Why a UK wholesaler ended up building (and selling) its own software
We didn't set out to build software. We set out to stop losing an afternoon a week to admin. This is how that turned into Grafto.
The itch
Green & Home Ltd trades wholesale and retail through Linnworks. A couple of years back, I timed one of our reps taking a trade order over the phone. Twelve line items, eight minutes — most of it spent hunting for the right price for that specific customer in a spreadsheet.
Multiply that across a day, a week, a year, and it's real money. Worse, the manual lookups meant mistakes — the occasional line priced wrong, always in the direction that cost us margin.
The build
I looked for something to fix it. Everything on the market was either a £500-a-month retail POS built for high-street shops, or a dev shop quoting five figures to "customise" an old plugin. Nothing fit a UK wholesaler running on Linnworks.
So we built Trade Order POS for ourselves. Then, because the same pricing chaos was still there underneath, B2B Price Tiers. Then a robot to chase the quotes we kept forgetting. Each one paid for itself inside our own business before it ever became a product.
Why sell it
Once a tool works for you, and you know thousands of other businesses have the identical problem, keeping it to yourself feels daft. So we cleaned them up, priced them fairly, and put them under one roof: Grafto.
We're not a venture-backed software startup guessing at your problems from an office. We're an operator that had your problem, built the fix, and is now sharing it. That's the whole pitch.
Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.