Your people are spread across Canada and North America. Your branded merchandise shouldn't live in a closet at head office. With ProStores, your team logs in to a private store, sees what's in stock and orders it. We pick it from your inventory in our Hamilton warehouse and ship it to the office, the event or the employee who needs it, and we reorder before anything runs out.
It usually starts small. A regional manager emails asking for shirts for an event next week. Someone in another province needs giveaways for a trade show. HR wants welcome kits for three new hires starting Monday, each in a different city. Every request lands on the same person's desk, and that person also has a real job to do.
For a company with branches and employees across Canada or North America, the requests arrive by email, by phone and in hallway conversations, and there's no single place to see them. Nobody can say for sure how many medium polos or branded tumblers the company owns, or where they are. So each location ends up ordering on its own, or someone at head office packs boxes and pays for rush shipping.
None of this is anyone's fault. It's what happens when promotional products are managed one request at a time. The larger companies we work with tell us they simply don't have the time to run their promotions this way.
An online company store puts everything in one central place. We build a store for your company on ProStores, the Proforma company store platform, and connect it to the inventory we hold for you. Only the people you choose get login access. Everyone else sees nothing.
Here's what an order looks like. Say one of your managers has an event in Vancouver. They log in and open the clothing category. They pick a Nike shirt and see right away that it's in stock, so they order two mediums, one large and one extra large. Then they add some giveaways: the store shows 800 hand sanitizers on hand, so they take 100. They need drinkware too. There are 400 branded cups available, and they take 50. At checkout they choose the Vancouver location as the shipping address and they're done.
On our side, that order is already sitting on a shelf in our warehouse. We pick it, pack it and ship it to Vancouver. Nobody at head office touches a box.
We look at what your teams order again and again, such as staff apparel, event giveaways, new hire kits and recognition gifts, and build the store around that. You don't need a big catalogue on day one. We add categories as your team asks for them.
Your merchandise is produced and decorated in bulk, which is usually the most cost-efficient way to buy it. It then goes into our Hamilton warehouse under your company's name.
Approved users log in, browse by category, see live stock counts and place orders for any location, event or home address.
Orders ship from the shelf, not from a new production run. We track inventory after every order so a popular size or item gets reordered before it runs out.
Only your key people can see and order from the store. You decide who gets access.
Every product shows how many units are in stock, so nobody orders something that isn't there.
Branches, trade shows, conferences and employees' homes, anywhere in Canada or the United States.
Set allotments per person or location, add an approval step above a set amount, or tag orders with a department code.
The platform runs on PCI-compliant, SOC 2-compliant infrastructure, and it works on any device, so a manager can place an order from a phone between meetings.
Company stores make the most sense for businesses with people in more than one place. We see the strongest fit with:
Companies with branches across Canada or North America, such as insurance and real estate firms, where every office needs the same branded product.
Teams with a busy event calendar that need booth apparel and trade show giveaways shipped to a different city every few weeks.
HR teams with steady hiring in healthcare, construction and tech, where new hire kits and branded apparel in every size need to be ready on day one.
Recognition and gifting programs that send corporate gifts on milestones and holidays.
A store isn't the right fit for everyone. For a single office that buys merchandise once a year, it adds steps you don't need, and a regular order through our corporate merchandise team is simpler.
Plenty of companies sell store software. A store page with nothing on the shelf behind it doesn't help your Vancouver office get its shirts. What makes a company store work is the stock and the team that ships it. Since 1988, Proforma Battlefield has handled branded merchandise from the drawing board to the final product, and the company store is the last step of that process: your product is designed, produced, stored, kitted and shipped by the same team in Hamilton, Ontario.
When your inventory, your store and your promotional fulfillment run in one place, your team stops chasing suppliers and spreadsheets. You get a record of what shipped, where it went and what's left, so reorders happen before a size runs out, not after.
Reorder triggers and approval options are explained step by step in how an online company store works. For the warehouse side, see our guide to employee swag stores.
"I have sincerely enjoyed working with Eric and all the kind people at Proforma. In addition to excellent merch options at all price tiers, we've been able to build seasonal gift stores for our entire team. Eric is very knowledgeable, and above all, has a keen ability to know what we'd like to offer - before we know what we want to offer. Highly recommended."
