Roger's Shoe Repairs

Executive Summary

A frictionless digital service layer that unlocked 14 hours of craft time per week.

As the Lead Service Designer, I co-designed a three-phase digital and service roadmap to transition Roger's Shoe Repairs to its next generation of ownership under Roger's son, Nathan. By launching an agile, two-week live operational pilot utilising an AI-assisted custom internal tool, we validated that introducing a digital service layer could unlock significant capacity for core craft production while driving a measurable increase in customer loyalty.

The Strategic Context

A 4.8-star reputation trapped behind an analog ceiling.

Operating in the inner-city fringe of Sydney, Roger's Shoe Repairs possesses an enviable competitive moat: a 4.8-star Google rating built organically across 246 customer reviews. Yet despite deep brand equity, the business was constrained by a critical operational ceiling.

The Offline Bottleneck

Transactions, inventory tracking, and order notifications were entirely analog — managed via handwritten paper stubs. Customers experienced variable wait times upon entry, frequently needing to shout to the back room because Roger and Nathan were deep in manual labour.

The Demographics Misalignment

While Redfern has rapidly gentrified into an affluent hub of tech professionals and young creatives, Roger's marketing model relied entirely on passive physical foot traffic and local word-of-mouth. Competitors with full digital presence were closing the gap.

Image courtesy Steven Siewert

Service Blueprint

One blueprint, three breakdown zones, three moves.

I mapped the whole system end to end — physical evidence, customer action and emotion, front and back stage, the technology layer, and time. Today sits on the left; scroll across the transformation seam to watch each zone heal and see where Next and Later attach.

Three breakdown zones became the roadmap.

Reading the blueprint top-to-bottom didn't just locate the friction — it sequenced the response into three moves: Now, Next, Later. Each zone mapped cleanly onto a move, and the most acute one became the pilot.

Pilot Results

Within the first seven days, the results were clear.

The system was deployed as a live operational pilot inside the shop, running alongside the paper stubs it was designed to complement rather than replace.

By proactively closing the communication loop, we transformed dead administrative time into profitable bench-crafting capacity.

Impact

From verified pilot to projected growth trajectory.

The performance data is benchmarked into a clear impact matrix, bridging verified pilot results with modelled commercial outcomes.

If I Were Iterating Today

Designing for stakeholder readiness, not just the end user.

This project highlighted a foundational principle of high-maturity service design: user research must extend beyond the end-user to account for stakeholder readiness. During our initial ethnographic enquiries, it became apparent that Roger experienced high friction regarding digital adoption. The physical, tactile touchpoints — including the handwritten yellow carbon stubs — were fundamentally tied to his professional identity and 60 years of community trust.

Forcing a radical digital overhaul on Roger would have resulted in high operational churn. We reframed the roadmap not as an operational overhaul for Roger, but as a succession product suite for Nathan.

Recognising this, I sequenced the roadmap so Roger could keep working exactly as he always had, with nothing new to relearn — and built the digital layer for Nathan, his son and successor.

I would explore non-intrusive service bridges that respect Roger's values. Rather than deprecating the physical yellow stubs immediately, an OCR scanning module built into the tablet interface would allow Roger to continue his trusted, tactile front-stage ticket creation while automatically populating Nathan's digital back-stage CRM. This approach balances human-centric empathy with scalable system design.