We’re currently working on full documentation for Cobbler for Reps. In the meantime, here are some excerpts from our demo screencast along with short video clips.
Click the links below the text to view the relevant chapter in our longer video, or watch the full screencast below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5hDmuVogZ0
(Ignore the fact that all the video bookmarks below look identical — they are all timestamped and will take you directly to the short excerpt in that section)
Hello!
Jeremy here from Cobbler.
Back in 2007 I started The Jacky Winter Group from a bedroom in a sharehouse in Melbourne. My goal then was to represent the amazing talent of Australian Illustration to the world, and as part of that I wanted to make sure that every single touchpoint of the business from our estimates to our invoices all looked as good as our artists did.
Unfortunately, nothing quite did the trick, and we ended up having to assemble our own ragtag group of tools, but still nothing worked perfectly out of the box. In late 2008 I gave up and found a local Filemaker developer to build us a custom database app which would create beautiful PDF paperwork and help keep everything in one place.
Over the years we continued to refine and develop this tool and built it up slowly over time so it eventually matched all our needs, especially for a commission-based business, something that no other app on the market catered for at the time, especially on the quoting and invoicing side of things.
Today, Jacky Winter is one of the largest artist agencies in the world, managing hundreds of commissions a year across our 100+ represented artists as well as off-roster with a team on three continents. I believe a big part of this growth and sustained success has a lot to do with some of the systems and processes we developed over time which we continued to build into our software during this time.
Faced with an expansion of our offices to the US and UK, combined with the lockdowns of 2020, having a local server-hosted software solution was no longer an option, so we began to rewrite what we referred to internally as JWOS from scratch into a Rails-based web app that could be accessed from anywhere.
What begin as a six month experiment turned into nearly three years of research, design, and development when we discovered that perhaps there was some potential outside of Jacky Winter for a newer generation of agencies to leverage our own tools and systems, and maybe even broader use beyond that.
Cobbler is result of this work and we’re so excited to finally be able to share it.
In this walkthrough I’m going to take you through the main modules of Cobbler to give you a feel for what it does. Seventeen plus years of knowledge is a lot to fit into one place though, so we’ve broken it into chapters and tried to address some of the biggest pain points that we’ve experienced over time, and how Cobbler addresses those, so feel free to skip around to get what you need. You can also use the table of contents up top.
Even still, this will only cover a fraction of what Cobbler can do. We’ve laid out most of this in sequential order of how you might start to work with Cobbler from scratch, but if you want to jump straight into the juicy stuff, you might want to skip the first few chapters and get straight into the Jobs module section.