The challenge
A direct-to-consumer homewares brand doing around €2M in annual revenue was running fulfilment out of a single Google Sheet — manually updated by a part-time ops coordinator. Orders from Shopify had to be copied into supplier emails, warehouse pick lists generated by hand, and customer shipping updates sent manually. One mistake cascaded into late orders and support tickets.
What we built
We built a Make automation layer sitting between Shopify, their two suppliers, and their warehouse. When an order hits Shopify, it's automatically triaged by product type, the correct supplier is notified with a structured PO, and the warehouse receives a pick list. A GPT-powered module drafts and sends customer shipping updates in the brand's tone of voice. All status changes flow into a live Airtable operations board visible to the whole team.
The outcome
The ops coordinator moved from doing data entry to managing exceptions — a fundamentally different job. Fulfilment lead times dropped by two days because supplier POs now land instantly rather than sitting in someone's draft folder. In the four months since launch, there have been zero missed SLAs.
The before state
The ops coordinator would start each morning by downloading Shopify orders into a CSV, manually sorting by supplier, drafting emails, and updating a shared Google Sheet. By mid-morning, the data was already stale. Weekends were a black hole — orders piled up and the team would spend Monday mornings firefighting.
What we built
The Make scenario runs every 15 minutes and handles the full order lifecycle: triage, supplier notification, warehouse coordination, and customer comms. We used OpenAI to generate customer-facing shipping updates that sound like a real person wrote them — because the brand's voice was a key part of their identity and templated emails felt wrong. All supplier comms are logged. Exceptions (out-of-stock, address issues) route to a dedicated Slack channel.
How it runs today
The team uses the Airtable board as their single source of truth. They can see every order's status in real time without touching a spreadsheet. The ops coordinator's week now consists mostly of managing edge cases and supplier relationships — work that actually moves the business forward.