A “technologist at heart,” Millie Tadewaldt is driving the promotional products industry into the digital age, forcing her fellow distributors to either keep up or be left behind.

The software engineer earned her undergrad degree in design from the University of California, Davis, and then studied law and business at Harvard. Before entering the promo space, she was a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, and then worked at a venture capital firm and a tech startup. In that time, she noticed a trend of new e-commerce brands, such as Warby Parker and Glossier, providing their customers with end-to-end experiences, including product offerings, top-notch websites, apps and great customer service.

Tadewaldt decided to bring the comprehensive, modern experience buyers (especially millennials) now expect in their consumer lives to the branded products category. In 2015, she launched San Francisco-based Brilliant (asi/146116) as an unbranded gifting site. After clients kept asking for products to be branded, the company pivoted into its current form, which has grown in revenue nearly 400% from 2016 to 2018.

“I love creating things from scratch, making a product or experience that wasn’t there before and making it great,” Tadewaldt says. “I’m obsessed with details and always critical, and this fuels the challenge of building an amazing client experience and an amazing place for my team to spend their careers.”

Customization & Creativity
Tadewaldt and her team have built their own end-to-end technology platform, giving clients access to current information about products, orders, inventory and shipments. Storefront, their proprietary company store software, can be configured to support a diverse range of programs, such as global merchandise procurement processes, public-facing pop-up brand shops and automatic distributions. Touchpoint, the Salesforce integration, enables clients’ account reps to send gifts and merchandise to prospects and customers without leaving their normal workflow. Managers can harness that data to track both the usage and ROI of the gifting programs.

“Rather than overwhelm our clients with every option under the sun, our team curates a lookbook of options for each client for each project, based on their brand, goals, budget and deadline,” Tadewaldt says. “These lookbooks are the starting point for our product sourcing discussions with clients. On our website, clients also have access to their own ‘catalog’ of every product we’ve ever shown them, pre-branded and ready to order.”

Clients are matched with a “creative partner,” who serves as the point of contact for all their needs. “We’ve assembled a truly incredible team and we’ve done it with a fully remote workforce,” Tadewaldt says. “Every single person is kind, hardworking, fun, excellent at what they do and driven by delivering top-notch customer service.”