The company
Wayfaren is a family-owned e-commerce company making high-quality custom keepsake boxes and Push Pin Travel Maps. Every box and map is assembled in their workshop in the Dallas, Texas area.
The challenge
Abby came to us wanting orders pushed automatically from Shopify and Etsy into the Google Sheets the team used to run operations.
The problem was the sheets themselves: overly complicated, hard to use, and nearly impossible to automate as built. Entering and managing each new order was eating the operations manager’s day. Spreadsheets are great — cheap and quick to set up — but once the data structure gets complex, their limits start to hold a business back.
The solution
After a couple of hours with Wayfaren’s production team, we agreed that fixing the spreadsheets was the wrong investment. Instead we built a custom app designed for their needs:
- Affordable to run
- Simple for the workshop to use
- Able to handle complex product customisation
- No more manual data entry
We built the app on Knack and used Make to push orders in from Shopify and Etsy. For an equivalent order, the data arrives in completely different shapes depending on the channel — a challenge Make handled cleanly. The new data structure let us automate steps that had been fully manual, such as engraving proof approval.
Now the whole production team sees exactly the information they need, when they need it, and Wayfaren’s managers track key business metrics from a dashboard.
“Can’t recommend working with Loic enough! He is very professional, skilled, and knowledgeable. Communication was reliable and prompt. He built us a custom system that has greatly increased the productivity and smoothness of our operations.”