From Idea to Execution: The Story Behind Select and the Platform They Built

There’s a moment most trade marketers know intimately. Not the campaign launch, not the shelf takeover, not even the big retailer execution. It’s the quiet, deflating moment when you find out that a significant portion of the POS you carefully designed, painstakingly ordered, and shipped across the country never made it out of the distributor warehouse. It’s sitting in a corner, wrapped in plastic, on its way to a dumpster.

Only 67% of POS materials that are created, ordered, shipped, and stored are ever actually executed in field. The waste is industry-wide, year after year, and it compounds at every level of the three-tier system. Select has been watching it happen for over 35 years. So they built brandhub™ to stop it.

What Is brandhub?

brandhub is a fully customizable trade marketing operating system built specifically for CPG companies. It centralizes every function in the journey from marketing concept to retail execution: communications, pricing, pre-ordering, procurement, inventory management, fulfillment, shipping, billing, live tracking, analytics, and reporting. One platform. One source of truth. Every team seeing the same data, status, and specs. brandhub, delivers real-time data and analytics to its clients to optimize trade marketing spend and drive brand activation.

But brandhub isn’t a technology company’s answer to a trade marketing problem. It’s an agency’s answer. It was built by Select, a multi-disciplinary marketing activation agency with more than 35 years of end-to-end experience. That distinction is what makes it different from every other platform in the category.

Who Is Select?

Select is an industry leading tech-enabled marketing services firm that manages and executes point-of-sale materials for large brands with complex distribution channels. Founded on the conviction that great brand activation requires relentless creativity and real-world execution intelligence working together, Select partners with brands from idea to execution across creative strategy, design, engineering, production, fulfillment, and trade marketing technology.

With a 75-person team working from its headquarters in Burlington, Vermont and an office in Shanghai, Select serves the world’s leading alc bev and CPG brands with a full-service model built on one principle: an idea is only as good as its execution.

Right-Brain Meets Left-Brain, From the Very Beginning

Select was built around the belief that great brand activation requires two things working in concert: relentless creativity and real-world execution intelligence. Not just strategists and designers, but engineers, technicians, and people who have spent decades understanding how an idea travels from a concept brief to a cooler door in retail locations and what can go wrong at every step in between.

That belief shaped a multi-disciplinary team unlike most agency or production partners. Select’s roster includes innovators, creators, producers, and what they affectionately call “data nerds,” people whose backgrounds span technology, creative, sourcing, and project management, but whose approach to problem solving is singular: push uncommonly hard, respond unusually quickly, and never stop until you get it right.

Select has operated for more than three decades from its headquarters in a circa 1915 building in Burlington, Vermont, originally home to a chocolate factory and now a creative hub where ideas get tested, refined, and made ready for market. It’s a place that reflects something essential about how Select works: heritage and craft in service of modern performance.

What Does Select Do? A Full-Service Model from Concept to Shelf

One of Select’s foundational principles is deceptively simple: an idea is only as good as its execution. While creative instinct drives the work, every concept is grounded in real-world production realities. Designs aren’t handed off to manufacturers with fingers crossed. They’re engineered from the start to work at scale, survive shipping, assemble quickly in the field, and perform under the actual conditions of retail.

The journey from brand challenge to in-market impact runs through five capabilities Select has built and refined over decades.

Solve. Fanatical problem-solving that encompasses channel expertise, brand strategy, on-premise campaigns, and retail display innovation.

Design. Creative concepts built with production in mind, spanning graphic design, industrial design, and engineering.

Build. Full ownership of the outcome through production and fulfillment, delivering POP/POS displays, custom products, uniform programs, and apparel.

Deploy. Rollout visibility, sales alignment, and reduced admin time, powered by the brandhub platform.

Optimize. Data and analytics so each campaign performs better than the last, including campaign management, inventory tracking, and robust reporting.

A commitment to no handoffs and no dropped balls means the brand’s vision arrives in market the way it was intended. Select’s people don’t just design things to be made. They make things that drive results. After 35 years, that distinction is hard-won, and it’s what keeps brands coming back.

Why Did Select Build brandhub?

What sets Select apart from most creative and production partners isn’t only the quality of what they make. It’s how deeply they understand the environment their work lands in. Select has spent decades inside the three-tier system, working directly with brands, distributors, and sales teams to understand the real mechanics of trade marketing activation.

That proximity to the problem gave them an uncomfortably clear view of how broken the process had become. Marketing teams were managing programs across disconnected tools, spreadsheets, and email chains. Sales teams didn’t always have visibility into what POS was available, let alone how to order it efficiently. Distributors were receiving shipments they hadn’t planned for. And brands were hemorrhaging budget on materials that never reached the shelf.

Select wasn’t just observing this problem as consultants. They were living it as partners. And 35 years of that experience gave them both the motivation and the perspective to build something different.

brandhub wasn’t a pivot. It wasn’t a side project born out of a hackathon or a reaction to market pressure. It was the natural next step for an agency that had spent decades owning the full journey from concept to execution and had grown tired of watching great work fall short at the finish line because the operational infrastructure wasn’t there to support it.

The platform was purpose-built for the three-tier system by people who understand it from the ground up. There are plenty of software solutions that promise to streamline marketing operations, generic platforms adapted for alc bev use cases or tools built by technologists who learned the industry secondhand. brandhub was built by practitioners. The team that designed it had sat in distributor meetings, managed rollout timelines, and watched what happened when communications broke down between marketing, sales, and the field. They weren’t solving a hypothetical problem. They were solving their own.

How Do Select’s Agency Services and brandhub Work Together?

What makes Select and brandhub genuinely distinct in the market is the combination of what they offer. Most POS partners can design and produce materials. Some software companies can help manage the logistics of getting those materials into the field. Very few can do both, and fewer still can do both with the depth of expertise Select brings to each side.

On the product side, Select brings decades of creative engineering to every program: POS pressure-tested through years of diverse industry experience, designed and engineered to maximize budget, boost trial, and elevate the brand. Prototypes validated before scale. Material decisions made early, not at the end. On time, on spec, on brand.

On the platform side, brandhub gives brands and their teams end-to-end visibility and control. AI-powered demand planning recommends optimal quantities so brands stop over-ordering and under-executing. Ordering is centralized across brands and regions, with multi-vendor sourcing built in to ensure competitive pricing. Tracking shows what shipped, where it landed, and when, eliminating the blind spots that have historically plagued distributor relationships and field execution.

Together, they form something trade marketers haven’t had before: a true end-to-end partnership where the agency that builds your POS is also the team managing how it gets to market. Select’s creative and production services and the brandhub platform are designed to work together, with seamless connections between design, execution, fulfillment, data collection, and analysis.

What Do brandhub Customers Say?

The brands that have built long-term partnerships with Select and brandhub describe a consistent experience: less confusion, less manual work, and more confidence that their brand will show up the right way in market.

A Director of Sales Operations at a top-five US craft brewery described how brandhub enabled their entire field sales team and distributor network to get on-boarded and ordering POS with minimal training.

A Director of Trade Marketing at a leading wine and spirits brand noted that brandhub helped deliver a complex marketing calendar with less confusion, less manual work, and real cost savings.

A VP of Commerce Marketing at a pioneering craft spirits brand called it the infrastructure that allows their trade team to work efficiently with marketing suppliers to develop and deliver high-impact campaigns from concept to execution.

brandhub is highly customizable because every brand operates differently, every distributor network has its own dynamics, and every team has its own way of working. And unlike closed systems, brandhub allows brands to bring their preferred vendors in rather than forcing them into a proprietary ecosystem. Everyone in the supply chain benefits from better visibility and simpler processes, and that shared value is what produces durable outcomes.

What Makes Select Different?

If there’s a thread that runs through everything Select has built, the agency, the platform, the people, it’s an honest resistance to complacency. The industry changes. Retailer requirements evolve. The three-tier system shifts. The brands that win are the ones with partners who are paying close attention and building ahead of the curve.

For Select, that means a team of technologists, creatives, engineers, and trade marketing specialists who are continuously learning from the work and feeding those insights back into both the services they offer and the platform they build. It means sustainability commitments that extend from their LEED-certified headquarters to the materials they specify and the waste they help brands eliminate, because being responsible and being innovative are two values that belong together, not in tension.

It means brandhub isn’t finished. Neither is Select. Both are shaped by the collective experience of the people who build them and the partners who depend on them, always being refined and always responding to what the market needs next.

That’s what 35 years inside the industry earns you: not just the credibility to solve the problem, but the perspective to see it clearly and the discipline to keep solving it.