Aoba Pictures shoots commercials and branded documentaries with a crew of 24. Between two storage floors, a van kit, and rotating freelancers, gear management used to be one person's entire job. Here's how they run it on Werp™ today.
Aoba Pictures is a mid-size production company: cinema cameras, a wall of lenses, lighting, audio, grip (roughly 700 items once you count every cable and V-mount battery). Shoots overlap, kits leave the building weekly, and freelance crew join for days at a time.
Before Werp™, the inventory lived in a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, and the equipment manager's memory. It worked, until two shoots landed on the same weekend.
Growth exposed the cracks: bookings clashed, prep lists were rebuilt from scratch for every shoot, and nobody could say which gear was company-owned and which belonged to individual crew members.
The old Excel register went in as it was: a quick check of the column matches, then import. For gear with a model code, Fill in with WerpAI™ added photos and product-page links, plus descriptions for models already in the catalog. Accessories were scanned in by barcode. What was budgeted as a week of data entry took one afternoon.
Producers book gear per shoot, with the project name and purpose on every booking and a takeout flag for location days. Conflicts now surface at planning time, weeks out, not on the morning of the call. Return reminders chase late gear automatically.
Every case and body carries a QR label. Crew scan it with their phones and check gear out from the page that opens. Tablets in kiosk mode by the edit suite and studio doors let freelancers without an account see when each room is free and book it on the spot. Every action lands in the activity history.
Bookings are written to Google Calendar, so the production calendar shows which kit is out on which job, with no separate tool to check.
Each quarter the team scans through storage in stocktake mode and gets a discrepancy report. The first run surfaced 12 items that had been quietly 'missing' for months. The full check-out and check-in history answers 'who had it last?' in one click.
Plenty of gear at Aoba belongs to individuals: a DP's vintage prime set, an editor's SSDs, a personal drone. Werp™ lets each item's owner be set to a specific user, not just the workspace, so personal gear lives in the same searchable, bookable inventory while ownership stays unambiguous. When a freelancer wraps, an admin can export the unit list with its owner column to CSV and see exactly what walks out the door with them.
Figures are illustrative, part of the fictional scenario above.
"The gear room used to live in my head. Now it lives in Werp™, and I get my evenings back."— M. Sato — Equipment Manager, Aoba Pictures
A three-person video team started on the Free plan, recovered ¥400K of 'lost' gear at its first stocktake, and moved to Starter as it grew to six.
Read the storyA 25-person SaaS company with no dedicated IT put its laptop register, chargers and adapters, and meeting-room and desk booking on a single Werp™ workspace.
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