How a Custom Chocolate Maker Got Per-Product Artwork Approval and Live Inventory in Airtable
A small custom chocolate maker replaced a crashed order system and an MRP app with Airtable and Softr: per-product artwork approval plus live inventory.
TL;DR: A small custom chocolate manufacturer (11 to 50 staff) replaced a crashed in-house order system, a CRM that couldn't handle artwork proofs, and a subscription MRP app with one Airtable + Softr system. Every product in an order now gets its own artwork proof and approval, and stock levels, purchase orders and bills of materials run from the same base. The order side has run for more than a year across a base of 125,000+ order and product records.
Custom chocolates ready for artwork approval and packing. Photo by Monique Carrati on Unsplash
The situation
The company makes custom and branded chocolate products. Most orders are personalized: a customer orders several products, and each one carries its own printed design. Orders come in through a BigCommerce storefront, a team of in-house graphic designers prepares the artwork, the customer approves it, and production makes and ships it.
About six months before calling Connex, they had moved from a homegrown CRM to Pipedrive. Sales was fine with the switch. The designers were not. The old system had handled artwork proofing. Pipedrive didn't, and nothing the team found in its marketplace fit.
The problem
In the owner's own words on the first call, the designers "have been slowed down by the switch," and every artwork proofing integration on the market was "unable to work with Pipedrive products, and/or too cumbersome for what is an easy workflow for our team."
The workflow itself was simple to describe and hard to buy off the shelf:
Pull the image the customer actually picked on the website into each order line, not a default product image.
Let designers upload artwork against each product in the order.
Let the customer review, zoom and approve or request changes per product, not one approval for the whole order.
Send preset emails for the first draft and every revision after it.
Move the order to "Approved" or "Rework Requested" automatically.
Put the approved artwork on the packing sheet, and keep every approved file exportable so a future platform change wouldn't strand years of designs.
Then the old in-house system they were still leaning on crashed. The next booking note read: "Need this project up and running asap as our existing system has crashed."
What they'd already tried
Off-the-shelf proofing apps couldn't attach artwork to individual Pipedrive products. The first plan with Connex was a light Fillout form skeleton scoped at 4 to 5 hours. In the first working session, a Connex consultant and the owner tested Fillout and Zapier Tables and hit limits with both on per-product approval across a multi-product order.
That session ended with a test approval interface in Airtable and a direction: build the order system in Airtable instead of forcing the CRM to be one.
What we built with Airtable, Softr and Zapier
Over about 20 one-hour ZoomFlow sessions from early 2025 to mid-2026, a Connex consultant built the system alongside the owner, who handled much of the Softr page work himself. That split kept the client in control of his own tool.
1. Orders land in Airtable first
Zapier pulls every BigCommerce order into Airtable as an order record plus one linked record per order item, including the image URL for the exact option the customer chose. A duplicate check on the order ID stops the same order from being created twice.
2. Artwork lives on the order item, with versions
Orders, order items and artworks are separate linked tables. Each order item can carry multiple artwork versions, so the history of first draft, revision and final is kept rather than overwritten.
3. Two portals, two audiences
A Softr portal gives designers and staff an order detail page where they upload proofs per product. A separate customer-facing view lets the buyer see each product's proof and approve it or request changes with notes, without ever touching Airtable.
4. Status tags that stack instead of overwrite
Orders carry tags such as awaiting payment, guest names, rush and pickup, set from order status and product options. These drive the production views.
5. Production planning and time tracking
Roll-ups show production hours and SKUs needed per day, so the night shift knows what to prep. A mobile time tracker lets staff start a timer on a production-ready job; the system compares the quantity against each product's output-per-hour rate to show an expected finish time and rolls up KPI reporting per person.
6. Inventory, moved off the MRP app
A year in, the owner wanted to drop the subscription MRP app for something simpler that lived next to orders. He exported products, parts, vendors, bills of materials and purchase orders himself, kept the original IDs, and the build linked them up:
Bills of materials link products to parts, parts to vendors, and vendors to a vendor price table with unit-of-measure conversions.
Booked stock counts only orders in active statuses. In stock only drops when an order reaches production complete. Available is in stock minus booked.
A reorder status flags any part where available plus incoming stock falls below its reorder point. One button creates a purchase order for that vendor with quantities pre-filled by formula.
Write-offs and adjustments are typed (adjustment up, adjustment down, broken, dated and so on) and show the cost of the write-off from the last price paid.
What broke, and how it was fixed
The edge cases are the useful part if you're building something like this:
Only one product linked per order. The first automation that linked order items to orders kept replacing the first product with the next one. It was rebuilt to append, so a five-product order links all five.
Tags overwrote each other. Each automation that added a tag wiped the previous one. Script-based tag handling and small delays between automations fixed the race.
Inventory moved the wrong way. Completing an order made in-stock go up instead of down, and formulas double-counted quantities. The fix was status-specific roll-ups and a clear rule: physical stock can never go below zero, booked stock can.
Nobody could trace a bad number. The owner put it plainly: "it is too hard to follow along stock ups and downs and track back errors weeks and months later." An Inventory Transactions Log now records every movement from stock takes, purchase orders and orders, and the stock figures roll up from it.
Historical orders poisoned the counts. Old orders imported without matching receipts drove stock negative. A cutoff date means only orders after go-live affect inventory.
The results
One system instead of three. The crashed in-house system, the CRM-as-order-system workaround and the MRP app were replaced by one Airtable base with Softr on top.
Per-product approval, the thing no app could do. Each product in an order gets its own proof, version history and approval or change request.
It held up. The order and artwork system has been running for over a year. In the owner's words, it "has been working well for over a year."
Inventory went live and counted right. Three days after inventory launch, the owner's report was: "Counting stock all seems to be fine." The remaining issue, inconsistent unit-of-measure pricing, was fixed by standardizing on last price paid.
Scale. The orders and products base holds 125,000+ records, with an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 inventory records a year added on top.
No time-saved or dollar figure is given here. The sessions never recorded a reliable before-time per proof or per order, and we'd rather show what the system does than invent a number.
Client voice
Booking the inventory phase, the owner described the next step as "a far simpler inventory program" linked to the order system he'd built with a Connex consultant.
FAQ
Do customers need an Airtable account to approve artwork?
No. Customers only see the Softr view. Airtable stays internal.
Do we have to leave our CRM to do this?
Not necessarily. The first design kept Pipedrive in the loop. What changed was where orders live: in a base built for orders, items and artwork, not in a sales pipeline.
Can Airtable really replace an MRP app?
For bills of materials, purchase orders, stock takes, reorder points and write-offs, yes, if the stock logic is built carefully. What made it reliable here: status-based booking rules and a transactions log every movement writes to.
How fast was the first working piece?
The first session produced a test approval interface. The core order and artwork system came together over a handful of sessions in June and July 2025, right after the old system crashed.
Get help building your order and approval system
If your designers, production team and buyers are working around a system that was never built for custom orders, that can become one system you control. Book a free call with Connex and we'll map your order, approval and stock workflow with you.
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