Launching Hubventory
Learn how The Boutique Hub partnered with Tighten to develop & launch a specialized web app to revolutionize the way boutique owners choose and manage their product inventory.
Tighten partnered with The Boutique Hub to develop Hubventory, an innovative app that helps boutique owners easily discover reputable brands and manage store inventory in one streamlined platform.
Boutique development
The Boutique Hub, started in 2013, has for years been known as the largest industry resource for boutique owners seeking community, training, and strategic business support. In 2019 they saw their members struggling without a convenient, standard way to select, stock, and manage inventory for their retail shops. The Boutique Hub was determined to develop a solution that reinforced the support they sought to provide their members.
Ben Holmen, The Boutique Hub’s CTO, began by outlining a concept for a new marketplace app that would centralize boutique purchasing for individual retailers. He understood that, as things currently were, boutique owners had to personally establish individual relationships with manufacturers to find reputable, high-quality brands and to make selections for their stores—all while balancing the mental load of running a business. What they needed was a way to facilitate building and managing the relationships and ordering with these manufacturers to make product discovery and purchasing easier. Enter Hubventory, a first-of-its-kind app designed to help Hub members manage inventory, connect with trusted brands, and select products more efficiently, all in one platform.
With Ben’s PHP experience, he determined that Laravel was the best choice to get their app off the ground quickly, and he initially began development on Hubventory on his own. Like many CTOs do during similar times, he acted as combination developer-and-project manager. On his own, Ben got about 20% of the way through building the app.
But after getting feedback from his team, he soon realized that the ambition of the project brought its own set of challenges. Building and launching a complex Laravel app at the scale he envisioned—one that would support The Boutique Hub’s 6,000+ boutique members and hundreds of thousands of inventory items—required greater resources and in-depth Laravel experience than a team of one could provide. Building an in-house development team from scratch while tackling the demands of an ambitious new product would be costly and time-consuming, and continuing the work on his own wasn’t sustainable. The stakes were high to get this project done just right, so that’s why Ben turned to Tighten.
Ben understood that this project would require expert guidance on both the architectural decisions and day-to-day development, and he wanted to be actively involved throughout the process. He was dedicated to learning, and from his earliest technical advising sessions with Keith, our Director of Engineering, he shared that he was open to revisiting and rewriting his previous work if it meant launching a more stable product. Throughout these collaborative sessions, Keith guided Ben through decisions on infrastructure, scalability, and key API integrations like Stripe and Shopify.
From there, Tighten performed a thorough audit of the existing code and moved forward with a collaborative plan to define the next product phases. Our team listened to Ben’s vision and took the time to learn about the needs of The Boutique Hub’s customers, ensuring we built a solution that aligned with the way boutique owners work. Tighten provided Ben with not just technical mentorship, but also with flexible, embedded development support. Our developers worked alongside first Ben, then eventually with The Boutique Hub’s new in-house development team, to architect a scalable app, write clean code, and institute Laravel best practices. And in the end, we brought Hubventory to life.
Thanks to The Boutique Hub’s willingness to invest in a collaborative partnership and Tighten’s approach to embedded development support, Hubventory moved from “early stage concept” to “launched web app” in half the expected time. We tackled each phase of Hubventory’s development by adjusting the size of our team as the project evolved, fluctuating between two and four programmers throughout the engagement. In addition to the hands-on work of launching Hubventory, Tighten mentored The Boutique Hub’s team, offering advice on hiring, team structure, and building a framework of reliable development processes long into the future. With Tighten’s guidance, The Boutique Hub built a more resilient, more capable, and more confident in-house engineering team that was well-equipped to take over day-to-day development of Hubventory.
Through the launch of Hubventory, The Boutique Hub successfully resolved a critical pain point for the boutique owners they sought to help in the first place, giving them the tools to more easily select stock and manage inventory so they could focus on growing their own small businesses.
If you’ve found yourself in a position similar to Ben’s, we’d love to help. Reach out to learn how Tighten can build or rescue your web app or dev team by submitting our Contact form or emailing us at
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