AT A GLANCE
- Shacole Hamlett is the founder and CEO of PlanBrite, an AI-powered event pre-production platform.
- After being laid off amid workforce cuts that disproportionately impacted Black women, Hamlett turned industry frustration into innovation.
- PlanBrite streamlines event planning workflows—budgets, timelines, and documents—into a single five-minute process.
- The company is being built in Tulsa, Oklahoma, connecting modern tech innovation to the legacy of Black Wall Street.
Shacole Hamlett Builds PlanBrite After Layoffs, Turning Event Industry Chaos Into AI Innovation
After managing brand activations at the Super Bowl, Coachella, and Formula 1, Shacole Hamlett understood pressure. Million-dollar budgets. Immoveable timelines. No margin for error.
What never made sense was the planning itself.
Despite operating at the highest levels of the live events industry, Hamlett says the tools were still broken—fragmented spreadsheets, endless email chains, and documents that didn’t communicate with one another. Then came the layoffs.
Hamlett was one of more than 300,000 Black women impacted by recent workforce cuts, a trend that has disproportionately displaced experienced professionals across multiple industries. Instead of reentering a field defined by instability and burnout, she decided to fix the problem from the inside out.
From Industry Displacement to Innovation
“I was managing massive budgets and impossible deadlines at the highest level, yet the planning process was still a complete mess,” Hamlett said. “Even with all my experience, the tools made the work harder than it needed to be.”
That frustration became PlanBrite, an AI-powered pre-production planning platform that compresses hours of event prep into a five-minute workflow.
Designed for everyone from first-time planners to seasoned professionals, PlanBrite helps users organize budgets, timelines, and core planning documents in one intuitive workspace—eliminating the chaos that has long plagued the industry.
Building Tech in the Shadow of Black Wall Street
Hamlett chose to build PlanBrite in Tulsa, and the decision was deliberate.
Once home to Black Wall Street, Tulsa is experiencing a modern tech resurgence fueled by investment, infrastructure, and community-led initiatives aimed at restoring the city’s legacy of Black innovation. With renewed attention on entrepreneurship and technology, the city is becoming a proving ground for founders redefining what Silicon Valley isn’t.
“Tulsa gave me the community and support to build this,” Hamlett said. “There’s something powerful about building in a place reclaiming its history of Black entrepreneurship.”
Innovation Rooted in Lived Experience
PlanBrite is not theory-driven software. It is a tool shaped by lived experience—by someone who has worked the world’s biggest stages and still encountered broken systems behind the scenes.
Hamlett’s journey reflects a larger shift: Black women turning workforce displacement into ownership, and exclusion into enterprise. From global events to Tulsa’s growing tech ecosystem, PlanBrite represents what happens when expertise meets opportunity—and when innovation is built by those who know exactly what’s missing.
About PlanBrite
Founded by event producer Shacole Hamlett, PlanBrite is an AI-powered event planning platform that enables users to create professional event plans in under five minutes and execute them in one centralized workspace.
Learn more at weplanbrite.com.
