Track Film Drop-Off Volume & Loyalty with Lightweight Automation

Yours, Durham is an analog film development lab based in Durham, North Carolina. They develop 35mm and other film formats for photographers - from hobbyists to professionals - who drop off rolls in person. It's a community-rooted, craft-focused business that grew steadily through word of mouth.

The owner runs everything with a small team. As the film photography revival pushed drop-off volume to record highs, the manual systems that had worked at smaller scale started to crack.

As volume grew to the highest film drop-offs they'd ever seen, the owner was stuck doing everything manually: rebuilding customer history by hand across Google Forms and Sheets, manually estimating who their best customers were, dealing with a buggy date field that sometimes saved submissions with no date at all, and having no clear way to see total rolls per customer over time, just "last order" and "number of visits". This made it nearly impossible to design real loyalty rewards or confidently understand who was driving the most revenue.

We turned their existing Google Form → Google Sheets → Gmail automation into a lean loyalty and analytics engine:

• Fixed core data issues by replacing unreliable date fields and improving email copy
• Added automated lifetime volume tracking with running totals for customer roll counts
• Created automated email flows for loyalty milestones and customer retention
• Built owner-operated system allowing direct campaign edits without developer dependency

The lab eliminated 300+ hours per year of manual tracking, spreadsheet reconciliation, and contextual email management. Every customer now has an accurate lifetime roll count and drop-off history - visible instantly, updated automatically.

A key design constraint shaped the entire build: the owner had no appetite for new software. Everything had to run on Google Forms, Google Sheets, and Gmail - tools they already knew. That constraint wasn't a limitation, it was the brief. The automation made those tools significantly more powerful without adding a single new login.

The system now runs during the lab's record-high volume weeks without friction. And because loyalty milestones are configurable by the owner directly in Sheets, new reward tiers - 50th drop, 100th roll, seasonal campaigns - can be added without a developer.