Tally
An all-in-one fulfillment hub
for made-to-order businesses
Yumei Shi (PM)
Mohamed Ahmed (Dev)
Jeremy Sedillo (Dev)
Existing inventory tools track finished products, leaving made-to-order businesses armed with just spreadsheets to track their materials. The closest alternatives are enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, which are far too expensive and robust for small businesses.
Tally is the middle ground: an all-in-one hub that tracks materials inventory, consolidates invoices, and streamlines product creation. With Tally, creators can focus more on what they care about: creating and sharing their craft.
Everything has a recipe.
Every dish has a specific combination of ingredients that are uniquely combined and processed to produce their final form. However different dishes are from one another, their ingredients often overlap. When you’re making an omelette or baking a cake, don’t you use eggs from the same carton?
Made-to-order businesses are chefs in their own right—each time an order is placed, they pull from material inventories to craft products. For each item in their shop, they have recipes they follow. Let's see this in action!
Each recipe is distinct, but they share core components, like this white crewneck in size M.
As an apparel business selling custom appliqué designs, you might be selling multiple designs, each with their own array of colors and sizes to choose from.
For a simple "2-ingredient" product: 4 designs x 3 colors x 4 sizes = 48 different recipes
Adding just one new design to your catalogue could mean adding anywhere from 1 to 12+ unique recipes. Scaling product offerings becomes exponentially more complicated...the more products you sell, the harder it gets to figure out how much of your materials you have on hand and how many orders you can actually fulfill.
Current inventory solutions overlook made-to-order businesses.
Existing products track inventory for finished items. Think back to the eggs—they'll track how many omelettes and cakes you've made but won't tell you how many eggs you have at the end of the day. We chatted with 10+ businesses selling anything from apparel to handmade jewelry. Across the board, sellers were using spreadsheet tools to manage their materials inventory, manually.
Imagine doing all of this by hand... for HUNDREDS of orders a month.
A few materials-based inventory management offerings exist, but only as Shopify apps. Those material inventories only reflect sales made through Shopify.
There still aren't any options on the market for made-to-order businesses with multiple storefronts, including Etsy, Squarespace, TikTok Shop, and more.
“Sometimes I'll make a Square sale and forget to update my Shopify... if someone buys off my Shopify storefront later and I haven't realized I've run out of stock, I have to email to cancel their order.”
This lack of integrated inventory tools creates an added layer of troubles for multi-channel sellers. Inaccurate product and material levels forces businesses to cancel orders or put products on backorder, causing them to miss out on potential sales.
Small businesses don't have the time to manually track their materials inventory.
Preview: What if recipes could automate materials inventory?
Users can add materials and link them to product recipes, updating their materials inventory as invoices come in.
Defining Made-to-Order Needs, from A to Z.
Our biggest goal was to validate Tally with users, building fast and shipping even faster. We drew from our user interviews to determine high priority needs.
KEY FEATURES
01 / Manage inventory on a materials basis
02 / Consolidate invoices from multiple storefronts
03 / Generate daily to-dos to streamline fulfillment
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Using this as a guide, we moved towards building a minimum viable product (MVP) to launch to early users. I designed the MVP information architecture to account for not only the core functionalities we defined, but also to be adaptable to features we intended to implement down the line.
Design & Iteration
INCREMENT COUNTER
Although inventory values are meant to update automatically, I wanted to allow users to manually input changes for added flexibility. I chose to use a counter component to dynamically convey inventory levels.
V2 implements buttons with larger touch targets and puts relevant information (e.g. safety stock thresholds) in closer proximity to inventory levels.
I also wanted to make sure users could quickly draw conclusions from their inventory. Semantic color coding allows users to identify critical values at a glance.
MODALS VS. SIDE PANELS
I originally explored modals as a way to handle material and product creation, but over time, with high volumes of product variants, it became clear that modals were unideal. With different quantities of variants, modals yielded inconsistent heights and blocked contextual information in the primary screen.
Side panels maintain context by allowing users to see more of their existing products and materials and are overall, more scalable for large amounts of inputs.
MAKING THINGS FEEL GOOD
Despite being on a time crunch, I wanted to add small touches to make the Tally experience a little more magical — I implemented subtle microinteractions and empty states to achieve this feel.
DESIGN SYSTEM
I built a design system, complete with call to actions, form inputs, custom illustrated icons, and more. Although some components like the counter are custom-made, I relied heavily on existing UI libraries like Vercel's shadcn, Google's Material UI, and Tailwind CSS as a starting point to relieve developer lift.
Meet Tally.
Take a peek into a made-to-order workflow.
ADD MATERIALS
Materials are like your building blocks. Define reorder quantities and safety thresholds and input supplier information to automate replenishment for your most important materials.
WRITE RECIPES
Add products and define unique recipes for size and color variants.
CONSOLIDATE INVOICES
Access a centralized collection of orders across your integrated storefronts.
FULFILL ORDERS
For any unfulfilled orders, Tally provides creators with a list of materials they need to collect and variants to be made from those materials, streamlining product creation.
Tally is still pre-revenue, but it's already made huge moves—our 10 early users have already fulfilled over 2.5k orders and generated thousands of dollars in revenue using our MVP! On average, they're saving 10 hours per week on administrative tasks, too.
NEXT UP
Getting Tally up and running required sacrificing features to launch and validate quickly. Now that we've verified the a real need for Tally, I've begun to roadmap our next priorities based on feedback from our early users.
Supporting batch creation: Accommodating finished product safety stocks
Supplier price tracking: getting users the best deals on their materials
Metrics dashboard: Giving users at-a-glance insights into their sales
Tally woke up the entrepreneur in me.
Launch something... anything.
Truly, the best way to iterate is to get a product into the hands of users. While I had to forgo craft and fidelity at some points to move more swiftly, getting feedback quickly yielded insights on what features to focus on immediately and what to think about for the future.
Sell a story, not a product.
Beyond the UI work, I crafted brand pitch and brand and conducted user research; from these, I synthesized stories. Tally pushed me to abstract a narrative from the users I spoke with and pushed me to become a better storyteller—a better communicator.
Nothing but love for my Tally Team <3 Excited to keep learning and building!
