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Best Structure for Handmade Product Orders

Topic Labels: Base design
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Ashley_Jackson
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Hello all, I am selling handmade items and want to track these orders via AT. Here’s what I’ve got:

Orders are made up of Products with specific Styles & Materials
Products are made up of Styles & Material Types
Styles dictate how many and each type of Materials needed and Amount of Time to Create
Materials dictate Cost of Supplies

So I created the following tables with field setups (simplified to relevant fields):

Custom Orders

  • Link to Product
  • Link Style
  • Length
  • Labor Cost
  • Materials Cost
  • Link to Materials

Products

  • Name
  • Sample Pics
  • Category
  • Link to Styles

Styles

  • Style Name
  • Time to Create (min / Length)
  • Core 1 (In)
  • Core 2 (In)
  • Core 3 (In)
  • Core 4 (In)
  • Accent 1 (In)
  • Accent 2 (In)
  • Accent 3 (In)
  • Accent 4 (In)

Materials

  • Brand
  • Color
  • Cost / In

So, here’s what I want to achieve:

Real life scenario: I’m creating paracord products for pets and humans. Each paracord project is designed in a specific style (ie. Fishtail Braid, Corkscrew, etc.) and customers can choose their style as well as the colors used in it. Each style allows for a max number of colors depending on the construction. All styles use a combination of Core and Accent cords. For instance, a fishtail bracelet can be made with 1 or 2 colors. I keep a running list of Materials I have in stock as well as Styles I have mastered and which cords are required for each Style’s setup. I have also calculated out the length of cord per length of bracelet as well as the time per length of bracelet it takes to make each Style.

When recording a new order, I’ll enter customer details, etc. as well as choose a Style. From there I’d like to be able to assign materials to the needed cord types and have AT calculate the length of each, the cost of each, and the amount of time to create the project.

I believe the formulas would look something like this:

[Style > Core 1 (In), etc] * [Custom Order > Length] = Material Amount
[Material > Cost / In] * [Custom Order > Length] = Material Cost
[Style > Time to Create] * [Custom Order > Length] = Time to Create

The problem I keep running into is finding the best way to assign different combinations of material types to each Style and then assigning specific Materials to each of those Material Types for a custom order.

I don’t feel like I’m explaining this very well lol. Let me just share the Base so you can see what I’ve done so far.

Read Only Link to Base, no personal info is shared: https://airtable.com/shriIdjocqASm7z9q

1 Reply 1

Hi @Ashley_Jackson,

I’m not going to dive into your specifics here, but I did want to point you to a base I published in Universe that may provide some guidance on structures you could follow or emulate:

If you did in to that, you may find some helpful patterns to incorporate into your base, or may even be able to just adapt this base to meet your needs.

Hope it’s helpful!