This letter appears in the August 2022 edition of the PromoStandards newsletter.

By Eric Alessi
PromoStandards Chairman
Essent President & CEO

When a group of dedicated industry volunteers founded PromoStandards eight years ago, our goal was to improve the way that promotional products companies communicate among their trading partners.

The industry has always had manual ways to share inventory, order status, and the other common transactional business documents. And for over forty years the world had a way to transact electronically. But due to the nature of the industry, promotional product companies haven’t. There were ways, but not good ways. Manual or electronic, there wasn’t an efficient, standardized way for the industry to communicate. The founders of PromoStandards knew there was a better way.

The companies sharing information automatically have newfound time to focus on what they do best: move their business and the industry forward. That’s the mission of PromoStandards and we’re extremely pleased and excited to see the adoption and progress.

Since our start in 2015, the results are astounding. Membership is at an all-time high and growing. There are thousands of trading partner integrations processing millions of transactions. Distributors and Suppliers alike, of all sizes, are seeing significant reductions in labor, errors, and processing time.

The companies sharing information automatically have newfound time to focus on what they do best: move their business and the industry forward. That’s the mission of PromoStandards and we’re extremely pleased and excited to see the adoption and progress.

At the end of the day, we’re leveraging the power of communication through process and protocol, tirelessly innovating both to make the custom product industry more efficient.

And we’re enhancing the ways we communicate too.

In 2022 we introduced monthly, live, online education sessions that regularly include hundreds of participants.

This inaugural PromoStandards newsletter is an outlet to further open the doors on the standards development process and share our progress with the community.

We aren’t here to just to help a few big companies. We are here to service the industry and beyond. ... It all starts with effective communications.

In October, we’ll hold our inaugural PromoStandards Technology Summit and Hack-a-Thon. It features industry- and application-specific topics for those interested in ecommerce, order management, ERP, and systems integration. It’s a new way, and perhaps the most prominent way yet, to communicate our mission and enhance PromoStandards adoption for a better industry.

PromoStandards is true to our name. We aren’t here to just to help a few big companies. We are here to service the industry and beyond. We are open and inclusive — a dedicated community of passionate volunteers working for the benefit of all. Our actions and progress demonstrate that we’re devoted to open integration standards that improve the industry.

It all starts with effective communications. PromoStandards is already the industry standard for trading partner integration and we continue to move the ball forward. Greater adoption equals a greater standard. Together we’re working make a great industry standard and make the supply chain as efficient as possible for everyone. And everyone is part of our success, even if it’s just looking up data through a PromoStandards protocol. Here’s to our continued success.