Quint and the Studio

Problem

Adding a vehicle in typical dealer software means facing 40 or more fields on one screen, and the VIN decoders behind them leave most of those fields empty. Small lots skip the structure entirely and paste everything into the description: equipment, highlights, and selling points in one block of text. Buyers get listings that are hard to scan, colours that just say “Black,” and pages that search engines can’t read well.

The constraint was the data itself. Canadian vehicle-data providers are slow, inconsistent and incomplete, and many publish no schema at all. We were asked to build inventory management. The real problem was that one vehicle record serves two audiences who need very different things from it.

Key decisions

I. Write our own standard

We audited competitor CRMs and consumer marketplaces, and found the same gap everywhere: the industry has no real standard for what to show on a vehicle or how to show it. Following any one provider meant inheriting its gaps. So we made a quick decision that everything else rests on: we’d write our own streamlined standard, and we named it Quint.

II. Split one record into two views

Quint’s first job was to decide what a vehicle record holds, and who it’s for. The CRM audit defined the dealer record, the marketplace audit defined what buyers need, and we pruned on a whiteboard until each field earned its place. The dealer record has 66 fields. The buyer summary has 15: year, make, model, trim, price, photos, colours, doors, seating, odometer, engine and transmission. Everything else sits in an expandable section near the bottom.

III. Make entering data a human experience

I designed the Studio’s flows and every screen. A VIN decode fills year, make and model in about half a second, and choosing a trim fills up to 30 more fields. Each step opens with a plain-language question, so the dealer is checking answers instead of typing them. Editing an existing vehicle shows the same cards on one scrolling page, because people editing want to jump straight to one field.

IV. Go beyond the VIN

Given how many CRMs pop up every few months, we knew we had to take this data standardizing opportunity to go above and beyond what the market offers. There is no better example of that than our OEM colour swatch system, loaded upon a VIN decode.

For customers, the OEM colours are the accurate vehicle colour and are displayed with material textures (leather, suede, cloth), detected from the name. For SEO and online listing filters, each manufacturer colour maps to a list of industry standard generic colours, so that a customer who may want a Nardo BMW discovers it when filtering for Grey vehicles.

V. Make listing and syncing vehicles just as effortless

A vehicle needs to be listed across different platforms and ideally that means it appears the same everywhere. So, we extended the idea of making running a dealership effortless to how vehicles are listed and synced across various platforms, such as CarGurus. Write a single Listing Copy and set the vehicle as listed or unlisted, we handle the rest; listings can be overridden per-platform for those who want it.

Result

The Studio and the buyer views are in daily use by our customers who say it’s the easiest inventory management platform they have used thus far.

Every Studio step has an optimized and digestible amount of fields

50+ fields → to 5 well-defined sets

Vehicle fields filled from a single VIN

32+decodes

From the full vehicle record to the summary buyers read

66 → to 15fields

What I’d do differently

Measure from day one. We know the Studio is faster, but we never timed the old process, so there’s no before figure.
Bring buyers into the audit directly. The customer view came from marketplaces and dealer feedback, not from watching buyers use it.