It’s not all about same-day delivery and oddly doe-eyed Zuckerberg VR avatars. Big tech is also embracing climate change tech in a big way. Brands like Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all pledging their allegiance to the planet through ambitious net-zero goals, product development deals, investments, and partnerships.
But What Does Climate Change Tech Look Like for The Promotional Products Industry?
For businesses in this space, manufacturing processes play a big part in determining sustainability benchmarks. But you might also be surprised at how operational processes and multiple systems can drive your company’s carbon footprint up in the shadows.
How Your Company Process Affects The Environment
We get it. Your business has to make money and be a player in the market. And to do that, it needs to work across multiple systems and leverage a range of services and human resources. However, research in the promotional products industry has shown that companies in this space rely on legacy (or old. Sometimes ancient) technology.
For all the overworked humans in your business, this means more time spent on software such as email, Excel – the axis of all evil – and hardware such as their phones and laptops. And for example, on average, it takes 25 hours a week for a business in the promotional products industry to set up an online store to sell its products.
Check out the environmental impact of just one of these hours in the bar chart below:
Brikl technology vastly reduces this number to 15 minutes per store.
Set up a branded online store, pull products in via our supplier integrations, and you have a way to reach your customers quickly, all while giving you access to data and insights to keep setting up shop. Smarter.
Designed for Growth
What company doesn’t want to add growth and scale to its wishlist? For a lot of companies in the promotional products industry, the inability to achieve global renown comes down to one thing: time scarcity.
You would be surprised how time sinks that hobble the environment are also stunting your growth as a business.
Here are just some of the time savings you can enjoy through Brikl automation:
40-50 hours saved, on average, a week on order processes during peak season.
90% of Brikl merchants saved over 20 hours a week using Brikl’s custom reporting feature.
An average of 30 days spent on team store setup prior to onboarding.
In 2007 two American economists established that, if the US moved to the same average working hours as the 15 richest countries in the EU, it would reduce its energy consumption by 18%.
With the time you save doing busy work (or as we like to call it here at Brikl, ‘boring work’), you could be building relationships, putting more money into marketing initiatives, driving customer experience, signing deals, and baking more cakes.
Because it’s not all just about work, right?
The time automation gives you back allows you to scale your business to new and unprecedented heights all while reducing operational environmental impact.
Benefits of Automation on Sales and Environmental Impact
Unlike other online store technologies, Brikl automation has been designed to specifically resolve the complex and nuanced workflows of people allow merchants, coaches, designers, and sales reps the unique ability to set up and sell in under 15 minutes.
If like many of our merchants this process conventionally takes you hours over days, you need to stop reading this article right now and book a demo so we can free you from a life of drudgery.
It takes us around 6 hours a day to organize team orders, no joke! We create spreadsheets to record data, such as sizes, customization, prices, etc., which a colleague then double-checks. Add to this the hours spent communicating with suppliers, team members, designers... organizing one custom order is hundreds of hours lost!
Not only does this equate to electricity used and water used, but human energy is also spent (think sweat and tears, hopefully, no blood). These are hours you could be piling into networking, building relationships, and signing deals.
Benefits of Automation on Employee Wellness and Environmental Impact
And for your employees, this time back could be the time they spend doing the jobs they were hired to do, reducing their stress levels, increasing happiness, and their overall feelings of wellness. In other words, it’s heart eyes all round.
‘If people are more time rich, the environmental intensity of their consumption will be lower. By producing less in exchange for more spare time, we create wellbeing in a different way,’ said François-Xavier Devetter, an economist at the University of Lille. Having more spare time allows another type of enrichment, through numerous activities that we can do ourselves without spending money: cooking, DIY, sewing, gardening, repairing a bicycle or a car etc.
Benefits of Automation on Design
Hands up those of you who decorate and embellish products one by one. This absolute forest of arms tells us that you’re in need of Brikl’s bulk embellishment feature. Imagine a world where you don’t need to embellish logos and artwork on Adobe software, send them to your client or customer for feedback and approval via email, search and query order forms via email, chat to them on the phone or engage in a heated staring competition with your fax machine.
Brikl Design Automation to The Rescue: Get Automated to Get Motivated
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All orders are collated in Brikl’s backend, giving your entire organization access to a single source of truth (not Dave from accounting’s ‘spreadsheet – v3’. Some numbers have gone wrong somewhere, Dave, and we’re not pointing fingers, but it’s definitely your fault). This means less time spent on data entry, on an epic hunt for ‘that elusive’ order form, and trying to dodge the complex processes of multiple departments searching for store performance data. Everything you need is right there in front of you. You’re free!
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Brikl’s 3D visualization tools eliminate paper waste, ink, and toner while allowing designers to map artwork onto 3D models. Live links can then be shared to streamline the approval process, so you can leave the fax machine alone. Ask any designer in your organization – this is a far more intuitive way to work and helps minimize design errors. There’s no designer on the planet who won’t love these features and the planet loves this feature back.
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When you and your customers are on the same page, it can reduce your communication time by 60%. That has a knock-on effect on how much battery-sapping pressure you’re putting on devices such as laptops and phones.
So, What's the Hold Up?
With all the benefits of automation on sustainability, sales performance, service, reduced reliance on generallised software and resources, why aren’t more businesses in this industry jumping on the chance to create value across their organizations?
Well…
An obvious list topper. The biggest drawback is financial cost. Promotional businesses are afraid of the crippling investment of digital transformation, especially when it comes to integrations. Brikl takes care of this by absorbing set up costs and integrations for enterprise customers. Book a demo to hear how this would work when it comes to your business.
You’re in, but how can you make sure everyone else in your company shares your vision and uses the tools you’ve spent so much time and money on? This is where evangelism comes in. Brikl makes sure everyone’s set up for success by offering training and onboarding to everyone who’ll be managing the changeover process. This ensures that leadership can help employees drive value in their day-to-day, provide automated solutions to resolve their issues, and create a success story in the form of your enterprise.
But before this happens, how can you make sure everyone stays the course? Brikl refers to itself as a technology partner, not just a platform. Every enterprise and business is given an account manager to deliver hand-in-hand support. It’s this level of personal service that ensures that your digital automation goals are met from the start of your journey onwards.
Familiarity is a real hurdle to digital automation. Even if existing systems aren’t fit for purpose, user comfort can slow down the adoption of new technologies. That’s why Brikl is a technology that’s designed around the beginners. If you can drag, drop, and click, you can use Brikl.
And finally, resource scarcity is another hurdle. Companies can’t commit staff hours to learning a new platform as well as maintaining business operations. But if every employee had 8-10 hours back a week, what could they achieve?
