Daydream Made
Daydream Made
An idea — a ‘blind date’ product matchmaker — built into a working system the team runs themselves.
The Problem
Daydream Made runs a small-batch product business with a twist: instead of browsing and choosing, customers answer a few questions and get matched to the right item — more of a “blind date” than a checkout. Lovely idea; behind the scenes it ran on spreadsheets held together by hand.
Product details lived in one sheet, inventory in another, and the matching logic — which product fit which set of answers — lived mostly in someone’s head. Every new drop meant entering the same information three times: once in the spreadsheet, once in Shopify, and once in the tool that generated the matches. Nothing talked to anything else, so a single price change risked three versions of the truth — and the busywork grew with every product added.
What Was Built
One connected pipeline, with Airtable as the operational brain the team actually opens day to day:
- Airtable holds the single source of truth for products, attributes, and the matching rules — a familiar, spreadsheet-like view the team edits without touching code.
- Shopify stays in sync automatically. When a product is added or changed in Airtable, an automation pushes the details and inventory to the storefront — entered once, reflected everywhere.
- The matchmaker, a small AI service hosted on Railway, reads the rules straight from Airtable and generates each customer’s match, removing the manual step entirely.
- A complete handoff package — a recorded walkthrough, a one-page map of how the pieces fit, and a “what to do if something breaks” guide — so the team owns and runs the whole thing.
See the live matchmaker at matchmaker.daydreammade.com.
What Changed
Launching a new drop used to be an afternoon of copy-paste across three places. Now it’s a few minutes of editing one Airtable view; the storefront updates itself and the matching runs on its own. The data lives in one place, so there’s one version of the truth instead of three.
Most importantly, it runs without us. The team manages products, prices, and inventory themselves — no developer in the loop, no dependency. Which is exactly the point.