A tailor's shop: 180 fittings synced across five staff diaries
A bespoke tailor's shop in Mayfair was running the fittings calendar on a leather-bound diary at the front desk. The master cutter and three fitters coordinated by shouting up the stairs.
The reading
A bespoke tailoring house in Mayfair, in continuous operation since the 1920s. One master cutter, three fitters, two apprentices, a front-desk manager who had been with the house for twenty-nine years. Clients were booked in for first fittings, forward fittings, and final fittings, with the intervals between dictated by the master cutter's judgement.
The calendar was a leather-bound diary at the front desk. Appointments were written in by the front-desk manager and verbally communicated to the fitters as needed. The system worked because the front-desk manager was always there and always knew.
She had, in a quiet conversation with the proprietor, mentioned that she would like to work four days a week instead of six. The proprietor realised the house had a problem.
The diary at the desk
The diary itself was not the issue. The issue was that the diary was the only copy. Fitters working upstairs did not know, at a glance, what their day looked like. The master cutter did not know, until asked, whether a particular client's forward fitting was ready to be scheduled.
The house had resisted digital systems on grounds of appropriateness. The clients were, in some cases, the fourth generation of their family to be dressed by the house; the proprietor felt a tablet at the front desk would strike a wrong note.
- 180 fittings per month, one leather diary
- Verbal communication from front desk to upstairs
- Front-desk manager present 6 days a week by necessity
- Master cutter unaware of upcoming fittings until the morning
- No historical view of a client's fitting cadence
What we built
We did not put a tablet at the front desk. The diary stayed. The front-desk manager continued to write in it as she always had. In the back office, out of sight of clients, a small tablet ran a web application that mirrored the diary. Each morning, the manager spent four minutes transcribing the previous day's entries; each evening, the fitters' calendars were updated.
The technical choice was deferential: we did not try to replace the diary because the diary was part of the house. We built a system that lived alongside it, took its input, and distributed it to the people upstairs. The master cutter received a short printed sheet each morning, by hand, from the manager, which showed his day. He appreciated the paper.
Stack: a small Rails application, Postgres, a web calendar for the fitters, a thermal printer for the master cutter's morning sheet.
The numbers at ninety days
| What | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Fitter diary visibility | None | Full |
| Front-desk manager working days | 6/week | 4/week |
| Fittings missed or rescheduled | 7/month | 1/month |
| Master cutter morning briefing time | 20 min | 4 min |
| Client fitting history queryable | No | Yes |
Deference as a design choice
The house had been right to resist a bad digital solution. The question had been how to introduce a good one without changing the client-facing character of the shop. The answer was to put the system behind the scenes and let the diary continue to be the diary.
The one-week training test passed, in the sense that the fitters needed no training because their new calendar simply contained what the diary already said. The system served the house; the house did not serve the system.