Wedding Rings

When my wife and I were looking for wedding rings, we visited Jewler van Velthuysen. While we were there, we bought beautiful wedding rings, but while we were talking with the owner, Jos van Velthuysen, I explained what I do for a living. I told him some of the things that are possible when you make all your software yourself.

"The Call"

When I got the call that the rings were ready to be picked up, Jos also asked me if I had time to discuss some of the wishes he had for his own store, software wise. One of the things they did by hand was keep a rolodex of customer information and when someone buys a nice watch of an expensive piece of jewelery, he makes a note to send them a letter with a handwritten address after a year to offer a free cleanup/checkup of the items. He wanted to be able move this into the digital age and have a system to record his customers and create reminders to send them letters about their purchases.

CRM

In the next few weeks, I build a CRM application to be used on his iPad that allowed him to easily add new and find existing customers, record small notes about their purchases in order to send them a nice letter and plan when those letters need to be sent, both digitally via e-mail and via regular mail.

Trouwbox

After a successfull pilot with the CRM application, Jos explained to me that he receives regular e-mails for people who ordered a 'Trouwbox'. This is a physical box you can order for free if you are getting married, that has magazines and local offers for things like wedding rings, locations, photographers, etc. He used to send each person who registers a hand crafter e-mail, but this took up a lot of time, so I wrote an application to check his mailbox, search for Trouwbox e-mails, download the attached Excel sheet, import the people into the CRM application with a special flag to indicate they originated from the Trouwbox, and queue e-mails to be sent; one directly with an offer and if the wedding is more than 6 months off, another one 3 months before the wedding. This alleviated Jos considerably; he no longer had to keep vigilant for e-mails to come in and keep track of when their wedding was due.

Website

After two successfull projects, the website was due for an overhaul. Jos liked the design of the current site, though he wanted some parts tweaked, but it lacked the ability to be updated. I explained that the most effective way to go about this would be to allow him to edit the content of the pages in Markdown; a relatively simple markup that you can mix with HTML when needed. I've also added a simple picture manager to allow you to upload pictures to the website to use in news articles. Something I really like myself, is the top banner that informs you about the current store state; it will tell your when it's open, if it's closing anytime soon, if it's about to open, or when it's closed. This is fed from the opening hours admin, which is also used to display the opening hours on the site.

If you have needs similar to Jos; weather that's a custom CRM, an application to help you with repetitive tasks or need your website overhauled, hire me just like Juwelier van Velthuysen did.