Tally
Empowering SMBs to process over $120k in revenue
Tally is an all-in-one fulfillment hub for made-to-order businesses.
Existing inventory tools track complete SKUs, leaving made-to-order businesses armed with just spreadsheets to track raw materials. The closest alternatives are enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, which are far too expensive and robust for small businesses.
Tally is the middle ground: an all-in-one hub that tracks materials inventory, consolidates invoices, and streamlines product creation.
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
Sep 2024 →
May 2025
Skills
UI/UX, Prototyping, and UX Research
Tools
Figma, Framer
Background
Everything has a unique recipe, but don't recipes share ingredients?
Every dish has ingredients that are uniquely combined and processed. However different dishes are from one another, their ingredients often overlap. When you're making an omelette or baking a cake, don't you use eggs from the same carton?
Businesses that make their products "to order" are chefs in their own right — each time an order comes in, they pull from various materials to craft their products.
Each SKU has a distinct recipe, but they share core components, like this white crewneck in size M.
As an apparel business selling custom appliqué designs, you might be selling multiple designs, each with their own array of colors and sizes to choose from.
For a simple "2-ingredient" product: 4 designs x 3 colors x 4 sizes = 48 different recipes
Adding a new product to your shop can mean introducing anywhere from 1 to 12+ unique recipes. Scaling your shop becomes exponentially more complicated.
The more products a shop offers, the harder it becomes to manage raw material stock—the harder it is to know how many orders you can fulfill.
Solution
Meet Tally: Made-to-order, simplified.
Add Materials
Materials are like your building blocks. Define reorder quantities and safety thresholds and input supplier information to automate replenishment for your most important materials.
Write Recipes
Add products and define unique recipes for size and color variants.
Invoices, consolidated
Integrate orders across storefronts, and fulfill from one place.
Fulfill Orders
For any unfulfilled orders, Tally provides businesses with a list of materials they need to collect and variants to be made from those materials.
The Status Quo
Current inventory solutions overlook made-to-order businesses.
Existing tools track inventory for finished items, not materials. We chatted with 10+ businesses selling anything from apparel to handmade jewelry. Across the board, sellers were using spreadsheet tools to manage their materials inventory, manually.
The few materials-based inventory tools that exist are Shopify apps, meaning they only reflect sales made through Shopify.
There still aren't any options on the market for multi-channel businesses that use Etsy, Squarespace, TikTok Shop, or even make in-person sales.
"I'll make a Square sale and forget to update my Shopify... if someone buys off my Shopify storefront later... I have to email to cancel their order."
Inaccurate product and material levels forces businesses to cancel orders or put products on backorder, causing them to miss out on potential sales.
Opportunity
What if we used recipes to automate materials inventory?
We drew from our user interviews to determine high priority needs for an MVP.
Manage inventory by materials
Consolidate invoices across stores
Streamline fulfillment with daily to-dos
For a v2, we roadmapped a few features that we got signal for from initial calls.
Batch creation: Accommodating finished SKU safety stocks
Supplier price tracking: getting users the best deals on their materials
Metrics dashboard: Giving users at-a-glance insights into their sales
Design & Iteration
Incremental Inventory Counter
Although inventory values are meant to update automatically, I wanted to allow users to manually input changes for added flexibility. I chose to use a counter component to dynamically convey inventory levels.
V2 implements buttons with larger touch targets and puts relevant information (e.g. safety stock thresholds) in closer proximity to inventory levels.
I also wanted to make sure users could quickly draw conclusions from their inventory. Semantic color coding allows users to identify critical values at a glance.
Modals vs. Drawers
I originally explored modals as a way to handle material and product creation, but modals didn't scale well. With different quantities of variants (sizes, designs, etc.), modals yielded inconsistent heights and blocked contextual information in the primary screen.
Side panels maintain context by allowing users to see more of their existing products and materials and are overall, more scalable for large amounts of inputs.
Sweating the Details
Design System
I built a design system, complete with call to actions, form inputs, custom illustrated icons, and more. Although some components like the counter are custom-made, I relied heavily on existing UI libraries like Vercel's shadcn, Google's Material UI, and Tailwind CSS as a starting point to relieve engineering lift.
Reflection
Launch something... anything.
Truly, the best way to iterate is to get a product into the hands of users. While I had to forgo craft and fidelity at some points to move more swiftly, getting feedback quickly yielded insights on what features to focus on immediately and what to think about for the future.
Sell a story, not a product.
Beyond the UI work, I crafted brand pitch and brand and conducted user research; from these, I synthesized stories. Tally pushed me to abstract a narrative from the users I spoke with and pushed me to become a better storyteller—a better communicator.
Impact
Tally has since wound down, but it certainly made a splash.
Our 10 early users fulfilled over 2.5k orders and processed thousands of dollars in revenue using our MVP!
Shout out to my team — Mo, Jeremy, and Haha for being incredible engineering and product collaborators along the way.
Super grateful to have had the opportunity to ship this tool and test drive it with some early users :)
