systems

Foote and Flame: A Whole Business in One System

My previous business, Foote and Flame, ran from 2015 through to the end of 2024. We made personalised homewares and gifts - all made to order, in my commercial workshop in Bibra Lake, with laser cutters, CNC routers, and UV printers. Shipping nationally, every day.

I custom coded the entire system that ran it.

What it did

The e-commerce store. Customers got clever previews - font previews, personalisation, custom earring designs - and ordered online. It processed over 30,000 orders and $1.8M in payments.
Order management. Every order and every unique item in it tracked through approval, manufacturing, quality check, packing, and dispatch.
Artwork approvals. Customers approved their personalised artwork online before we made it, with email and SMS follow ups. Fewer mistakes, fewer remakes.
Adobe Illustrator automations and a filing system that meant I could find a customer's artwork years later in under a minute.
The artwork pipeline. Took the designs and metadata and wrote out batches of files ready for the laser cutters and UV printers - grouped by material, with packing materials and engraving files generated along the way. Loading a machine became a breeze, and mistakes dropped to very low rates.
Machine monitoring on TVs around the workshop that announced when a machine had finished, and monitored compressed air pressure on the lasers.
Shipping. Booking up to 100 Australia Post parcels in a few minutes, re-sorting the labels to match the boxes, and a packing station with a self-built digital scale that fed weights straight into the system.
Xero integration. Every order pushed to Xero as an invoice and marked paid, turning hours of reconciliation into minutes.
Etsy product sync and order import, so the second storefront stayed in step with the first.
An after-hours pickup locker with a one-time code per customer, giving customers pickup options that matched their schedule.

And a lot of other things I've run out of room to list.

How it grew

None of this arrived at once. It started small - a website that could take an order - and grew as the business grew. Every automation on this list was added because something was taking too long, going wrong too often, or driving me or my staff up the wall. Over nine years that added up to around 7,000 code changes and 1,200 releases.

Start small. Use what you already have until you outgrow it. Grow and evolve as the business needs change. That's how this system came to be, and it's how I'd approach yours.

Why I'm showing you this

Obviously, a full custom business system is a large project, and most businesses don't need one. I'm showing you this because I've run a small business - worn all the hats - and I understand there are so many moving parts to any business. The right computer systems can make the day to day so much easier.

If a small piece of this sounds like something your business needs, let's chat.