Running seven pottery studios on one system

Somewhere around a second site, most pottery studios feel a change they did not expect. Booking software that worked fine for one location starts to strain the moment there are two: two diaries that do not talk to each other, two spreadsheets of customers who are sometimes the same person, and a phone call asking whether the mug someone painted at one branch can be collected at another. Social Pottery, which runs seven studios across the UK on Kilndar, is a useful case for what running several sites as one business actually requires, not as a testimonial, but as a pattern any studio heading toward a second or third site will recognise.

The moment two studios stop feeling like one business

The first branch is simple by definition: one diary, one shelf, one till, one till roll of paper at the end of the night. The second branch breaks that simplicity in ways that are easy to miss until they have already caused a problem. A customer who painted at one branch turns up at another expecting the studio to recognise them, because to the customer it is one business with two addresses. If the two branches keep separate customer lists, that recognition simply is not there, and the studio looks disorganised for something the customer never even thought was a big ask.

The same happens with capacity. Two studios running on two separate diaries, even two instances of the same software set up independently, means nobody at head office can look at both on one screen and see which branch has room this Saturday and which is already full.

One customer record across every site

The fix that matters most is the simplest to state and the hardest to bolt on after the fact: one customer record, shared across every branch a business runs, rather than one record per site. A person who paints at a studio near their office and collects at the branch near home should be recognised as the same customer at both, with one history, one set of preferences, and one place their marketing consent lives, rather than several duplicate records that quietly drift apart from each other over time.

For a business running several sites, this is not a nice extra. It is what makes several sites actually add up to one business rather than several small ones sharing a brand name.

Branch-level capacity, one head office view

Each branch still needs to run its own day: its own floor plan, its own opening hours, its own staff. Nothing about running several studios should mean flattening them into a single identical layout, because a converted shop unit and a purpose-built studio do not have the same tables or the same capacity.

What changes is what head office can see. Reports that sit side by side, branch by branch, let an owner running several sites spot the quiet Tuesday at one location and the fully booked Saturday at another without asking every manager for a separate number. Settlement, working out what each branch actually took and owes, needs the same side-by-side view, because a business with several sites is still one set of accounts at the end of the month.

The kiln room problem multiplied

A single studio's kiln room problem, keeping track of which piece belongs to which customer through weeks of glazing and firing, gets harder with every branch added, because pieces do not always stay at the branch where they were painted. A customer might paint near their office during a lunch break and collect closer to home at the weekend, and unless the piece record travels with the customer rather than staying locked to one location, nobody at the second branch has any way to know it is even there.

The same question applies to who owns the shelf of uncollected pieces at each site. With several branches, that is not one shelf to manage, it is several, and each one needs its own honest count of what is sitting on it, visible to whoever is running that branch day to day, not just to head office.

Team: rotas from bookings, not the other way round

Staffing several studios by hand, working out who should be on shift at each site from a guess about how busy it will be, does not scale the way staffing one studio does. The sensible order is the other way round: build the rota from the bookings that are actually on the books at each branch, so a quiet Tuesday at one site does not get staffed the same as a fully booked one at another purely because someone wrote both rotas from habit rather than from the diary.

That only works if the rota tool can see the same bookings the diary sees, branch by branch, rather than being handed a rough headcount once a week and asked to fill it in.

What changed for the people at the counter

The clearest sign that multi-site software is working is what it does not require from the person standing at the till. A staff member at any of Social Pottery's seven studios can check a customer in, see their history, take a balance, and hand back a piece, without needing to know or care which branch that customer originally painted at. The complexity of running seven sites as one business sits behind the scenes, in one shared record and one shared view, rather than landing on the one person trying to serve a queue on a Saturday afternoon.

Kilndar's Group plan gives a multi-site business one customer record, branch-level reports and settlement side by side, and a rota built from real bookings at every site. See what's included on pricing.