Inspire Kitchens
Sole technical hire for a 30-person premium kitchen manufacturer in New Zealand. To fully automate their daily operations, I own the entire digital stack—spanning web development, CRM integrations, SEO, marketing, lead generation, and a suite of 13 custom internal tools.
Inspire Kitchens (NZ kitchen manufacturer)
Full-Stack Developer & Marketing Specialist
The Problem
Inspire Kitchens is a premium kitchen manufacturer in New Zealand with a 30-person team and no internal tech department. Their operations ran entirely on manual processes:
- Job scheduling was managed through complex spreadsheet timelines — when a job's install date shifted (common in kitchen manufacturing), staff had to manually recalculate every sub-task and work order across the full job graph, a 20+ minute process per reschedule that was easy to get wrong.
- Weekly management reporting — pulling pipeline data from Jobman, financial data from Xero, and compiling it into a master spreadsheet — took over 4 hours of copy-pasting every week.
- The public website (inspirekitchens.co.nz) was built on Shopify from the old iKitchen product-selling days. After rebranding to bespoke kitchen manufacturing, the template design didn't reflect the craftsmanship of their work, and the team had no control over the experience.
- There was no centralized view of competitors, no way to track SEO performance across the site migration, no automated lead pipeline, and no internal catalog of the tools that did exist.
They didn't need a generic SaaS platform or a costly agency retainer. They needed a dedicated developer who could embed with the team, understand the manufacturing pipeline from factory floor to office, and build custom tools tailored to how they actually work.
What I Built
Main Website
Rebuilt from Shopify to a custom Next.js application with regional SEO landing pages, a B2B "For Builders" portal, and CRM-piped lead capture
Jobman Calendar
Real-time drag-and-drop planning tool mirroring ERP jobs via secure webhooks into Supabase, featuring a custom date cascade algorithm
Reporting Ecosystem
Defect-tracking dashboard, interactive competitor intelligence map with automated data scraping, and an SEO dashboard with automated PDF exports
Operational Automations
Synced Jobman ERP and Xero data to live tracking sheets and pushed weekly rendered reporting cards into Microsoft Teams
Secure Infrastructure
Managed the full infrastructure across Vercel and Supabase. Implemented secure HMAC-signed HTTP-only cookies for authentication across all tools
Supporting Tools
Materials search engine, automated lead generation pipeline, and a password-gated internal wiki mapping every automation
The Impact
Replaced the entire paper-and-spreadsheet operation with a suite of 13 interconnected custom applications. The drag-and-drop calendar eliminated 20+ minutes of manual recalculation per job reschedule. Weekly operational reporting dropped from 4+ hours of manual compilation to zero — the sheet is ready each morning without anyone touching it. The public website rebuild brought the online presence in line with the brand quality, while the SEO dashboard and competitor intelligence platform gave the team real-time visibility into their market position. The lead generation pipeline provides a steady stream of prospects without manual research.