Screenshots are not available for this project as it involves internal operational tools.
Steph runs Sugar Rush by Steph - a custom cake and dessert business where every single order is different. Different flavours, custom designs, decorations requested weeks in advance. It's the kind of business where the product demands attention, and the operations shouldn't. When she came to us, her operations were demanding a lot of attention.
The Nightly Routine
Every night, Steph would open Shopify, go through the day's orders, and manually enter them into a spreadsheet. From there she'd try to map out the coming week: what needed to be baked when, which orders had custom designs that needed to be printed, what was due for pickup versus delivery.
The spreadsheet was doing work it wasn't designed for. As order volume grew, the cracks started showing. Orders would get missed. The status of any given order - was it baked yet? decorated? packed? - lived in Steph's head, or in a tab in the sheet that was already out of date. Custom design references - customer mood boards, printed edible images, specific decoration instructions - were scattered across DMs, emails, and notes.
The problem wasn't that Steph was disorganised. The problem was she was using a general-purpose tool to manage a specialised workflow, and the spreadsheet couldn't keep up.
What We Built
We built a Shopify embedded app that lives directly inside her Shopify admin and is designed around how a custom bakery actually operates.
Automatic order ingestion: Every order placed on Shopify is captured instantly via webhook. The system extracts the delivery date from order tags, or if no date is specified, automatically assigns the next business day. No manual entry. Orders are in the system the moment they're placed.
Production stage tracking: Each order moves through a defined workflow - Pending, Baked, Decorated, Packed, Dispatched. Steph or anyone on the team updates the stage as work progresses. At any point, the dashboard shows exactly where every active order sits in production. No more mental tracking, no more checking the sheet to see if something's been done.
Design asset management: Custom design files, customer reference images, and printing instructions can be attached directly to each order. The production board and the design brief are the same place.
14-day planning view: A dedicated tab shows every order due in the next two weeks, sorted by delivery date. Steph can see the week's load at a glance - what's coming up, when it's due, what method it's going out by - without touching a spreadsheet.
Internal notes per order: Separate from customer-facing notes, team members can leave internal context on each order. Instructions that don't belong in the customer record but do need to travel with the job.
The Result
The nightly Excel session is gone. Orders arrive in the system automatically. Each morning Steph opens the dashboard and sees exactly what's active, what stage it's at, and what's due across the coming week. Design files are attached to the orders they belong to, not buried somewhere in her inbox.
The business didn't change. The way she runs it did.
What Made It Different
Some businesses need real-time delivery logistics - live driver tracking, same-day urgency, dispatch dashboards. That wasn't what Steph needed. She needed clarity about what's in production and what's coming.
The right tool for a custom bakery isn't a dispatch dashboard. It's a production board that maps to how the work actually flows - order by order, stage by stage, week by week. Getting that right meant understanding her workflow before writing a line of code: how she plans, what she needs to see, and what would genuinely replace the spreadsheet rather than just sit alongside it.