One board, six stations

How it was made

1. 1 · Discovery
2. 2 · Strategy
3. 3 · Concept
4. 4 · Design
5. 5 · Production
6. 6 · Results — how we measured

1. 1 Discovery

   Firing, glaze and orders each lived in a separate spreadsheet, plus a whiteboard — nothing connected. Six percent of orders shipped late purely from lost status, and the owner reconciled every Friday by hand. The cost was status, not capacity.

   

2. 2 Strategy

   Replace four tools with the path a pot already takes: thrown, bisque, glaze, fired, packed, shipped. The non-negotiables — zero logins on the studio iPad, offline-ish through the no-wifi kiln room, no per-seat fees — shaped the build. Gate ① signed.

   

3. 3 Concept

   Three interface directions: a kanban board, a production calendar, a sortable list. The calendar hid current state behind dates; the list was the spreadsheet they were escaping. The board shows status at a glance from across a sunlit studio — it won.

   

4. 4 Design

   Order-card anatomy: a stage color bar, order number and boutique, quantity and glaze, due date and an automatic late-risk flag. A kiln-load capacity bar tells the studio when to hold or fire early. High-contrast tints for a sunlit room.

   

5. 5 Production

   An installable web app on one shared iPad — no logins. A local-first store queues writes through the no-wifi kiln room and flushes on reconnect; the sync state never claims saved until it is. Glove-friendly 56px targets; no per-seat SaaS.

   

6. 6 Results — how we measured

   The pipeline timestamps its own stages, so the numbers came free: late shipments fell from 6% to 0.8%, Friday reconciliation from five hours to forty minutes, status lookup from four minutes to eight seconds. Demonstrative; cards below.