Made by hand. Run by hand, too.
The brief sounded simple: help an independent studio grow.
Before designing anything, I asked a different question — to the owner, and to other craft and maker shops: what actually stops businesses like this from growing? Fear? No time? No money? Or a choice to stay small?
“How might we help the workshop sell beyond exhibitions, without adding work to the people who make the art?”
Seven barriers — in the owners' own words.
The root cause wasn't marketing. It was discomfort.
I mapped likely causes on a fishbone — people, process, tools, buyers, materials, mindset — and tested each in interviews. Every branch led to the same head: making time leaks away, and sales stay small.
So a “growth” product with ads, CRMs and dashboards full of numbers would fail here. It adds work and asks a man who finds self-promotion awkward to self-promote. The product had to give time back first.
Four Indian cases. Four principles I took from them.
of every 100 Indian firms are micro; only 4% of MSMEs get formal finance.
of about 6,000 Kutch artisans actively sell on Amazon Karigar.
of 2,000+ handicraft workers have had any digital selling training.
daily users, mostly by word of mouth — Khatabook copied the paper bahi khata.
Seven moments where the service breaks — and what replaces each one.
One place for every order. Exhibitions come later.
Updates go by SMS, email and in-app — nothing lives in a personal chat.
The admin tracks stock and supplier bills, not accounts.
The owner never reconciles payments inside the app.
Each order already carries what the workshop needs.
Every label written in the studio's own words.
Two products, one rule: remove work before adding features.
Buyers keep calling to ask “will it fit my wall?” What do you build?
A shop that's open every day — and lets the art carry the colour.
The owner runs the accounts on a laptop. What should the admin dashboard be?
Snap the bill. Stock updates itself.
Test the tasks people repeat most — not the ones that demo well.
Every task got a frequency score (1–5) and a criticality score (1–3). The rule: test everything done daily or more, plus anything where failure loses an order.
5 buyers and the workshop team, each on their own laptop over Google Meet, 45 minutes. Measured: task success, time on task, wrong turns, ease (1–7), SUS (target 68+) and issue severity 0–4. Fix severity 3–4 first, retest only what changed.