About Stella Soomlais
Stella Soomlais is the leather design studio founded by Stella Runnel, who has been designing bags since 2004. Every bag is designed and crafted in Tallinn by Estonian crafters, carries its own serial number and is made to last a lifetime. The studio offers aftercare and repairs, rents out bags, buys them back for resale, and turns the most worn into new Round 2 pieces.
The other half of the business is workshops: more than 120 groups since 2023, in the studio and at companies' offices. Katana's own team has booked them more than once.
The challenge
Every order used to start as a printed order sheet, filled in by hand. That worked at the bench, but each bag added another sheet to a paper archive that would only keep growing. Any business analysis meant digging through paper.
The work itself is varied. Most bags are made to order, many with embossed initials, across more than 2,300 variants. Orders come from the web shop, the studio shop, phone and email, resellers, corporate clients and aftercare customers.
Every bag we make has someone waiting for it. On paper, we could never see all of them at once.
Stella Runnel, Designer and Founder
How Katana helped
Stella Soomlais started using Katana in 2017 as its first pilot customer, while Katana was still in early development. The studio's everyday production and feedback helped shape the product. Since 2021, every bag and accessory made in the studio, along with aftercare and repair work, has gone through Katana.
Today nearly every process in the company runs through the studio's own custom-built application, which integrates around 25 services and platforms with Katana at its core. Katana is the source of truth for production and stock. Around it, the application adds what a small studio needs: an integrated web shop, the shop till, corporate invoicing, parcel delivery and banking, plus the studio's proprietary register of thousands of unique bags and their histories.
- Web and invoice orders become Katana sales orders without retyping.
- One “Make” button checks stock and creates manufacturing orders only for what isn't on the shelf.
- Job cards carry the colour, initials, gift wrapping and delivery method.
- Crafters work from a live production board that reads from and writes to Katana.
- Customers follow their order's status in their own account.
- Shipping closes the Katana sales order automatically.
- Each new bag's serial number is linked to the manufacturing order that made it.
Katana does production and stock very well, and its API lets us connect it to everything that's specific to us. A paid order becomes a job card without anyone typing it in again.
Tõnu Runnel, Systems and Integrations
The results
- No paper archive: the production figures in this story came straight from the studio's Katana account.
- Katana's stock figure decides whether a bag is made or taken from the shelf.
- New bags carry their production history into aftercare, rental and resale.
- With production on Katana, the same small team also runs the workshops, the shop and the circular services.
