Ravenstone sells unique jewelry, thoughtfully curated gifts, and natural wonders to statement-seeking customers, deepening their connection to the everyday magic around them.
Ravenstone began as an Etsy shop run out of a Victorian house in Lynn, Massachusetts — jewelry built from vintage brass shapes, plated locally, photographed and listed one product at a time from a phone.
By the time the founders signed a lease on a storefront a minute from that house, the business had never needed the machinery a store needs. Asked how they tracked inventory, they answered plainly: no system. Stock was judged visually, by how much material was left on the bench. There were no SKUs. There were no barcodes. There were no reports — Etsy showed revenue by date range, and sales tax from markets was reconstructed afterwards from a card-reader export.
None of that is a failure. It is what a maker-run business looks like when the maker is also the buyer, the packer and the shipper. It simply does not survive a cash drawer.
So the work was not migrating a system. It was building the first one.
We designed a SKU structure and naming convention from scratch, then mapped and grouped a catalog that had only ever existed as individual Etsy listings — jewelry that restocks, alongside one-of-one crystals, plants and preserved specimens that do not, tracked separately but held in one place.
Barcode labels had to fit the product rather than the other way round. A pair of earrings sits on a card; a crystal does not. We settled on a single label small enough for a jewelry card and still legible, peelable, and readable by a scanner — one spec for the whole store instead of a different one per category.
Then the hardware, almost all of it new: card reader, stand, cash drawer, receipt printer, barcode scanner, labels, gift cards. Tax rules for the food items that are not taxable. Access for two owners, built so more logins could be added later without rework. Receipts carrying the bird logo.
And a soft-launch week before the doors opened — appointment shopping for local regulars, which doubled as the real test of both the system and the flow of the room.
The store opened on schedule, ringing sales through Shopify POS against one inventory count shared with the online shop.
What the owners were actually asking for underneath the hardware list was data. They wanted the counter to capture an email address and a zip code without slowing anyone down, and they wanted a customer's purchase history to be one record whether it was made in the shop or on the site. That is what a point of sale is for in a business this size. The register is the cheapest customer research a store will ever run.
A first point of sale is not a software project. It is the moment a business writes down how it actually works.
Ravenstone knew their process precisely — which vendor plates which finish, how long a batch takes, which pair gets inspected at which step, the small quartz crystal that goes in the corner of every box. None of it was recorded anywhere. It lived in two people's heads, which is entirely workable until a third person has to ring up a sale.
The SKU structure and the label spec are the visible deliverables. The real one is that the process left those two heads and became something a new employee can be handed. Retail systems get sold on speed at the counter. What they actually buy a founder is the ability to not be in the room.
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