Case study · La Hora Azul · Custom point of sale
La Hora Azul is a consignment art shop in Patagonia. Every piece belongs to a different artist, each with their own commission. Every sale, every discount and every payout changes who is owed what.
This is the system built to fit those rules: point of sale, inventory, commissions and balances in one place. The math that used to live in spreadsheets now runs itself. Built in one day.
If you run a business with rules of its own, you already know the choice.
That's the trap: bend your business to the software, or pay with your time for every rule the software doesn't understand.
La Hora Azul lives the case nobody talks about: the rules are the business. Encoding them into a system wasn't a luxury, it was the only way for the counter and the back office to tell the same story.
Every feature exists because the shop needs it. The clips are the real system, recorded exactly as it's used.
Tap the products, pick cash or card, done. Stock updates itself, in the moment. No manual, no training: anyone behind the counter can use it on day one.
Every artist has their own percentage. On every sale line, the system computes and stores the artist's share and the store's share, in the moment. Nobody does that math by hand at eight in the evening.
Computed and stored on every sale line, with each artist's own percentage.
Discounts by category or by product, right from the counter. And the detail that matters: the artist's cut is recalculated on the final price, automatically. The shop decides the discount; the system does the math.
What they earned, what they've been paid, what they're owed: live, per artist, with a payment history. Month-end closing stops being an afternoon of spreadsheets. And the relationship with every artist rests on numbers both sides can see.
Today's and this month's sales. Cash versus card. The store's share versus the artists'. The real state of the business, at a glance.
Every product belongs to an artist. Filter by artist and you see what's in the shop and how much is left. Adding new stock is taking a photo.
An artist's balance, or a full backup of the shop, downloads as an Excel file in one click. The natural next step: every export triggering an email to the artist with their balance attached.
On screen: the system of La Hora Azul, an art shop in Villa La Angostura, Argentina, with its real catalog and data.
How this exists
It runs online today, on Vercel. A system shaped to your rules is no longer a months-long project. That changes which businesses get to have their own software: you no longer need to be a company with a tech team.
La Hora Azul's rules are consignment. Yours might be different: prices that depend on the type of customer, salespeople's commissions, volume discounts, the math someone on your team lives inside a spreadsheet to keep up with.
The part that doesn't change: if your business has rules of its own, generic software forces you to choose between adapting and running them by hand. That choice is no longer necessary. I build the third option: small, custom systems that encode your rules and run them on their own.
Book a call20 minutes. You tell me how your business works, I tell you what can be encoded and what isn't worth it. No hype.
Build notes
The system runs on Next.js and Supabase, deployed on Vercel. Product photos are taken with the camera and compressed automatically. What mattered most to me wasn't the speed: it was that the business's rules (commissions, discounts, consignment) ended up written in one place, and that the system runs them the same at 10 in the morning and at 8 on a Saturday night.