Paramerch — the DAO that delivers sweet gear to our team

Paramerch is not only an internal merchandise distribution and delivery service. It's an in-house brand of clothing and accessories. It aims to shift to a more sustainable approach by designing simple and practical items. These items are produced from durable materials and sourced from local makers.

Core principles

• Sustainable materials 🧵 Paramerch is based on a responsible approach to the design of each item. It seeks to use only high-quality and durable fabrics and sturdy fastening products. For decoration and prints, it uses long-lasting embroidery and silkscreen printing.
• Diversity 🌈 While launching the first collection, Paramerch avoided creating boring items. It focused on strange but necessary things instead.
• Local artisans 🦄 Paralect has a lot of experience working with local craftspeople who put their heart into what they do. So this project does not only support start-ups and small businesses but also excludes greedy suppliers, resellers and other exploiters from the process.

Tokenomics 🪙

In our age of decentralization and the rise of tokenomics, we decided to apply this approach and use made-up currency (coins or points). These tokens serve as awards and incentive mechanisms for the team.

We specifically reward socially useful things such as mentoring, launching new products, participation in internal projects and public speaking are not forgotten but always encouraged.

An experienced reader can see in this a DAO, or kind of. Employees are peers and the Paramerch team is the “DAO Committee”. Peers can create a proposal that they commit socially useful off-chain action — then the DAO Committee initiates an on-chain transaction.

The committee also allows revoking the transaction. So, in simple words — it acts as a guarantor.

Technology radar 📡

For a long time, we have been thinking about how we can make the application fast, simple and affordable. And the Jamstack architecture fits our requirements perfectly!

Why Jamstack? 🤔

• Performance! When it comes to minimizing the time to the first byte, nothing beats pre-built files served over a CDN.
• Better Security! With server-side processes abstracted into microservice APIs, surface areas for attacks are reduced.
• Scaling! When your deployment amounts to a stack of files that can be served anywhere, scaling is a matter of serving those files in more places. CDNs are perfect for this, and often include scaling in all of their plans.

Here's how Jamstack compares to classic architecture

Stack 📚

For the front-end, we decided to choose Next.js using these serverless functions.

Instead of creating an admin panel and storing data on our side, we used Airtable.

For analytics, we decided to use Splitbee and Amplitude. Aside from generic metrics and events, we have implemented user profiles and custom events.

To make the registration process easy and light, we have implemented firebase authentication. So only Paralect employees can access the application using their work email.

We integrated with Slackbot so employees can get notifications about accrued points right at their workplace.

As for the deployment, the choice was obvious — Verсel. It provides CI/CD, deployment on CDN and hosts serverless functions itself without configurations and settings.

Airtable automation 🤖

Automations allow configuring custom trigger-action workflows straight within the Airtable database.

For Paramerch, we used Airtable automation to set up notifications about updates, actions and received points.

How did we automate adding points?

We store the history of all earned points. If we need to add points to a user, we start with creating a new record. Then in the “User” field, we select a specific user from the list of users.

In the “Activity” field, we choose an item from the list of activities. After this change, our automation starts working. With the help of the script we calculate the total amount of points based on the current balance of the user. After that, we send a notification to the user in Slack.

Here’s the process workflow:

The first drop

Merch has been an afterthought at too many places — slap a logo on a mug, get super cheap shwag that most folks just throw away. It can be better, it can be community focused and it can be sustainably designed.

And it can be a fun way to test DAO architecture while prompting more of us to collaborate, share knowledge, and have fun doing it 💡