AI automation in Stoke-on-Trent
The World Capital of Ceramics knows exactly what industrial transformation feels like — the Potteries have lived through it for three hundred years. Today’s heritage brands and manufacturers compete on quality and story; the admin behind both is what we automate.
Ref 01 · Surveyed local economy
The local picture
Stoke’s ceramics lineage runs from local clay and coal to names the whole world knows: Wedgwood, Portmeirion, Moorcroft, Emma Bridgewater, Spode, Royal Doulton. The industry that employed around 79,000 people at its 1948 peak now employs fewer than 10,000 across roughly 30 working factories — survival has meant becoming leaner, more branded and more direct-to-consumer.
The wider city adds scale: Royal Stoke University Hospital is among the area’s largest employers, Staffordshire University anchors the education sector, and Rolls-Royce and JCB run engineering and supply-chain operations in the area.
For the makers, the modern battle is fought in order books, stockists’ portals, product content and customer messages. Handmade product; hand-typed admin. Only one of those is a virtue.
Ceramics & heritage brands
Trade orders, stockist onboarding and D2C content — brand-critical work that automation can feed without flattening the brand voice.
Manufacturing & engineering
Works orders, quality documentation and supplier flows around the area’s engineering operations — structured data waiting to be treated as such.
Visitor & retail economy
Factory shops, tours and seasonal retail generating enquiry and booking admin that a well-built pipeline absorbs quietly.
Ref 02 · Where automation earns its keep here
What we’d automate in Stoke-on-Trent
Brand content in the maker’s own voice
Product stories, listings and social output generated from a brand’s real materials — with the grounding guards we engineered into PostBear so nothing invented ever ships under a heritage name.
Trade orders without the retyping
Stockist purchase orders and portal exports parsed into production planning and invoicing automatically, validated against the catalogue, exceptions surfaced to a person.
Kiln to customer, connected
Production tracking, stock, D2C storefronts and trade accounts joined so a firing’s output flows through every system without being typed twice.
Ref 03 · Proof, not promises
The relevant work
We prove capability with systems we’ve actually built — described from their codebases, with no invented clients or results.
PostBear — a month of social content from one URL
Grounded brand-content automation with real API publishing — built for exactly the brand-sensitive output Stoke’s makers need.
Laravel · React · OpenRouter
Index W3 · Workshop build · internal toolingApplicant tracking on Trello for a logistics recruiter workflow
Order-and-pipeline automation layered onto everyday tools — the pattern a pottery’s trade desk would actually adopt.
Next.js · Supabase · Deno Edge Functions
Ref 04 · Working with us from Stoke-on-Trent
The practical bit
We’re forty-five miles away in Derby, straight across on the A50 — close enough for regular on-site days in the Potteries. There’s no Stoke office behind this page, and we’d rather tell you that than invent one.
Every project starts the same way regardless of postcode: an email describing the workflow, a straight answer about whether automation fits, then a scoped survey before any build. How we work →
Automating something in Stoke-on-Trent?
Describe the workflow in plain words — you’ll get a straight answer from the engineer who’d build it.
Email [email protected]