Ash Workwear came to us with a fast-growing book of corporate accounts and a problem: their existing process — branded product PDFs emailed back and forth, ad-hoc orders by phone, account managers chasing approvals in spreadsheets — was buckling under volume. They needed a two-sided portal, fast.
What we built
A two-sided B2B ordering platform with a staff-facing fulfilment dashboard and a client-facing ordering experience, sharing a single source of truth.
Client-facing portal:
- Branded product catalogue per account
- Role-based access — client purchasers, approvers, view-only roles per organisation
- Repeat-order quick add and saved baskets
- Approval workflows for accounts that need them
- Order history, status tracking, account-level reporting
Staff-facing dashboard:
- Order queue with stage tracking (placed, approved, fulfilling, dispatched)
- Account-level CRM with contact history and order patterns
- Catalogue management per client account
- Reporting on monthly spend, popular SKUs, slow-moving stock
Both interfaces sharing the same backend data, both with full audit trails on every privileged action.
Security from day one
Cyber Essentials-aligned security was baked in from the first commit. That means:
- Role-based access control across both portals
- Encrypted data at rest and in transit
- Audit trails on every order, approval and admin action
- Session timeouts and CSRF protections
- Password policy enforcement
- Secure document handling
This wasn't a phase-two consideration. For a B2B portal handling corporate account data and order information, security has to be the floor.
The timeline
Under three weeks from signed scope to live deployment.
That timeline only works because we work to a tight pattern: clear scope upfront, no scope creep mid-build, design and engineering working in parallel rather than waterfall, daily check-ins with the client so blockers surface fast.
What we learned
A few things worth surfacing publicly:
Two-sided portals are scope-disciplined or they're nothing.
Trying to ship "everything everyone might want" is how three-week builds become six-month ones. We agreed a strict v1 scope and pushed nice-to-haves to a v2 backlog.
B2B users are forgiving of UI polish, intolerant of broken workflow.
A B2C consumer expects beauty. A B2B account purchaser expects the order to go through reliably. We focused engineering effort on workflow reliability over visual finesse — both got attention, but the priority was correct.
Audit trails earn their keep on day two.
When the first client query came through about a missed approval step, the audit log resolved it in 90 seconds. That single feature pays for itself within the first month of operations.
What it looks like now
The portal is the daily operations hub for Ash Workwear's B2B business. Orders flow through it, account managers work from it, clients self-serve where they used to need a phone call. The phone calls that do happen are now about consultative work, not order placement.
What this kind of build typically costs
Two-sided B2B portals are bespoke pricing — typically £6,500-£12,000 depending on integration depth and number of distinct workflows. AGP's AI-augmented education platform sits higher because of the AI work; pure ordering portals are at the lower end.
If you're considering something similar, the 10-minute call is the cheapest way to find out whether your situation lines up.
A note from the Bloomorbit studio
We build bespoke B2B portals for UK businesses from our Cardiff studio. See more on the Portfolio page or read up on what's possible in our Portals & Platforms overview.