How Social Pottery swapped a pile of tools for one login.
Social Pottery runs social pottery studios in the UK: painting drop-ins, wheel classes, multi-week courses, private events and a café. This is what the week looked like before Kilndar, and what it runs on now.
“We were paying for three booking systems, a marketing tool, a rota app and a lot of paper. Kilndar replaced all of it: bookings, the till, coffee orders from the table, the kiln shelf, rotas and emails, on one login. The studio runs smoother and we stopped being the glue between tools that never talked to each other.”
Before
Every part of the studio had its own tool, and none of them talked to the others.
- Three booking systems, because none of them handled painting drop-ins, wheel classes and multi-week courses together.
- bsport for memberships.
- Square for product stock.
- Specialised marketing software for campaigns and enquiries.
- A rota app for the staff rota.
- WhatsApp for the daily tasks.
- Custom spreadsheets for collections.
- Paper for the rest: handwritten kiln sheets, collection lists taped to the shelf, a notebook for who works Saturday.
- A subscription for each of them, every month, and staff reconciling it all by hand.
Now, on Kilndar
One login, one customer list, every job in the studio.
Selling
Replaces the three booking systems and bsport
- Painting drop-ins, wheel classes and events are booked into one diary.
- Multi-week courses are sold as one enrolment.
- Memberships and gift cards are sold and redeemed in the same system.
Front desk, till and café
Replaces Square
- Checking a party in opens the floor map, so they are seated at a table on arrival.
- The till takes bookings, walk-ins and shop sales in one place.
- Shop products and their stock live in the same system, and each sale updates the count.
- Coffee orders from the table QR land in the till's order queue.
Kiln and collection
Replaces the collection spreadsheets and the kiln sheets
- Every piece is on the kiln board with a photo and its stage.
- Customers get an email when their piece is ready for collection.
- The same email lets them book a free pick-up slot.
The team
Replaces the rota app, WhatsApp and the Saturday notebook
- Rotas are planned and shared in the same system.
- Each day has a task list the team ticks off.
- A daily brief hands each day over to the team, with who is on which station.
- The staff handbook sits next to the rota.
Customers and marketing
Replaces the marketing software
- Marketing emails and automations go to the same customer list the bookings build.
- Private event enquiries arrive in one inbox, where the team quotes and replies.
- Loyalty stamp cards reward the regulars.
- Reports read bookings, the till and customers together.
Branches
- One customer record across every branch, so a regular is a regular wherever they book.
In their own words
Before Kilndar we were paying for three different booking systems, because no single one could handle painting drop-ins, wheel classes and six-week courses at the same time. Marketing lived in another tool, rotas in another, and everything else was paper: handwritten kiln sheets, collection lists taped to the shelf, a notebook for who was working Saturday. Every month the subscriptions went out, and every weekend someone still had to reconcile it all by hand.
Now it's one login. Bookings, courses and gift cards come in through the same diary. On a busy Saturday we check a party in and the floor map shows their table before they've taken their coats off. The coffee orders come in from the table QR and land on the same till as the painting. Every piece has a photo and a stage, and customers get an email the moment it's out of the kiln, so the phone stopped ringing with 'is my mug ready?'.
The team gets their rota, their tasks for the day and the studio handbook in the same place, and the marketing emails go out from the same customer list the bookings come from, so we finally know who our regulars are. We stopped paying for a pile of tools that didn't talk to each other, and we stopped being the glue between them.
Tell us about your studio.
A short note is enough. We'll reply from a real inbox, usually within two working days, and set up a walkthrough of the live demo studio with your kind of workload.