The Cork Plug
www.thecorkplug.comA sourcing business that now runs about 85% on its own.
The challenge
The Cork Plug is built on sourcing: a customer asks for a specific pair in a specific size, or a particular bag, and the business goes and finds it. That model is bespoke by definition, and it was manual from end to end. Requests arrived through Instagram DMs, TikTok, a WhatsApp community and the storefront, each one a message to read, a screenshot to save and a conversation to have before anything could be quoted. Turning an approved request into a live product meant building the Shopify listing from scratch every time: downloading and cropping supplier photos, tidying inconsistent backgrounds, typing the title, setting the price, adding size variants and assigning collections. Order status was spread across Shopify, a spreadsheet and the DM threads themselves. Across footwear, clothing, bags, accessories and electronics, and a customer base several hundred reviews deep, the admin had quietly become the job, and the actual sourcing and selling had to fit around it.
What we built
- 01
A dedicated source request portal
We built source.thecorkplug.com so requests come in structured instead of scattered. Customers submit the item, brand, size, colour, budget, reference images and contact details in one form, which produces a single clean record per request. The endless DM back-and-forth before a quote is now mostly unnecessary.
- 02
Image extraction built into the request
Reference images are pulled straight out of a submitted request and filed against the record automatically. Nothing has to be screenshotted, downloaded, renamed and dragged into a folder by hand.
- 03
Draft listings that build themselves
An approved request generates a Shopify draft product with the images, title, price, size variants and collection already in place. Publishing a new item became a review-and-approve step rather than fifteen minutes of form filling.
- 04
Product imagery on a consistent standard
Supplier photos arrive in wildly different shapes and quality, so they now get processed automatically: cropped, backgrounds tidied and sized to the storefront's aspect ratio. The catalogue looks like one shop even though the stock comes from dozens of sources.
- 05
Instagram handles on the order card
Because so much of the business happens on Instagram, each order now carries the customer's handle directly on the order card. A message about an order is one click from the order itself instead of a name search across two apps.
- 06
One order view across every channel
Storefront checkouts, manual orders and sales agreed over DM or WhatsApp all land in the same list with the same status stages. The day's book is one screen instead of three.
- 07
Manual order intake with instant alerts
Sales that never touch the checkout get logged through a manual order form that fires a notification the moment it's submitted, so an order taken in a message thread can't quietly go unnoticed.
- 08
Repeatable bundles and offers
Recurring promotions like the two-for-one-fifty footwear offer are set up as reusable product structures across the men's, women's, bags and accessories collections, so running them again is a switch rather than a rebuild.
- 09
Self-serve tracking
Delivery tracking is wired into the storefront so customers check their own order status instead of messaging to ask, which took a large slice out of the daily message volume.
The result
