How I digitized sales for a horse stable manufacturer: the EQUIBOX case
A horse stable factory near Buenos Aires, products with thousands of combinations and quotes built by hand at expos with no signal. How I approached digitizing its sales, piece by piece.
Digitizing a small manufacturer's sales means moving into a system what today depends on paper, spreadsheets and people's memory: how a quote is built, who it was sent to and where it stands. At EQUIBOX, a horse stable manufacturer in Berazategui, near Buenos Aires, Argentina, that ended up being a 3D configurator for its customers, a sales panel for its team and a CRM, all in an app that works even with no signal.
This is the story of how I approached it, told through the decisions rather than the technology.
What was the problem?
EQUIBOX manufactures modular horse stalls and stables. Modular sounds simple, but in practice it is the opposite: every customer chooses how to lay out the stalls (in a row, back to back, or facing each other with an aisle), how many, what sizes, whether to build an L or U shaped plan, which walls are wood and which have bars, which doors, which accessories. And then there is shipping, which depends on where the property is.
With so many combinations, two things happened. Buyers struggled to picture how it would look. And every quote was built by hand, often at a rural expo stand with no internet.
Why start with the quote?
Because it was the bottleneck. A CRM organizes contacts, but if every contact needs a hand-built quote, the problem is still there. The question was: how do we get the customer to understand what they are buying, and the sales rep to quote without redoing the math every time?
The answer was a 3D configurator: a step-by-step wizard where you design the stable and, alongside it, see it in live 3D, with real wood textures and a day and night mode. The 3D is not photos: it is calculated from the dimensions, so any combination can be shown without anyone drawing it.
Show prices or not?
It was one of the most important decisions, and the answer was to have two versions of the same configurator.
The public one shows no prices. The buyer designs their stable, downloads a PDF spec sheet with the 3D and sends the quote request over WhatsApp. EQUIBOX replies with the quote. That way the factory receives requests with the full configuration instead of a “how much is it?”.
The sales one, behind a login, does show prices: coupons, installation and shipping calculated per kilometer, payment method and the sales rep's commission. It generates the PDF quote and the WhatsApp message with the amounts. I covered how those two pieces work in automatic PDF quotes and in how to calculate shipping per kilometer.
What ended up running?
Today EQUIBOX has a system in production with three fronts:
3D configurator, public, at cotizador.equiboxarg.com, in Spanish and English and designed for phones too, with the 3D on top and the form below.
Sales panel, with priced quotes, shipping per kilometer with Google Maps, payment plans, installments and coupons, a CRM with statuses, next contacts and payment tracking, reports with charts, and admin and sales rep roles.
Infrastructure built for the countryside: an installable app that works offline, automatic email alerts on every quote and protected customer data.
See the full case studyHow do you sell at an expo with no signal?
It was a requirement, not an extra: if the system did not work at the stand, quotes at expos would keep being done on paper. That is why it is an installable web app that works offline: quotes are saved first on the device and synced when the signal comes back, without duplicating contacts in the CRM.
There were also details designed for the stand: the 3D is optimized to run smoothly on an iPad, night mode is exaggerated on purpose because it is used in the sun, and the interface uses a single font to load fast on a weak signal. I covered it in detail in an app to sell at expos without internet.
Why is the design so understated?
The interface follows the brand's main website: black, white and grays, nearly square corners and a single font. That was on purpose: the only color on screen comes from the product, the three wood finishes in the 3D (Chocolate, Nórdico and Hormigón). When what you sell looks good, the tool has to get out of the way.
What do I take away from this project?
- Start with the bottleneck. In a factory that makes products to measure, it is almost always the quote.
- Adapt to how they sell, not the other way around. The system did not replace WhatsApp: it uses it.
- Think about where it will be used. A stand in the sun with no signal calls for different decisions than an office.
- If there is a public side, protect it from the start. Anyone can request a quote without an account, so the system decides who can see what and limits how many requests can come from the same place, to keep fake requests out.
- What is built well gets reused. The 3D engine was born here and I extended it in Estructuras 3D, my own demo with sheds, prefab houses and horse stalls.
Could something like this work for your factory?
If you make something to measure, with many combinations, and your quotes are built by hand, probably yes, though not necessarily with every piece EQUIBOX has. I summarized what is worth including in sales system and CRM for manufacturers. To see how I work and what to ask any developer before hiring them, how to choose a web developer in Argentina may help.
And if you want to see the result for yourself, open the EQUIBOX configurator and design a stable; the footer says “Desarrollado y diseñado por Facundo Campo” (designed and developed by Facundo Campo).
Frequently asked questions
What does digitizing a factory's sales mean?
Moving into a system what today depends on paper, spreadsheets and people's memory: how a quote is built, who it was sent to, where it stands and what was collected. It is not about having social media: it is about the sales process running inside a tool.
Where should you start?
With whatever eats up the most time or loses the most sales. At EQUIBOX it was the quote: the products had so many combinations that every quote was built by hand, and buyers struggled to picture the result.
Do you have to change the whole way you work?
No. The system has to adapt to how the factory sells, not the other way around. At EQUIBOX, for example, WhatsApp is still the channel: the system writes the messages and PDFs to send through it.
Can I see the system in action?
The public part, yes: the configurator is at cotizador.equiboxarg.com and anyone can design a stable in 3D. The sales panel is internal, and in my portfolio I only show how it works, with no prices or customer data.
How much does a project like this cost?
It depends on how many pieces it includes (configurator, sales panel, CRM, offline use), how many products and options it has to quote and how many people use it. Tell me how you sell today and I will send you a fixed quote within 48 hours.
Do you make something your customers cannot picture, and quote everything by hand? Tell me what you make and how you sell today, and we will figure out which piece to start with.