07 — Servaali · Columbia Road · Helsinki

Designing for a bar manager at closing time

Lead design consultant on a B2B mobile ordering system for one of Finland's largest drinks importers — brand, UX and product design, built on a custom microservices backend.

Industry
Beverage import & distribution — B2B commerce, Finland
Role
Lead Design Consultant — Creative Direction · Brand & Visual Identity · UX & Product Design
Scope
User research, mobile ordering UX, design language, visual identity, back-ordering & stock control
Team
A two-person core — me on design, one engineer on the build
Stack
Custom microservices, integrated with Epicor, MEG and PIM
Case study
Columbia Road write-up →
Website
servaali.fi →
Timeframe
6 months
The Challenge

A whole industry ordering by phone call and fax

Restaurants and bars across Finland were ordering their wine and beer manually — and Servaali had almost no visibility into any of it.

Every order was a phone call or a form. That meant no live stock picture, no reliable sales funnel, and a purchasing process that took a bar manager's time at exactly the hour they had least of it.

The business goals were plain: bigger average orders, more repeat orders, automatic processing internally, and a brand that felt current next to competitors. The design problem underneath was harder — this had to be genuinely faster than picking up the phone, or nobody would switch.

Servaali mobile ordering interface — product detail with pricing and stock
Servaali ordering interface — product list and cart
The Move

Go and watch them order Then design around the account, not the product

I ran in-person interviews with restaurant and bar managers across Helsinki, in their venues, watching how ordering actually happened.

What came back reshaped the whole thing. These aren't browsing customers — they reorder the same things, in volume, under time pressure. So the interface had to favour speed and repetition over discovery: fast reordering, clear pricing excluding VAT, live availability, and a back-ordering and stock control system that replaced the manual workflow entirely.

Alongside the UX I created the visual identity and a scalable design language for the system. The frontend was the simple half; the weight sat in the backend, so I worked closely with engineering as we built a custom microservices architecture — separate services for customer data, availability, product information and ordering, integrated with Servaali's existing ERP and pricing systems. Prototypes went into real customers' hands early, then bi-weekly sprints, then a beta group of restaurants before the wider rollout.

The Work

01 — User Research

In-person interviews with restaurant and bar managers, watching real ordering sessions.

02 — Mobile Ordering UX

Designed for speed and repetition — fast reordering, live availability, clear pricing.

03 — Visual Identity & Design Language

Created a scalable identity and design system for the whole product.

04 — Back-Ordering & Stock Control

Designed the system that replaced Servaali's manual stock workflow.

Servaali ordering system — interface screens across devices
The Outcome

A manual process, retired and a system still running the business

Every client moved across. The platform became central to how Servaali sells, and the design language later stretched to cover their brewery operations too.

Customers noticed the difference in what they bought, not just how they bought it — a restaurant manager told Servaali they'd started ordering from product categories they'd never reached before, simply because those categories were now easy to find.

Built to grow, as well. A monitoring dashboard let the client spot errors and gaps themselves, and the architecture was deliberately modular so new services could be added without disturbing what already worked. The design later became a white-label solution, reused as the foundation for other ordering platforms beyond Servaali.

All clients
Migrated from manual ordering to the new platform.
21
Custom microservices, designed and shipped with engineering.
6 months
Research through to live platform.
Still live
Now central to Servaali's B2B operations, extended to brewery.
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