About
A small studio building the systems most agencies won't.
Cauldron Studio builds custom operational software for work that doesn't fit off-the-shelf tools. That has meant purchasing and inventory systems for specialty e-commerce retail, and coordination software for high-touch group events. We work narrowly, deliberately, and on the parts of an operation people only think about when something breaks.
What we believe
The most valuable e-commerce work is the work nobody sees.
Storefronts get redesigned. Ads get optimized. The purchasing pipeline that determines whether you actually have the product to sell gets inherited from whoever set it up three years ago and never revisited. That imbalance is where we work.
Software is what happens after you understand the problem.
We spend more time mapping current state than writing code. The map is often the most valuable deliverable. It shows people their own operations in a way they have never seen, and it changes the conversation permanently.
Apps are someone else's priorities wearing your logo.
A third-party app serves its own roadmap. When that roadmap diverges from your operations, or the app is deprecated entirely, everything built on top of it disappears. The operational core of a business should be owned by the business.
Tools should be designed for the person who uses them at 6am.
A warehouse manager scanning packing slips. A buyer building purchase orders before the store opens. If the interface is not calm, clear, and fast for that person, the system fails, regardless of what it does technically.
The team that inherits the system matters more than the team that builds it.
We write documentation for the engineer who joins your team in two years and has to extend what we built without talking to us. That standard shapes every decision we make.
Who runs it
Cauldron Studio is run by Gil Calderon.
I think about e-commerce operations the way a product designer thinks about a doorknob. Nobody notices it. Nobody talks about it. Then it fails, and the person standing in the hallway is suddenly ready to put their fist through the entire door.
The interface between a human and a system should be the part that gets the most attention, not the least. Most operational tooling inverts this completely. The data model is fine. The API is correct. The dashboard is an afterthought that someone will stare at for eight hours a day and nobody ever asked whether it needed to be humane.
I came into this work sideways. I have spent time in 3D animation, film, photography, industrial design, and restaurant operations. None of those are e-commerce. All of them trained the same instinct: when something feels wrong in how a person interacts with a system, the system is the problem, not the person. That instinct turns out to be the thing most Shopify implementations are missing.
For several years I have led digital operations at a long-established specialty retailer in New York that ships thousands of SKUs internationally. I oversaw their migration to Shopify, then spent the years after replacing every brittle third-party app with internal tooling that actually fits how the staff works. Supply chain management, AI-powered receiving, an event-sourced reporting pipeline. The tools survived because they were designed around the people using them, not around the data they process.
I am most useful to companies that sell real things. Garments, food, objects, books. Companies where technology is not the product. I build the systems these businesses run on, and I build them with the same care their founders put into the things they sell. Design, development, and operations are one continuous problem. Treating them as three is where most of the damage happens.
If you have read this far, you probably already know what is broken. Tell me about it.
How we engage
The operational specifics of how we work. We've found these patterns serve clients best, but we're flexible where the work demands it.
- Communication
- A shared Slack channel for day-to-day. One 30-minute call per week during active engagements. We don't schedule status meetings.
- Demos
- Working software, every Friday during a Build. You see what we've actually shipped, not slides about what we're going to ship.
- Documentation
- Real, written, version-controlled. You own it on day one. We update it as the system evolves.
- Scope changes
- Always written, always priced, always your decision. No "we just added a few things" surprise invoices.
- Handoff
- Every engagement ends with a handoff session and a 30-day support window. We want the system to outlive our involvement.
Where we are
Cauldron Studio LLC is based in New York. We work with clients across the United States, Canada, and the UK, primarily remotely.
For clients in or near New York, we're happy to spend a day on-site at your warehouse or office during the discovery phase of an engagement. We've found that one good day of in-person mapping is worth a week of Zoom calls.
Got a system that's creaking?
A 30-minute call. A real diagnosis. No pitch deck.
Book a call →Or email us at hello@cauldronstudio.com.