The challenge
A home-based bakery grows in a specific way: markets and stalls on the weekend, custom cake quotes during the week, regular customers who order the same things, and products whose prices and availability change with the season. Generic e-commerce and POS tools assume a shop with a till and a fixed catalogue. The business was being run across spreadsheets, a notes app, message threads and memory, and the owner was spending evenings reconciling instead of baking.
What we did
We mapped how the business actually works, from a stall sale on a Saturday to a wedding cake quote six months out, and built one web application around it:
- Customers and orders with history, preferences and repeat ordering
- Products with variants, seasonal availability and costed ingredients
- Stalls and markets as first-class events, with stock taken, sold and returned
- Point of sale that works on a phone at a stall, including offline-tolerant behaviour
- Quotes for custom work that convert to orders when accepted
- Reporting on sales by product, stall and customer, and margins by product
The public website was rebuilt at the same time and connected to the application, so enquiries and orders arrive in the system rather than in an inbox.
The results
The owner now runs the business from one screen. Stall days end with a stock count that takes minutes, quotes go out the same day, and the monthly numbers are a report rather than a weekend. Because the application is custom, it keeps changing with the business: new product types, new markets and new reports are added as the bakery grows, not worked around.