Bridge was started to solve a pain point experienced by its founder. In 2007, Jason Solarek was running a small design agency that created and updated retail websites. When it came to adding products to clients’ websites, he found Excel and Dropbox frustrating to use and felt like they weren’t built to share retail products easily.

While thinking about his clients' businesses over a beer at Moran's pub in New York City, he noticed that Karen, who owned a retail shop in New York, was adding the same products to her website as Sallie, who owned a store in Missouri. Upon further consideration, he realized that many of his clients were adding the same items to their websites, week after week, thereby duplicating each other's work. Drawing the process on a bar napkin, he sensed an opportunity to help his clients save time and money. Solarek asked the retailers to team up with their popular brands and share the product data. Solarek asked the brands to input and maintain the data. With retailers and brands on board, Solarek setup a system by which the product data 'flowed downstream' to the retailers' websites.

Today, Bridge helps thousands of businesses in the retail industry share products, news, and market-sensitive data. In 2021, retailers will use Bridge Store to sell tens of millions of dollars in goods. Helping them accomplish this is the Smart Product service which enables them to easily display up to 62,779 products from 121 home goods brands. With Bridge, retailers, brands, and sales reps streamline communication and speed product to market.

Shopping local is proven to help support our schools, families, and communities. Specifically, shopping local helps produce local jobs and generate local tax revenue. Due to this, Bridge supports shopping local and enjoys developing community empowering software.

Jason Solarek, Bridge's CEO, grew up in Rochster, NY—a city that has seen its ups and downs and can benefit from local businesses growing. Using Rochester as inspiration, we seek to help towns and cities of all sizes grow and 'own' their futures vs let a distant tech behemoth undermine their community.