A designed concept for a custom cake-business operations app. Built from a decade of running one myself — not from outside the industry looking in. The screens, the math, the design decisions are everything I wished existed when I was undercharging for my own work.
I spent the last decade running a bakery. I also spent the last decade undercharging for it. Confection is the operational scaffolding that fixes that — not a product I designed to fill a portfolio.
I'm the market for this app. After ten years inside the industry, I can name the four issues that eat real bakeries — and none of them are generic SaaS pain points.
Quotes don't start in software. They start as Instagram DMs, move to text, then email, then back to Instagram when the client remembers a detail. By the time the baker sits down to write the quote, half the conversation lives in screenshots and half lives in her head. Details get lost. Dates get double-booked.
A complex custom cake takes thirty to forty-five minutes to price properly. Cost of goods scaled to the gram. Hourly labor including consultation, shopping, sketching, dishes. Complexity multipliers. Then the client says "I can get that at the grocery store for thirty bucks" and disappears.
Spreadsheets are only as accurate as their data. Butter, eggs, vanilla, flour — these prices move every week. Most pricing tools require manual updating, and most bakers do not have time to maintain a spreadsheet on top of running a kitchen.
CakeBoss for costing. HoneyBook for contracts. Hotplate for pre-orders. Square for payments. A spreadsheet for the rest. The honest answer for what most bakers use today is a pen, a calculator, and a lot of Instagram screenshots. Anything new has to be radically better, or it gets abandoned.
I didn't design Confection from outside the industry. I designed it from inside.
An interactive concept walk-through. Eight screens, real pricing math, real interaction logic. Violet for labor — because labor is the craft, not a cost to apologize for. Pink for high attention — complexity, priority, urgency. The pricing engine recalculates on every input.
Move through the sidebar to walk the eight screens. Toggle Returning ↔ New on Order Intake to see the intelligence panel shift posture. The pricing engine on Technical Specs runs live — numbers move on every input.
Open full appEach color carries an argument. Putting labor in the brand violet says it plainly: labor is the thing the client is paying for. Not a cost to apologize for. The craft.
Primary action, default state, brand expression. The Internal Quote highlights labor in violet because labor is the craft, not a problem.
Complexity warnings, urgency, Priority status. The Sculpted tile is pink. The Priority badge is pink. It says: this is the hard one.
Body text. Off-white pages. Pure white cards with hairline borders. The frame the work sits inside, never competing with it.
A violet gradient hero box sits at the top of the Internal Quote, showing the percentage of every cake that actually belongs to the baker after materials, labor, and overhead. This is the screen I needed to see eight years ago. Most pricing tools hide this number. Confection makes it the first thing you see.
The pricing engine breakdown highlights the Labor row in violet — the brand color, the primary color, the color of action. The complexity surcharge badge sits inside that row in pink, doing the work of explaining why labor costs what it costs. The craft is the cost. That argument lives in one row of a table.
Toggle to Returning and the intelligence panel surfaces lifetime value, order history, and social context: "Welcome back, Reyes. 9 months since your last order. They usually book 3 weeks out." Toggle to New and it surfaces source attribution and date-conflict detection that suggests alternative dates. Same data shape, two postures.
The Internal Quote shows profit margin, labor breakdown, complexity multipliers — every honest number a baker needs. The Client-Facing Quote is the inverse: a concept render, a poetic two-line headline, a single price, one approve button. Same underlying data. Completely different posture. The hardest design move in the whole app.
Every card on the Production Grid leads with Order Value, because money is the point. Priority cards get a pink left border for at-a-glance scanning. A one-tier sculpted card outranks a three-tier plain card, because complexity is what makes work hard — not size.
Active orders, quotes pending, priority count. Production preview by stage. Alerts banner for priority orders falling behind.
Two intake modes. Returning surfaces lifetime value and history. New surfaces source attribution and date-conflict detection.
Shape, tiers, servings, flavor, structural requirements, complexity. The estimate flickers on every input. The math is real.
The screen this whole app is built around. Violet hero box. Full breakdown. The percentage that actually belongs to the baker.
Four signals — complexity, relationship gap, tier count, event stakes — recommend whether to schedule a 30-minute call. Visible reasoning.
Concept render. Poetic headline. Single price. One approve button. No internal numbers. Same data, completely different face.
Every card leads with Order Value. Priority badge in pink. Priority cards get a pink left border. Complexity ranks above size.
Empty state. Network error with retry and a real error code. A 404.html deployed alongside, because real software has dead ends.
Real software has empty states, network errors, and broken links. That's where users actually live. These are what separate a prototype that looks like an app from one that acts like one.
A clear call to action — Start your first intake — instead of a blank screen. The empty state earns its keep by reducing the cost of the first move.
The draft is saved. A calm error appears. A retry button. A small error code at the bottom — the kind of polish that signals real software.
A real 404.html deployed alongside the app, so anyone hitting a bad URL sees a branded screen instead of a dead end.
Confection is a designed concept. Not a launched product. The reasoning behind every screen comes from a decade of running a cake business — the part of the job that didn't have software.