Blog
Why we're building MadeTo
The duct tape is showing
Every made-to-order business we’ve talked to runs into the same wall. Custom or personalized products don’t fit off-the-shelf commerce tools. A lot of multi-tool products end up with enterprise bloat because of the necessity to cater to the bigger business and smaller companies get charged for that said bloat whether they want it or not. Then there are incomplete products i.e. products that don’t necessarily meet all the requirements and create a nuisance in implementation. And as the tale goes - the orders end up in a spreadsheet, formulation or spec details in a second spreadsheet, and shipping bolted on last through whatever carrier tool is cheapest that month. Nothing keeps the three in sync, and every personalized order multiplies the busywork.
What MadeTo actually does
MadeTo is both a storefront and one back office for order intake through fulfillment: orders, inventory, and shipping in a single place, built for businesses whose products aren’t off-the-shelf. This doesn’t mean that the product is not a good fit for something that is a bit more mass produced - au contraire - managing something mass produced becomes easier. It’s still in development - nothing below is a promise of a ship date, just what we’re building and why.
Inventory is the piece we built first, because it’s the piece that breaks fastest under a made-to-order model. A single formulation or configuration can pull from a dozen different components, and most inventory tools assume every unit sold is identical. MadeTo tracks products and SKUs the way a made-to-order business actually uses them, including a way to resolve the same item under whatever name it arrives as from a supplier, order form, or spreadsheet import, so “the same thing, called three different things” stops being a source of mismatched stock counts.
Sales orders, shipping, and a customer-facing storefront are next. The plan is to carry an order from intake through to a shipped, tracked package without it ever leaving MadeTo, and to let a business pick native carrier accounts or plug in a shipping platform they already use, rather than forcing one workflow on everyone. Every feature also ships with a matching API alongside its own screens in MadeTo itself, so a business that wants to pull orders or inventory into something else it runs isn’t stuck waiting for us to build that connection first.
Who this is for
MadeTo prioritizes businesses that build for one, made-to-order and personalized-product and companies whose orders each carry their own formulation, spec, or configuration. Our first customers are supplement and health-product businesses that collect intake information from their own customers to formulate personalized products, and compliance around that kind of data is built into MadeTo from the ground up rather than bolted on afterward. The platform itself doesn’t require any of that, though: any physical-goods business that assembles orders per customer, not just supplement makers, is a fit.
Straight to the point and with no bloat
Businesses looking for a SaaS that fits their needs a lot of the time will find themselves in a pickle. A lot of the business management software comes with the built in bloat that a lot of businesses have to navigate around in order to make it fit their needs. There are unnecessary fields that you have to ignore during the API calls or a lot of features requiring “Training Manuals and Tutorials”, which really translates into - “I couldn’t make it simple enough and I tried to please too many clients”.
MadeTo values are rooted in providing simple but powerful features that will enable the business to do more. More automation, more transparency, more visibility and less worrying about regulatory requirements. MadeTo will provide everything that you need to run your physical goods business from A to Z. A secure storefront, an inventory management that will work for you, shipping and order management built in, while being HIPAA compliant and SOC 2 ready (GDPR as part of the roadmap).
All of this while requiring zero code if you choose to keep it simple and API first efficiency if you choose the fully integrated approach.
Where we are today
Tenancy, sign-in (including two-factor authentication and Google/Microsoft sign-in), role-based access, and the inventory/SKU layer described above are built. Sales orders, shipping, and the storefront are what we’re building next, roughly in that order.
If any of this sounds like the tool you’ve been stitching together yourself out of spreadsheets, join the waitlist below. We’re building this with a small group of early-access businesses helping decide what ships next, and we’ll follow up as access opens.