Kiln
Orders arrived as texts, emails, and voicemails. Inventory was a guess until the truck left.
Year
2024
Role
Product, design & engineering
Type
Commerce
Stack
Catalog · Ordering · Inventory
Before
A regional distributor. Restaurants ordered by texting a rep who had been there fifteen years. The catalog was a PDF. Inventory was whatever the warehouse said that morning, which was often wrong by lunch.
What was hard
The catalog had customer-specific pricing, cuts, and substitutions. A public storefront would have been a lie. Reps still needed to exist. The system had to take the order without pretending the relationship was not the product.
What we built
A logged-in catalog. Price lists per account. Standing orders. Substitutions the warehouse can actually fill. Reps see the same cart the kitchen sees. Inventory from the warehouse system, not from a sheet.
After
Most orders do not start in a text thread. The PDF catalog is an export. Reps still call. They do not retype.
What shipped
- Account-priced wholesale catalog
- Standing orders and substitutions
- Inventory from the warehouse system
- Rep view of the same cart
- Order history and reorder