The Hypothesis: Industrial Tracking in Retail.
In March 2019, I launched The Purple Furball. On paper, it was a pet grooming service; in reality, it was my operational laboratory. Coming from Festo, I couldn’t tolerate the manual pen-and-paper tracking most small businesses relied on, so I set out to bring industrial-grade tracking into a retail context.
The Build: QR-Based Identity.
I engineered a custom “digital ID” system for every client. Each pet was assigned a physical QR tag that linked directly to a central cloud profile, turning every visit into a structured data event. Under the hood, this was a relational database schema mapped onto real-world foot traffic, not just a cute QR gimmick.
The Result: a single source of truth
The system eliminated roughly 90% of intake friction and finally gave us a single source of truth for customer history and visit patterns. It demonstrated that solid systems architecture is not reserved for factories or large enterprises—it scales down cleanly to a neighborhood grooming shop.