Baumit — a leading European building-materials company — needed an internal shop where 100+ field employees could order branded workwear and equipment against individual budgets. A custom-coded attempt had proven hard to use, and off-the-shelf e-commerce couldn't handle the two things that mattered most: per-employee budgets and authenticated, employee-only access.
The problem
The requirements ruled out the obvious tools. The system had to:
- restrict the shop to registered employees, each with an individual budget limit;
- give admins control to adjust budgets per user;
- show every employee a personal dashboard of spend and orders;
- calculate dynamically across varied packaging and product sizes;
- generate branded PDF order summaries with custom fields (like print positions).
The combination of personalized budgets, user-specific dashboards, and admin controls proved challenging for traditional e-commerce solutions.
The approach
Rather than force it into a shop platform, we built it as a no-code application on Softr over an Airtable back end — the data model the business actually needed, with a real interface on top. Access, roles and budgets became data, not custom code.
What we built
- Filtered shop views so only registered employees see the shop, each scoped to their own budget.
- A shopping cart with live budget tracking and real-time packaging and inventory calculations.
- An admin dashboard to manage users and adjust budgets.
- Conditional forms that render a custom view per user.
- Branded PDF order summaries via DocsAutomator, delivered through Gmail.
The result
The app went live and was in real use across the company within weeks.
- 100+ employees onboarded
- 2,500+ orders placed in the first five weeks
- €600,000 in merchandise ordered through the system
The team's verdict: "a huge improvement over what we had before — much more efficient."
This is the pattern we repeat: a clear data model, a permissioned interface, and the boring parts (auth, roles, budgets, documents) solved once and kept running.