Our Work

Schott NYC, founded in 1913, is an American clothing manufacturer based in New York City. By the mid-twenties, Schott was revolutionizing the way Americans dressed for the outdoors when they were the first to put zippers on their jackets. Their classic Perfecto® motorcycle jacket was made popular by Marlon Brando in “The Wild One”. Today, Schott is owned by third and fourth generations of the Schott family and is still manufacturing in the United States.

In 2003, Jason Schott reached out to Binary Minds to develop their online store. Schott had several retail locations but no online presence at that point. Binary Minds built the ecommerce website in ColdFusion, which started out with an offering of 25 styles. Schott and Binary Minds have continued to work closely over the years, enhancing and expanding the ecommerce platform including:

• Integration with Shipping Carriers to Calculate Real-Time Shipping Costs
• Drop Ship Integration for Large Retailers (i.e. Nordstrom) through DSCO
• Implementation of “You Call the Schotts” Community Forum
• Custom Leather Jacket Product Configurator (Front End)
• Expansion of Online Shipping from U.S. to Worldwide
• Extranet “Look Book” allowing Retailers to Place Orders for Drop Ship to Stores with Pricing Based on Location
• Expansion to Support 500+ Items Across Multiple Categories

Schott’s business was initially run off of an AS400 mainframe computer. As other modes of technology became more stable, reliable, cost effective and secure, Binary Minds developed methods for the data in the AS400 to integrate with PHP/Symfony technology, as well as other third-party software, and implemented:

• BOM (Bill of Materials) – A system which, after a product is designed, calculates the cost to produce that product based on materials sourced from manufacturing suppliers. This streamlined approach allows Schott to produce their products in a more cost-effective manner, based on a number of factors, including what vendor they procure materials from. Previously, this was accomplished through use of an Excel spreadsheet.
• Inventory System for Physical Warehouses
• Generation of Purchase Orders to Order Materials, and Invoicing Integrated with AS400
• File Generation to Leadtec (Software Running Production Floor), Formerly Done through AS400
• Extensive, Detailed, On-Demand Reporting
• Secure, Real-Time Integration of Amazon Web Services with AS400

In addition to ongoing application development work, Binary Minds handles online marketing (SEO and PPC) for Schott NYC.

Our traffic has increased four-fold since Binary Minds did the search engine optimization. It gives us greater exposure which is critical for an e-commerce site like ours.
— Jason Schott, VP Finance

Tea Forte was founded in 2003 by Peter Hewitt, a former Museum of Modern Art designer. The company produces a highly stylized product line of teas and accessories inspired by the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Today, Tea Forte is owned by Jacobs Douwe Egberts, a leading coffee and tea company in the Netherlands. In addition to their own online store, Tea Forte products are featured at leading hotels, restaurants and luxury retailers in 35 countries.

In 2004, Peter designed and hired Binary Minds to build Tea Forte’s first online shopping presence – a simple ColdFusion ecommerce website showcasing the beautiful, signature pyramid tea infuser and teas.

Over time, and as the business grew, the original website was unable to support the growth and expanding product line. In 2013, Binary Minds was again called upon to develop a solution. A new website was built from scratch in PHP/Symfony and integrated with payment and shipping systems, as well as “Tea Forte SELECT”; a customization tool for users to choose and add teas to their own Tea Chest packaging.

Tea Forte’s owner wanted to use the same website code base for their partners and resellers in Australia and Europe, but with completely separate pricing and product selections. Binary Minds developed and integrated multiple databases to feed these independent regional websites.

Now, with a world-renowned product presence including award-winning packaging and tea blends, Tea Forte continues to work with Binary Minds to enhance and expand their website application. What was once a startup company’s first iteration of an online store is now a high-powered ecommerce application, efficient at handling a tremendous number of visitors and orders, with fully streamlined backend processing including inventory control and fulfillment.

Thanks for all your work on the new site.  We accomplished a lot in a short 10 weeks and have a great looking site which has some strong UX enhancements as well.  We’re already starting to see an improvement in conversion and AOV!
— Jurgen Nebelung, VP e-Commerce & Digital

Pongo was established in 2002 and at its launch in 2004, was one of the very first subscription-model online Resume Builder and career tools websites.

Pongo offers monthly and annual memberships to their Resume Builder, Letter Builder and Interview Tips tools, as well as Professional Resume Writing services. These tools and services help Pongo Members use best practices in job searching to obtain the positions they are seeking.

Pongo had an established relationship with Binary Minds for several years already, working together on projects including development of an online Professional Resume Questionnaire, implementation of customer surveys, improving the recurring monthly subscription logic by using reference transactions, and numerous front-end website changes and updates. When it was announced in 2017 that Adobe would cease to support Flash at the end of 2020, Pongo needed a solution that would allow them to seamlessly continue providing services to their almost 5 million members and database of over 6 million resumes, as the current Resume and Letter Builders were developed using Flash.

Pongo worked collaboratively with the Binary Minds development team to develop a new Resume and Letter Builder built in Angular (still using the existing ColdFusion back end), including several new product features and an interface allowing the application to be easily used on mobile devices and tablets (a huge enhancement which the original version did not support). All of the existing data in the Pongo database was ported into the new Resume and Letter Builders, presenting a smooth transition for Pongo members, along with the enhanced tools and mobile options.

For many years, the Pongo website and Resume Builder were hosted in-house or at a local data center and the servers were maintained by Pongo. In 2016, Binary Minds worked with Pongo to move the website, application and expansive database to the AWS cloud infrastructure, alleviating day-to-day maintenance tasks and saving Pongo time, money and the headaches of managing an in-house infrastructure.

In order to optimally link AWS with your own business processes, you need an expert. Binary Minds is AWS certified and has completed this development with us. We have put our hosting in their hands and today we pay for the services we need, when we need them.
— Rodney Capron, President

When owner Michael Flynn started DoorHardwareCenter.com in 2007, he had a website developed that was effective at getting the business to a certain point but needed to be more robust as the business continued to grow.

DoorHardwareCenter.com prides itself on providing its customers, both consumers and businesses, with the finest quality decorative hardware and security products at the best price available. After partnering with Binary Minds in 2009, the company now sells its products through what has become a highly convenient and informative website that has helped DoorHardwareCenter.com become the second largest online retailer of door hardware.

Binary Minds devoted themselves to getting to know my business and my very specific niche industry so they could approach my situation intelligently and with a grasp of what needed to be done. We had a lot of inefficiencies because we were doing many things manually, particularly our process for order-taking and submitting orders to the vendors. We were taking orders over the phone, entering them into an Excel sheet and then sending them off to the vendor. Binary Minds streamlined that whole process. We really retooled the business by leveraging technology.
— Michael Flynn, Owner

Binary Minds’ complete redesign of the website gave it a more modern user interface, increased usability, decreased the abandonment rate, and made the site more responsive, mobile-friendly, and ADA compliant (Americans with Disabilities Act).

• Inventory of Over 160.000 Residential and Commercial Products 
• Full Integration with Fulfillment Centers Throughout the US and Canada
• Special Programs for the Trade
• Online Installation Guides
• All Major US brands Plus Many Hard-to-Find Niche Products 

The administrative back end that Binary Minds developed for Door Hardware Center is the Business Management System, which handles online order fulfilment, drop shipping, and customer communications regarding order availability and shipment.

The Door Hardware team had been spending 80% of each workday manually processing customer orders, primarily using email for communicating to both vendors and customers. By building an EDI (electronic data interchange) system that allowed communications between the web platform and vendors’ warehouses, Binary Minds enabled orders placed on the web to be sent directly to the warehouses. They integrated the system with the vendors’ inventory feeds, allowing customers to see real-time stock availability.

The Business Management System has been a real game-changer for us. Binary Minds helped us to scale our business by coming up with a solution that has completely streamlined our backend processes and removed all the cumbersome tasks that were weighing down our productivity. We have gained a large chunk of time that we can spend on tasks such as growing the business.
— Michael Flynn, Owner

Once orders are shipped, warehouses send a notice to the website that goes to the customers. All order processing and shipment tasks are performed automatically, including order shipment updates, delivery notifications and other customer notifications — all tasks that were once conducted manually. With the Business Management System in place, the time previously spent to process orders has been reduced by 95%.

Initially, the website search function was slow, and many times results were not optimal. Binary Minds was able to reduce database search time by 80 percent and ensure that results were relevant to the search terms used. As a result, order conversions resulting from using the search increased by 54 percent.

When Door Hardware Center changed their shipping service from UPS to FedEx, Binary Minds made the transition easy by building another component to the Business Operations System to allow customers to see shipping rates based on weight and zip code, and the shipping status of their web orders. In turn, Door Hardware Center benefits from the lower cost of a volume shipping account with FedEx, a savings they can pass along to their customers.

Binary Minds also manages the site’s Google Analytics and Google Advertising campaigns.

We have a great working relationship with Binary Minds that feels more like a partnership. To be able to partner with a company that understands your business and what you are trying to achieve, then implements technology to improve it, that is a huge advantage. I’ve been working with Binary Minds for over a decade now and that speaks volumes. There are a lot of companies who do what they do, but even if I got a half price deal from one of them, I wouldn’t take it. That’s because when you have people like Binary Minds, who show they care about your business and are there when you need them, those are the people I want to work with. I can’t say enough about that.
— Michael Flynn, Owner

Founded in 1940 as a greenhouse supply firm, today, Tom Irwin Inc. is known by golf superintendents and turf managers throughout New England as the premier provider of testing/analysis services, plant nutrition, control products, and expert advice and knowledge to use them successfully. 

The Planner — In 2010, Binary Minds developed the Agronomic Planner for Tom Irwin Inc., which has enabled hundreds of turf professionals throughout the Northeast to plan and budget all aspects of turf and lawn care in real-time, conveniently from a desktop or mobile device.

Details on the client’s facility, such as the number of greens, tees and fairways or field acreage, are captured in the system. Maintenance products used, including plant protectants, nutrients and adjuvants, are noted along with spray tank sizes, coverage amounts and dilution rates. At a glance, clients can see what maintenance tasks they need to do from month to month throughout the season. They can annotate each planning function or task — like the purpose of each plant application.

Over time, Binary Minds added features to enhance the application’s effectiveness:

• Calendar — Essential for scheduling product applications for greens, tees, fairways, roughs, landscaping, fields and more, with a season-long view of applications down to each day’s specific plan.
• Budget Guide — Saves turf professionals unnecessary expenditures by using their financial data to help them purchase plant protectants, fertilizers, nutrients and other products, at the right time in the right amounts, bringing clarity and convenience to the budgeting process.
• Regulatory Reporting — Allows clients to quickly produce state-required regulatory statements of annual product use for treatments such as fungicides and insecticides.
• Soil and Water Testing — Working with Tom Irwin’s third-party soil and water testing company, Logan Labs, Binary Minds created a fully-automated system where clients’ test results are combined into a single document emailed to them and available in The Planner as soon as they are processed. This was previously a manual process that took an entire day of time each week.

They are fair, honest and have dependable turnaround times. They’re always available when we need them. Our experience with them has been exceptional and I would highly recommend them.
— Sue Dube, IT Manager

The Back School (formerly The Back School of Atlanta) has 40+ years of expertise in the Ergonomics field, performing proprietary Ergonomics Consulting programs for small to Fortune 100 organizations in diverse industries. Since 2000, they have been training and certifying Healthcare, Human Resources, Risk Management, and other Wellness professionals in Ergonomics best practices through their Live Workshops held throughout the United States.

In 2012, The Back School recognized the potential of the internet and launched the first version of their Online Ergonomics Courses, built in ColdFusion, which allowed their substantial professional audience to purchase and complete Ergonomics courses to become Certified Ergonomics Assessment Specialists conveniently from their homes or offices.

In 2013, Ron Porter, Director of The Back School, approached Binary Minds and Synthenet Corporation to make several necessary changes and enhancements to the existing website, including rebuilding the shopping cart to improve the purchase and check out processes; moving the front end content into WordPress to allow for in-house updates; adding content pages to improve search visibility; and modifying the design and look of the website header and footer to reflect an updated look. Synthenet spearheaded the project and worked directly with The Back School on project vision, strategy, design, architecture, content and project management, while Binary Minds performed all of the development work and also took over hosting of the existing website.

The Synthenet and Binary Minds teams have always been highly professional yet very personal in their approach to dealing with us as a client.  They provide honest advice and explain it in terms that a non-technical professional can understand. In addition, they have an excellent manner of working with our employees who have many different levels of website understanding.

We first began working with them in 2013 on our old website. It became evident that we actually needed and would greatly benefit from a new website. Because of our excellent experience in prior work with them, we felt comfortable using their expertise to develop our current state of the art site that launched in 2017.
— Ron Porter, President

Some time after the improvements were made to the existing website, The Back School decided to initiate a complete website redesign and rebuild, culminating in a launch in June of 2017. A completely new, modern design was implemented to reflect new branding for The Back School; and the new site is fully responsive (compatible with mobile devices and tablets).

Synthenet again handled project vision, strategy, design, architecture, content and project management, while Binary Minds’ expert PHP developers built and implemented the new website application with a fully custom administration area featuring vastly improved capabilities and a complete order entry and fulfillment system with real-time shipping and tax calculation.

We also had many inefficiencies because we were doing many things manually, particularly our process for order-taking, registrations for our online and live courses and for record keeping. The Synthenet and Binary Minds teams streamlined that process which allowed us to spend more time with business development and client relationships.
— Ron Porter, President

The online courses were completely revamped to allow new courses (Live Workshops, Online Courses and Webinars) to be easily implemented in the administration area. On the front end, the courses were made more user-friendly and more cohesive. Interactive functionality was introduced, along with automation of customer communications.

Areas for course fulfillment were built into the administration, including automated production of Live Workshop check-in sheets and materials, document uploads, and review/grading of Online Course Assessments with automatic print-quality Certificate generation at completion/passing of courses.

The front-end ecommerce portion of the website introduced product and course categories and options, use of promotion codes, and the ability for customers to (in addition to completing Online Courses and Webinars) see Order and Course History, as well as access Course Materials.

The new application is hosted on AWS.

Over the 7+ years we have worked together, the Synthenet and Binary Minds teams has devoted themselves to getting to know our business and our very specific niche industry so they could approach any situation intelligently and with a grasp of what needed to be done.

When you have a relationship with a company who is always available when you need them and show they care about your business, you stick with them. I highly recommend them.
— Ron Porter, President

VenSero specializes in Surgical Vendor Coordination and Loaner Instrument Management. The company was developed with the premise that Perioperative, SPD/CSP, and Vendor collaboration can drive performance improvement, increase patient safety and improve revenue cycles by combining technology and LEAN methodology. Formed in 2011 in Annapolis, Maryland, VenSero (formerly ScheduleGreen) is an application developed by Binary Minds and deployed within hospitals across the country who strived to standardize, simplify and improve Surgical Vendor Coordination and tray tracking. VenSero’s real-time, HIPAA compliant dashboard provides facilities with accountability, increased patient safety and immediate ROI.

Managing medical equipment in a hospital is a demanding task, and dealing with outside resources can make it tremendously challenging. Once surgeons submit lists of equipment needed for scheduled procedures, hospital staff must contact vendors to find providers for the equipment and locate authorized staff in the Sterilization Processing Department (SPD) to sign off on the equipment rentals. Meanwhile, operating room schedules are constantly changing and there is typically only a whiteboard to serve as the centralized point of OR information. Staff need to communicate changes to the vendors (via phone, email or text) so the correct equipment is ready for surgeries.

Initially. the concept was to help a healthcare provider client to simplify this process, making it easier for both their hospital staff and medical equipment vendors. To bring the concept to fruition, Sero Solutions employed the application development expertise of Binary Minds.

With VenSero, surgeons can schedule their procedures, selecting the equipment needed from a database, and an equipment request will automatically be sent to the vendors, who can then confirm in the application that they are able to accommodate. Since the surgeons have always initiated the scheduling process, it made sense to relieve hospital staff of the burden of handling the equipment orders. When a surgery is completed, the vendor receives a notification to pick up the equipment.

Since first building the VenSero platform in 2011, Binary Minds has been expanding and supporting it over time. The VenSero surgical vendor coordination application currently includes the following capabilities and integrations:

2012: Mobile app for equipment vendors to respond to requests on-the-go.
2013: Application available to doctors’ offices.
2014: Release of E-terminal to track equipment with printed labels.
2014: Certification of Mobile HIPAA Compliance.
2017: API integration with EPIC, a major enterprise-level scheduling system.
2018: Patient data anonymization.
2019: Integration with Kermit billing system.
2020/21: Integration with Cerner Scheduling System (in process).

The series of improvements since 2011 has enabled VenSero to evolve into the leading platform for surgical vendor coordination, experiencing rapid adoption by both hospitals and vendors and now in use by 30 hospitals across the U.S.

Binary Minds’ team is highly professional, a quality that is hard to find these days. They provide honest advice and an understanding of what you are trying to do, then turn that talk into action. They can implement solutions that will help you to be successful at whatever you are trying to do. It’s been working very well with them since 2011 and I’m confident it will for many years to come.
— Jason Platt, Technology Partner/Consultant to Sero Solutions

MCLE, a non-profit organization, is the Massachusetts legal community’s premier provider of hands-on educational programs and reference materials, presenting more than 200 programs annually, in a variety of in-person and online formats; publishes more than 160 practice manuals, available as ebooks as well as print; and offers an online subscription product (the MCLE OnlinePass®) with unlimited access to its entire book collection and all webcast programs.

MCLE began working with Binary Minds in 2008. The relationship began with a revamp of their existing website at that time, done in ColdFusion.

As the years progressed and the website clientele grew, MCLE recognized the need for a sophisticated search engine that would allow a user to easily search MCLE’s extensive database of law content, including books, practice areas, decisions, and more. Binary Minds employed the Apache Solr Search Engine to index all digital library content, resulting in targeted, seamless search results for MCLE’s clients.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, restricting users from participating in live events, Binary Minds implemented MCLE ThisWeek, a free Webcast and Podcast portal where users can view a new lecture each Thursday in rotating practice areas.

Additionally, Binary Minds integrated AffiniPay — a popular online payment solution catering to professional firms — for online sales. AffiniPay’s tokenized processing system ensures that MCLE’s payment processing is extremely secure and PCI compliant; especially important for subscription-based services which are billed on a recurring basis.

Some clients (such as law schools), have IP address-based access to the site content (the website automatically recognizes the IP Address of the user(s) and allows access to the content based on that), which can be easily maintained through the website administration.

Binary Minds’ response has always been beyond anything we have been accustomed to and the quality of their work has been way above the norm.
— Jeff Kingston, IT Manager

In 1995, Constance Anderson wrote the original marketing textbook for the credit union industry.

Twelve years later, she recognized that credit unions needed actionable, affordable research to back up their marketing strategies — in the form of mystery shopping surveys and analysis. That year (2007), she founded MemberXP and with a small team, developed the first credit union-specific mystery shopping program, MemberShoppers.

With the credit unions as their clients, Member XP fostered the idea that the credit union members themselves could provide the best feedback in a number of areas, from branches to contact centers, personal teller machines, online apps, mobile apps, and more (with the option available to use professional mystery shoppers, as well).

In 2011, Anderson connected with Binary Minds to begin development on Member XP’s online suite of tools, culminating in the launch of the comprehensive Omnichannel Member Experience Suite in 2014.

Binary Minds integrated Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo) via API to facilitate the design and creation of mystery shopper surveys, customized for each credit union. Once the surveys are submitted, Amazon Comprehend is used to employ machine learning — measuring over 144 factors — uncovering insights and relationships in the unstructured data gained from the surveys. This sophisticated technology identifies the language of the text; extracts key phrases, places, people, or events; understands how positive or negative the text is; analyzes the text using tokenization and parts of speech; and automatically organizes a collection of text files by topic.

Credit Union executives and Member XP coaches can log in to view and download survey results and reporting data based on permission-based roles. 

The surveys use Member Effort Score, an ease of use measurement, Net Promoter Score®, which measures the likelihood a member would refer the credit union to others, and scores for member advocacy, member appreciation and member education.

Thanks to Constance Anderson’s tremendous marketing expertise, combined with Binary Minds team of expert developers and the suite of tools developed for Member XP, MemberShoppers has grown to be the country’s largest credit union mystery shopping provider.

Structurae was created in 1998 by Nicolas Janberg, structural and bridge engineer, out of a “gallery of structures” he built for the course “Structures and the Urban Environment” taught at Princeton University and for which he was a teaching assistant at the time. After continuing work on the website initially as a hobby while working as a bridge engineer, he transitioned Structurae into a business in 2002.

The Structurae website is a database of more than 75,000 works of structural and civil engineering — buildings, bridges, walls, dams tunnels, towers and more — with 14,500+ participating companies and their products, and 10,000 architects and engineers with 300,000+ images, catering to a diverse worldwide audience including engineering students and professionals.

With the extensive data contained in the database, the website was experiencing ongoing, worsening performance issues. Nicholas contacted Binary Minds in 2009, initially to do a rebuild of the website with a new design and new functionality. Additionally, he wanted to explore ways to monetize the digital content contained in the database.

Binary Minds built the new site in Linux with a MySQL database, on a Lucee CFML Server and implemented (and continues to implement) many new features:

• Ecommerce Shopping Cart for One-Time Purchases – Books, etc.
• Paid Subscriptions to Access and Download Digital Content
• User-Submitted Content
• Save Content as “Favorites”
• Varied Levels of User Access
• Structurae Plus (In Progress) – Includes Unrestricted Access to Image Downloads, Extended Structure Types, Extended Filtering Functions, Parametric Search, Data Downloads, and more.