Digitizing Harry's Tailor Shop

By Roshan Edachali — 2025-08-16

I was a customer of a small tailor shop owned by a father and son in Dallas named Harry’s Tailor Shop, and they did a stellar job tailoring clothes. But they were faced with a key issue: their inventory organization and order fulfillment was a mess. Order details and receipts were on handwritten pieces of paper, clothes were stored by memory, and pick-up messages were sent manually (when they remembered to do so). As a result, out of the 5 orders I placed with the tailor shop, my clothes were delayed 3 times, clothes were lost once, and I never received a pick up text. Ever. Harry’s Tailor Shop was obviously very busy and great at what they did, but I felt they could use some help optimizing their order flow.

After a brief conversation with the owner’s son, I started by researching low-cost, easy-to-implement ways for Harry’s Tailor Shop to digitize their systems without overhauling their operations or needing to learn complex systems. The goal was to come up with a system Harry and his son could learn and use quickly while preserving their original systems (payment with cash/Venmo hence no point-of-sale systems like Square) and remaining low-cost and functionally lean.

I first researched SaaS products like Sortly, but decided against them as they were often too bloated in their offerings and hence too expensive for a small tailor shop to take on. I then explored easily customizable and cost-effective no-code tools Glide, coupled with platforms like Airtable for storing data and Twilio for SMS automation.

At the time of writing I am on the verge of having an MVP ready to show Harry and his son. The no-code app (built using Glide) contains a customer list, order list, calendar, and barcode scanning functionality and is able to trigger a text to a customer notifying them that their order is ready for pick up when Harry selects ‘Ready for Pick Up’ in the app.

My goal for the next 6 months is to finish the app and measure its success with optimizing the inventory management and order fulfillment at Harry’s Tailor Shop.