Made by Hand, Managed by Hand

The last few months have been a bit of a blur. And not the kind of blur we prefer — the one that comes from riding a bike. Still, we have been getting out on two wheels, but between sprints of another kind: of design and tech, logic, problems, solutions and released products. A trio, in fact: Vidual Projects, Inbox, and Spaces.

Vidual Projects came to pass because there simply was no project management tool for brands who make things by hand — bespoke items for clients, whether those clients are end users or industry partners. Nothing on the market could house everything in one place: the messages, the payment reminders, the payment requests, the payment confirmations, the invoice connectivity. There was nothing that brought it all together. Never mind a beautiful portal for the client — somewhere they could read messages from the brand, see photos, videos, PDFs, any form of media richly displayed before they even click, and follow a full timeline of the build.

So that was the prosaic reason: nothing existed. After working through WBD, our agency, with clients like Pegoretti, who make things by hand, and Sarto, who make carbon fibre bicycles by hand at a slightly bigger scale, there was still nothing available. It became apparent we'd have to build it ourselves. And it was a lot of fun doing so.

But beyond the prosaic reason, there was a more poetic one. A bespoke thing — something made by hand, made as a one-off — is a beautiful thing. It's a story. It represents the story of the brand, and a story of decades, sometimes centuries, of tradition handed down from artisan to artisan. In Vidual Projects, that story is rendered however you want it to be. The customer who commissioned the item becomes part of it — part of that long artisanal tradition. That, beyond the nuts and bolts, was what drew us: provenance, and story.

So that's Vidual Projects. An all-encompassing portal, and a good place to be throughout the day — message a team, get your notifications, none of it frenzied, none of it in your face. All of it thought out to keep you in your flow and informed, rather than pulling you out of it and causing you stress, which, let's face it, technology so often does. If we're honest, very few pieces of software truly make our lives better. We're sold a lot of things — but do we really benefit to the same magnitude as the cost, and the promises made? I don't think so. With Vidual Projects, we aimed to buck that trend.

Vidual Inbox — the conversations before the build

Paired to it is Vidual Inbox. If Vidual Projects is the story of the build, Inbox is the story of everything before it. After a few requests from early adopters of Vidual Projects, we realised there was a second half we hadn't made: the conversations before the project. So we made Vidual Inbox.

One of the main things it does is let customer conversations flow in from the usual suspects — email, IG, WhatsApp — and if you have a Vidual Projects account, you can push a conversation straight into Projects. It automatically creates a project, gives it a title, carries the customer details over, and pulls in the backstory — what you'd been talking to the customer about — as a backstory snippet. Depersonalised; anything extraneous is left out, and only what's relevant and pertinent to the project carries through. It's a really lovely handoff from Inbox to Projects.

And if you don't use Vidual Projects, Inbox is still a lovely place to spend your day doing customer support. It has a live chat widget you can put on your website, which respects out-of-hours without any stress or complication. It informs you without cluttering. It's stylish — you can choose a palette to match your brand, and your brand assets are pulled in automatically where we can find them when you sign up. If you use Gmail to power your business email, we detect it, and in one click you can connect your support account. We give you a unique forwarding address; you forward your inbox to ours, and that's it — you're up and running in about a minute.

What it affords you is the best of modern technology. There's a little AI in there to shepherd things along where they need it. There's some good deterministic maths that surfaces things customers might have mentioned — dates, for instance — and reminds you of them; that's pure maths and logic, no AI. And then there's a little helper called Otto. Otto appears after a few messages, when you might want to catch up, and gives you a recap of the conversation — and can suggest the next steps that might be needed. That might be an internal message to a team member, which you can send from inside a customer conversation, or a sculpted message to the customer themselves — but always with your approval. Nothing ever gets sent automatically. It's a light touch: there to help, rather than hurry you into some frenzied productivity that leads to mistakes, or to a distilling of your brand, which we wouldn't want.

Vidual Spaces — files, found by asking

The third thing we built recently — again with the Vidual name — is Vidual Spaces. It's a lovely file management system, akin to something like Dropbox, but with natural language search. Show me all the photos we shot with the Leica in Italy last week. Show me all the photos from the Highlands shoot last year. Give me the financial documents — or anything that mentions sales tax in a PDF — and show me that, please.

There are lovely built-in tools, too. You can notify your team, or certain members of it, when you upload files. You can run a poll, so team members vote on the files or photos they like best; the results get sent round, and the chosen photos are automatically pulled into a folder of selects. That one's quite photo-specific, but it works for plenty else — art direction, layouts, mood boards, that sort of thing.

It's a smart, sophisticated, very stylish tool. There's a Mac app as well, so you can sync everything from your Mac with full Spotlight integration. You can share links straight from your Finder folder, just as you can from the web, and choose which files to share with third parties and how long they last before they expire. And if you own the account, you can keep private folders that are yours alone — never visible to other team members. So there's a bit of protection there for owners.

Three tools, one idea: technology that keeps you in your flow instead of pulling you out of it. Made by hand, managed by hand.

A bespoke thing — made by hand, made as a one-off — is a beautiful thing. It's a story.