Founded in 2016, Brikl is a platform that set out to make the lives of custom and promotional business owners easier by providing them with a complete toolset for reducing the effort, cost and chaos involved in the customized design and online selling process of their microstores. This enables Brikl’s customers to create profitable businesses, increase employee happiness, and internal efficiencies that positively impact the planet. We spoke with Chad Sparrow, VP of Product about their experience with PDF Generator API.
Nice to talk to you, Chad. Could you perhaps first shed light on what were some of the issues you set out to tackle before finding out about PDF Generator API?
We had a challenge with reporting – reports used in companies can vary greatly – you could even say every company can have a unique format, style and way of reporting. So we were spending enormous resources to constantly modify the report templates for our merchant customers. Also there were limits to what we could change.
Sounds time consuming?
Yes, that is why we didn’t do it that often.
Who are your clients mainly, what type of businesses?
Originally, it was mainly sporting apparel companies, but now we could say it has expanded to cover the full promotional wear sector.
Internally, who is the person responsible for managing your integration with PDF Generator API? Who is the product owner, so to say?
The integration falls under my responsibility mainly, but also our VP of Engineering is involved. Since our integration is currently still in its infancy, then we are the ones that are directing the team on how to do the integration and how it will look, feel and work on our platform.
Is there anything you are still missing from our product?
Given the specifics of our product, the only thing we would like to see is a more focused Excel document creator. One where you could drop fields directly into an Excel document. Our customers do like the PDFs, but also have a need for the same information to go into Excel, so that they can import it into their systems – including the correct columns and rows etc.
Can you give us an idea of your document generation volumes?
The current volumes are still modest, given that we are only in the development and testing phase, but considering the profile of our customers, major companies like Stahls who does most of the NFL apparel, or Vernon Group, then we are looking at significant volumes already in the near future. So we are currently finetuning the solution to be able to provide our customers with that kind of scalability.
What kind of customer groups would you recommend PDF Generator API to – who do you think benefits most from using our product?
First of all – any one of our merchants needs something like this at some point.
What is the most typical use case of your customer using PDF Generator API?
Currently it would be generating order detail documents – a list of all the products people are purchasing. Also monthly sales reports of the microstores of our customers, purchase orders sent to suppliers. Those would be the main three, I would say.
Given your experience so far, how would you describe our product?
So far, everything has been great. We are still waiting for something to handle the Excel export issue, but otherwise everything is great.
