Helen Crowe
Helen spent twelve years on womenswear trading desks in Manchester and London before settling in Pembrokeshire. She writes the category reviews and still prefers a printed grid over a projector.
Practice
Three people who still print the grid.
System Craftbase is a small reporting practice in Merrion. We write merchandising reviews for catalogues that already trade online. The studio exists because trading meetings kept asking for charts that named listings, not for another screen to log into.
Origin
Helen Crowe left a Manchester womenswear desk after years of rebuilding the same Sunday-night conversion tables. She moved to Pembrokeshire, kept taking files from former colleagues, and found that a posted PDF was more useful than a shared workbook that went stale by Tuesday.
James Pell joined after a catalogue trading role where the Monday meeting always started late because the charts were still being pasted. Priya Nair came from buying administration, tired of range meetings that ignored last season’s size-curve failures.
How we work
We read exports, walk the live category pages, and write. Visualisation means charts with captions, not a wall of unexplained lines. Recommendations are merchandising moves: reorder tiles, restore a lifestyle photograph, chase a size, delay a markdown. Clients keep their own shop, their own photography studio, their own agency if they have one.
Values that actually constrain us
One category at a time on the flagship review. No customer names in files we store. No claim we cannot attach to a listing. If the numbers are messy, the briefing says so on page one instead of smoothing them into a single percentage.
People
James Pell
James prepares the fortnightly conversion packs. He previously sat in Monday trading meetings for a multi-category catalogue and learned to put the listing name above the percentage.
Priya Nair
Priya works with buyers ahead of range freeze, attaching last season’s sell-through and size-curve gaps to the proposed buy. She trained in buying administration before moving into reporting.