What did Brand New Box get up to this year?
A lot, that's what.
BNB works with clients, which means most people only see a fraction of what we do. Here's a quick look at notable projects from 2024.
Merchtable & SeenMerch
Our friends in the merch industry joined forces, and this year we built new tools and features to help support a growing roster of artists, musicians, and comics.
Our tech now supports twice the individual stores, manages whole new ways of selling products, and moves millions of dollars of merch each month.
County of Los Angeles
We've worked with the county for more than a decade, and this year wrapped up a huge suite of software that helps them manage their deferred maintenance over tens of millions of square feet.
AND we built and launched another tool, a best-in-class ADA inspection platform.
Neumz Updates
Our favorite Gregorian-chant-karaoke app got some big updates this year! We added a whole new set of voices - really a whole monastery full of monks - and a much richer way to view the score notation. Now you get syllable-by-syllable highlighting.
And then we added more: now you can view your music with even-more-ancient notations, preferred by the gregorian Real Ones.
City of Chicago
At the very beginning of the year, we wrapped up a UX and information architecture overhaul for the City of Chicago's planning department. This was a challenging project, with a set of interlocking stakeholders and a lot of info to organize!
Knock Home Visiting
We built a whole new app to help people explore a career in the growing Home Visiting field. It's centered around a dynamic quiz that helps sort out if the job could be right for you.
This app was focused around inclusivity - helping people from all backgrounds and situations feel welcome and valued. We're excited to bring principles from this work to our other projects
Digital Transformation Coaching
Sometimes we're not the right fit to build a tool, but people still want BNB brains applied to their problem. In 2024 we started doing coaching for other digital transformation and tech teams, and it's been an exciting way to help leverage our hard-won expertise.
But wait, there's more...
There are really more projects than you've got the patience to read about. A few more we're particularly pleased with:
- IRIS, the community referrals app grows from strength to strength
- FRIENDS National Center has a suite of tools to help federally-funded agencies serve kids
- The Protective Factors Survey has a new custom database back end and several new survey variants
- ECIDS is a data-driven dashboard to see how and where Kansas kids are supported by their communities
- TASN continues to support educators across Kansas
- SWIFT Center works toward equity in education across the country, with a suite of assessment and coaching tools
- And some very ~SECRET~ projects that we can't talk about... YET.
By the numbers
- 44,000 Home Visitors getting career training
- 100,000+ support referrals in IRIS!
- 35,000 parents and educators served by TASN
- 50,000 surveys given in the PFS by more than 3,000 practitioners
- Processed over a MILLION orders on our merch platforms
- and almost doubled the number of stores!
- 60+ French nuns (and as of this year - monks!) singing every day
- 4 Texan llamas spotted so far
Who's who
If you've got a project with Brand New Box, it's likely that you only work with a few of us. But here's who you're missing out on, and something they're excited about from real life in 2024:
Ashley: I had a baby and I'm building a house!
Ian: I recorded some cool music and improved my bowling handicap
Jace: I restored a very cool old mustang
Matt: I made up a conspiracy theory website about pancakes
Nate: I took my son's robotics team to the World Championship and I started a record label
Ted: I built a new house and got my family all moved in
Vika: I moved to Denver and learned to sew
Will: I finished a house remodel and built an app to manage my notifications
Hey, you guys do AI?
Oh man, it's nearly all we've been thinking about this year. 2024 was the year AI became part of our daily life. LLMs, GPTs, embeddings, vectors and agents. We've been working with new tools and integrating AI-powered features on all kinds of things. Some examples:
- Built an AI tool that processed tens of thousands of natural language user records to harmonize data
- Launched a startup that uses AI embeddings to find interconnections in complicated federal regulations
- Nate's been giving conference talks about embeddings and machine learning (ask him about EmoGPT)
- Ted's been building an AI-enhanced platform for homeschool families in his spare time
- And of course, We all use coding copilots to develop not just faster, but more creatively
- And lots more.
Retreats!
We're a remote team, so we make a point to all get together in the same place to organize, plan, and refill those social batteries. This year we made it four times, in New Orleans, Detroit, Lawrence, and Austin.
Thank you
No seriously; if you've read this far, thank you. We only do this because we love building things with our clients. We can do a lot - but we can't do anything alone. Thanks for your partnership in 2024 - let's build something new in 2025!