Building the Operating System Behind a 10-Store, 3-Factory Custom Curtain Company

One connected platform for retail, ordering, supply chain, and production — replacing decades of tribal knowledge with a system the whole business runs on

A 10-store, 3-factory custom curtain business ran on a few experts' judgment calls. Our platform has already cut errors and inefficiency over 50%.

The Challenge

The business had grown into real scale — more than 10 retail stores across the Greater Toronto Area, three factories, and customers spanning the GTA and the Niagara region. The owner had spent years in the custom curtain industry and knew exactly where it broke down: measurement, product configuration, and pricing decisions all depended on a small number of experienced people making judgment calls the same way they always had, store by store, order by order.

That knowledge had never been written down anywhere a system could use it, because there had never been a system. Every additional store or order added more surface area for the same handful of experienced staff to cover, and any mistake in a configuration decision only surfaced downstream — in the factory, or at installation — where it was far more expensive to fix. Growth was outrunning the business's ability to make consistent decisions at its own scale.

The owner wasn't looking for a narrow fix. Having watched these exact problems play out across the custom curtain industry for years, the goal was a real platform — one thorough enough to run this business today, and credible enough to eventually bring to other curtain businesses facing the same problem.

Our Approach

We started by working closely with the owner, whose own depth of industry experience shaped the brief as much as our discovery did, along with staff across the stores and factories doing the actual measuring, configuring, and building. The goal was to find every place a decision currently depended on one person's memory rather than a documented rule.

From there we're designing and building a connected platform rather than a single tool: a retail-facing system for store staff to manage customers, design solutions, and generate quotes; an ordering experience that carries a customer's specifications through to production without being re-entered by hand; supply chain coordination across the factory and supplier network; and production tracking on the factory floor. All of it runs on one shared data model, so a measurement or configuration decision made at the point of sale flows straight through to pricing, production, and delivery.

Given the scope, we structured this as a phased build rather than a single cutover, prioritizing the areas where dependency on a few experienced people was highest and most expensive to get wrong. We're still actively building out further parts of the system together — this is an ongoing partnership, not a fixed-scope project with an end date.

The core of the work is turning tacit knowledge into explicit, configurable logic: the sizing rules, fabric and product constraints, and installation requirements that used to live only in a few people's heads are now rules the system enforces — so getting it right doesn't depend on which staff member happens to be handling the order.

The Results

Across the parts of the platform live today, error rates and operational efficiency have both improved by more than 50%. Mistakes that used to require an experienced eye to catch are now caught — or prevented outright — by the system itself.

The business's dependency on a handful of experienced staff to get orders right, previously a real operating risk, no longer exists for the workflows the platform now covers. Store and factory staff can execute decisions correctly without years of tribal knowledge behind them.

The roadmap ahead is as ambitious as the build so far: expanding the platform's remaining modules, and — grounded in results the owner has already seen — preparing to bring the system to other businesses across the custom curtain industry facing the same problem.

They used technology to change how we survive in this industry. We used to take things one step at a time, under pressure every single day. Now we're advancing on every front.
— Owner, Custom Curtain Retailer & Manufacturer, GTA & Niagara