Near and Native

Bespoke order processing tool for shipping 20K+ candles a year.

A high-volume candle maker was running its entire order flow through a single shared Apple Note. Northwoods replaced it with a central hub that pulls every order in automatically — live for the whole team in three weeks.

Engagement: Design, build, deploy
Capabilities: Order management, Workflow automation, Systems integration

The problem

Near and Native is entering its eighth year, has shipped over 20,000 orders and 165,000+ candles and home fragrance products across Shopify, Faire, and in-person studio sales.

Yet the entire operation ran through one shared Apple Note. Four teammates, working remotely on flexible schedules, copied every order in by hand from each channel. The note glitched between mobile and desktop, lost data, and failed to sync — so updates and task assignments never reached the people who needed them. Orders slipped, daily objectives got missed, and the team had no reliable, remote-accessible source of truth.

What we built

01Every order from Shopify, Faire, and the studio shows up automatically — nothing keyed in by hand, nothing missed.
02Anyone on the team can open it and see exactly where an order stands, what's next, and who owns it.
03Questions that used to become Slack threads or texts now live inside the order itself — assigned, flagged, and visible to everyone.
04Pallet arrivals, urgent orders, market updates — one place for the whole team, separate from the work.

How we worked

Embedded, in three beats.

01
Scope
One working session with Hannah to capture the real requirements — after off-the-shelf tools proved too expensive and too rigid to fit how the team actually worked.
02
Prototype
A working proof of concept in the team's hands within a week, built around their actual order flow across Shopify, Faire, and the studio.
03
Ship
Two weeks of feedback, then a full production rollout to the whole team — three weeks from first meeting to live.

Outcomes