Meet Dries. Dries does a lot at Dauby. Photography, design, marketing, and project management. He takes on the kind of role that only works when you've been working with a company for 20 years and actually care about the work. Which makes bad tools especially painful.

"We had our catalogue with thousands of products in one system, the website in another, and they had to talk to each other," he explains. Except they didn't really talk. More like shout across a room and hope the message got through.

Every product update was a gamble. Would it sync? Would it break something? How long would it take? The search function had basically become decorative. Making a new page meant filing a ticket, waiting for design, going back and forth. For a business selling to architects and interior designers, people who tend to notice when things don't work elegantly, it was getting embarrassing. Luckily, Dries knew just who to call: Gho- No. Dashdot!

The "let's just do it" approach

Most website rebuilds begin with requirements documents and stakeholder workshops. This one started with the hardest problem.

"In the first phase, we didn't even think about design," Dries says. "We just focused on getting the product database connected properly. Can we test it? Does it actually work? Let's find out."

There's something refreshing about skipping the theater and building the thing. No mockups of the product sync. No presentations about database architecture. Just: here's the connection, try to break it.

It worked. Which meant they could actually start to think about everything else without that technical debt hovering in the background.

Building a website someone actually wants to use

The content management was next. Dries likes to move fast. New collections, project showcases, blog posts, and the occasional emergency update. The old system made that annoying, challenging and expensive.

"I wanted blocks I could actually work with," he says. "Take a section, copy it, paste it somewhere else, change what needs changing. Not needing to file a ticket every time."

And we built exactly that. Photo galleries that resize properly on mobile. Text layouts that let you put images where they make sense. A search that shows suggestions as you type (which is surprisingly hard when you have 250,000 products) and feels surprisingly delightful when it works.

His team picked it up immediately. "Way faster than the old system," Dries notes. The complaints from users? "They're just not there anymore."

The boring part that matters

Here's what usually doesn't make it into case studies: the working relationship. Monthly check-ins. Questions answered right away in Slack. Tickets that get planned and actually done. No drama, no surprises, no "sorry we're too busy with other clients."

"It just works with Dashdot," Dries says. Which sounds underwhelming until you've been burned by agencies that disappear for weeks or developers who need everything explained three times.

Years of working together mean Dries can say "I need this" and not worry about whether it'll happen. The budget conversation was straightforward. The timeline was realistic. The process was transparent. And that’s why our collaboration is so successful.

What happens when your tools don't fight you

Dauby is managing flawlessly now. Their website is no longer a ‘job-to-be-done’, leaving room for other things. Strategic moves are being planned. Video content in the works. The website isn't the bottleneck anymore.

"I can focus on what I want to do instead of fighting technical setbacks," he says.

That's the real story. No dramatic transformation, just tools that finally work as well as the furniture fittings Dauby sells. Which, if you've ever been stuck with bad tools, sounds pretty good.