PromoTrace is a carbon-footprint calculator made specifically for the promotional products industry. Built by people who understand promo because they came from it — not by a consulting firm parachuting in with a generic LCA tool.
PromoTrace started in late 2023 when a UK promotional-products commercial team — with over 20 years working with most of the world's big brands — partnered with engineering (Vistoweb, building B2B SaaS since 2001) to answer a single question: could an LCA tool be built with a simple promo user in mind vs a sustainability expert? No prior knowledge required, no complexities. Could we make it easy for all?
The answer was yes, with conditions: it had to be screening LCA (full LCA per SKU doesn't scale to the long tail of promotional products), the methodology had to be defensible, and the output had to be a thing a distributor could actually email a client.
What followed was over two years of research, iteration with real distributors, and methodology hardening. PromoTrace went live with the calculator, the lifecycle breakdown, the white-label PDF, the bulk upload, and the methodology page. Real customers. Real reports. Real auditor sign-off on the first round.
Then came the next question, asked by distributors a year into using the platform: my corporate clients are now asking for sustainability ratings on our company, not just on the products — can PromoTrace handle that too? The Sustainability Hub is the answer. Eight modules of company-level data — energy, water, waste, suppliers, policies, actions, targets, training, verification — tracked year-round, ready for any corporate sustainability questionnaire or reporting framework. Built on DEFRA, IEA, IPCC, GHG Protocol and ISO 14064 across thirty-seven country grid factors. Multi-site, multi-country, audit-grade.
PromoTrace today is the sustainability operating system for promotional products distributors — product carbon for every tender alongside company sustainability for every corporate questionnaire, on one platform with one methodology.
A team of commercial leads, software engineers, customer-success managers, and methodology specialists — based across the UK and EU — keeps the platform running, the data accurate, and the answers fast.
Over twenty years of combined experience in the promotional-products industry, working with most of the world's big brands. Knows the brief-to-quote workflow from inside.
Handles sales conversations, customer onboarding, and the day-to-day support inbox — with named owners on every major customer relationship.
Building B2B SaaS since 2001 — over two decades across web platforms, chat infrastructure, and white-label tooling. Runs the PromoTrace platform end-to-end.
Handles methodology updates, platform reliability, and the day-to-day engineering work — an engineer is available for any technical conversation when an auditor calls.
Every emission factor is sourced; every revision is dated; every PDF carries its methodology stamp. Nothing in the calculation chain is hidden behind a black box.
Distributors don't have an environmental scientist on staff. The tool has to be usable in the four minutes between a brief landing and the quote going back.
Screening LCA isn't ISO 14067 verification. We say so on the methodology page so it doesn't come as a surprise during a tender.
Every per-unit figure ships with a confidence band, a lifecycle breakdown, and a methodology revision stamp. No bare numbers floating without their provenance.
Releases are dated; release notes are published. Historical calculations stay locked to the revision that produced them. Recompute is explicit, opt-in, and preview-able before commit.
PDF reports are purpose-built documents — distributor branding on the header, client's name on the subject, methodology footer on the bottom. Not the dashboard with print styles bolted on.
