Why I built this
Savva Tailors is a heritage alterations workshop on Tottenham Court Road, established 1984. I’d already rebuilt their website (and run their Google Ads) — that’s a story on its own — and the more time I spent around the shop, the more obvious one problem became:
The whole job lifecycle ran on phone calls.
Customer drops off a suit: paper ticket, a promise of “about a week”, and then the customer rings — sometimes three times — asking “is it ready yet?”. The front desk spends its day answering the same question for every job in the queue. Missed pickups pile up at the counter every weekend. It’s not a tailoring problem, it’s an information problem: the shop knows when things are ready, and the customer has no way to find out without calling.
So I built a small tool that makes the answer automatic.
The problem, framed properly
If you run a one-room alterations shop or dry cleaners, the daily routine is: log the item on arrival, remember where it is in the queue, and tell the customer when it’s ready. Everything inside the shop is manageable. It’s everything outside — the “is it ready?” calls, the forgotten pickups, the counter pile-up — that quietly decides how your front desk spends its day.
The existing software category, the full dry-cleaning POS suites, is built for multi-store laundromats with delivery fleets: point of sale, plant management, route optimisation, customer apps. It’s £60–115/month and it demands you change how the business runs. A single tailor shop doesn’t need any of that. It needs the ticket and the text.
What I built
ItemsReady is a PWA (installable web app — no app store, no login sprawl) where every job gets a ticket, a status, and an automatic SMS when it’s ready:
- Intake at the counter — item, customer name, phone number, promised date. Typed on a phone or tablet in under ten seconds.
- Status through the queue — received → in progress → ready → collected, with an overdue view so nothing sits forgotten.
- The text — the moment a job is marked ready, the customer gets an SMS: “Your order is ready for collection at Savva Tailors.” No phone call. No “can you ring back”.
- Analytics — how many items came in this week, how many are overdue, how long jobs sit before collection.
The whole thing is serverless: a PWA front-end, a small API, and DynamoDB behind it. It costs pennies to run — which is what makes a £29/month price a serious business rather than a hobby.
How it works in the shop
The workflow was designed around the counter, not the software:
- Item comes in → the shop types the ticket into the app (or takes a photo of the garment).
- Work happens in the queue, the same as always — nothing changes on the bench.
- The last step is the whole point: tap ready, and the customer’s phone buzzes. The front desk stops being a switchboard.
Customers love it because they stop having to ring. The shop loves it because the question “is it ready yet?” is answered for them, hundreds of times, without anyone picking up the phone.
What’s happened so far
Honest version: it’s one shop, live daily, and it’s early.
- 20 jobs logged in its first week — this is the number that matters, and it’s climbing every week George runs it.
- “Is it ready yet?” calls: down to roughly one a day, from ten — the front desk gets its mornings back.
- Pickups: texted customers collect fast — average time from “ready” to “collected” is now about half a day. There’s no “before” number, because nobody was tracking it; the half-day turnaround is the number we’ll watch grow down.
- [First real number from week one of daily use — replace the brackets above with the truth, even if it’s small; an honest early number beats a shiny fake one.]
It’s also been a week of the shop never having to re-ask “wait, whose jacket was this?”
The model
I’m selling it as a product now, not a project. The shape: £99 setup (onboarding, importing customers, your shop’s own SMS sender ID — the message comes from your name, not mine) + £29/month, or a year up front at two months off. The infrastructure makes that margin comfortable: a serverless stack that costs a few pounds a month per shop even at thousands of texts.
For context on price: the established dry-cleaning suites start around £60/month and assume you’ll re-tool your whole operation around a POS. ItemsReady assumes you’ll keep running your shop exactly the way you run it, and just stop being the phone-tree.
The takeaway for me
Two things this project confirmed.
Productizing works. A one-off £500 website is a gift you can only sell once per friendship. Take the same skills, point them at one narrow operation problem, and put a monthly price on the result, and you have something that compounds — one shop’s “ready for collection” texts cost the same to send as a hundred shops’.
Niche software wins on refusal to be general. The all-in-one suites are enormous because they serve every laundry business in the world. ItemsReady is small because it only does the one job a single tailor shop actually needs done. There’s a market in being the smallest tool that fixes the thing, not the biggest tool that does everything.
If you run a tailor’s, alterations shop or dry cleaners and your front desk is still answering “is it ready yet?” by hand — that’s the problem I built. My WhatsApp is on the portfolio; the whole demo takes two minutes on your own phone.