, featuring Brikl employees and Lisa Hubbard from The Vernon Company,  submitted the most creative and innovative solution that solved real promotional industry challenges.

OHIO, U.S., November 9, 2022 -- Brikl, a powerful technology that helps distributors, dealers, promotional businesses, and suppliers set up online stores and sell, is proud to announce that it won PromoStandards’ first-ever hackathon.

The PromoStandards Technology Summit is the premier Promotional Products Technology Event. Its Hack-A-Thon featured groups of cross-functional teams working together in a first-of-its-kind PromoStandards challenge. The Adaptors, comprised of five Brikl employees, teamed up with Lisa Hubbard, VP of Sales and Marketing at The Vernon Company, to create solutions for real-world industry challenges. 

Lisa Hubbard, The Vernon Company’s VP of Sales and Marketing, “I was incredibly excited to be able to participate in this event and contribute my insights. I’m not a tech person or a developer, but I am passionate about making processes and experiences better for our users and customers.

To see the passion of all the teams while breaking down the competitive barriers to make a better tomorrow for our industry was incredible to see. It’s critical that we lean into technology to help us scale our businesses. Those that don’t will struggle. The brilliance that I was surrounded by during the hackathon just simply had me in awe. I was proud to be a part of this great event and a truly fantastic team!”

The Adaptors, a name chosen to reflect how the team’s solution would act as a ‘universal plug’ for the industry, sought to design an integration with PromoStandards. The challenge lay in websites and platforms being able to integrate effectively with PromoStandards due to its use of SOAP technology, API design, and API documentation. 

This blocks businesses in the industry from integrating as they often use outdated systems within a legacy infrastructure. Workflows are inefficient due to the multiple software tools involved, and the APIs to search and synchronize data are not fast enough.

The winning entry from The Adaptors posited a working demo that showed the panel how it’s possible to integrate with PromoStandards in 90 seconds, complement e-commerce sites, platforms, and ERPs, and give users the ability to search products, refresh inventory, and submit POs in milliseconds.

Brikl’s VP of Engineering and The Adaptors team leader, Phoomparin Mano, comments, “It was an amazing experience to be able to combine Lisa’s deep understanding of industry friction points with Brikl’s expertise in GraphQL technologies to find a problem-solution fit in this hackathon.

We’ve adopted GraphQL as it is specifically designed for integrating with multiple PromoStandards services at once, not because it is a newer technology. With the PromoStandards committee being so open to change, as indicated by this hackathon, we can eliminate the friction of integrating with suppliers and decorators, making it inclusive and accessible to everyone—from small businesses to enterprises. I believe that the Brikl engineering team has the potential and expertise to contribute to this unique movement of open technology and implementation accessibility”.

“Brikl’s winning entry reflects how we have the brightest and most creative minds on our staff,” Jason Reinhardt, Brikl’s Chief Commercial Officer, comments. “The industry has relied on legacy technology for far too long and has rested on its laurels when it comes to automation.

Our solution showed the industry how critical it is to look at creating efficiencies for their businesses, not just today, but into the future. From being able to plug into ERPs to pulling inventory at warp speed, our winning entry shows that the solutions to long-held pain points aren’t just something people can dream about but utilize today through Brikl’s technology and talent. I couldn’t be prouder of my team!”

About PromoStandards

PromoStandards is a nonprofit organization committed to improving supply chain and transactional efficiencies in the promotional products industry. They standardized the transfer of vital information to move transactions forward. A better flow of inventory, order status, shop notices, media, product data, product configuration, purchase orders, and invoices between suppliers and distributors leads to improved customer experiences. For more information, please visit: https://promostandards.org/.

About Brikl

Brikl, the leading next-generation MicroStore technology partner for custom and promotional companies, was founded in 2016 by Maarten Boone, Tobias Meixner, and Jason Reinhardt. Their vision was to streamline the way businesses sell custom products online by allowing them to set up MicroStores in under 15 minutes, and expedite the design process through bulk embellishment tools, and other specialized, next-generation features.

For more information, visit www.brikl.com.

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