Case study · a small product company
How a custom-photo company took the busywork out of every order, without hiring for it
The fix wasn’t a new app. It was finding the manual steps that scaled badly, and building a system around them.
The situation
My first company, Coastermatic, turned customers’ Instagram photos into custom-printed ceramic coasters. At the holiday peak, a team of four working with a USA-based factory was shipping hundreds of coaster sets a week. The bottleneck wasn’t sales or shipping. It was a step in between. For every single order, the factory’s print operator dragged and resized the customer’s photo by hand to fit the print template: a few minutes a set, every set, and her least favorite part of the job.
What we did
Automated one painful step first
The first version was a small tool that auto-fit each photo into the print template and saved it as a ready to print file, so no more dragging and resizing by hand.
Grew it into a pipeline
That became a script wired into the website’s order processing that templated the photos, generated the mailing label, and printed an order sheet the factory could batch from, daily or weekly depending on volume.
Left the rest alone
Nothing else needed replacing. The fix was aimed at the steps that scaled badly, not at the whole operation.
The result
3–5 min
saved per order on templating alone
Hundreds of sets a week
handled at peak; the saved time compounded across every order
No new hires
the volume was absorbed without adding staff for it
The print operator was visibly happier, too. The tedious part of her day was gone.
Why this is how Kuriri works
The instinct when a business is straining is to buy a big system that promises to fix everything. This was the opposite: find the steps that scaled badly, build a system around exactly those, and leave the rest.
Systems before software.
What’s a step that scales badly in your business?
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