It started with my parents' campsite.

My parents opened their campsite in 2005. They ran it on paper, moved to a spreadsheet, then worked through most of the off-the-shelf booking systems going. None of them solved the problems they actually had. So, in 2008, I started building them one-off fixes of my own: a patch for this problem, then another for that one, until the patches were doing more work than the system they were patching.

They got talking to other owners nearby, and by the start of the next season there were three more campsites running on it. Those campsites stayed on it for years, and every season taught me something else about what a campsite actually needs.

Eventually, it was obvious there was a real gap in the market, so I teamed up with a few friends to build Pillowcase properly: the same thinking, but configurable from the ground up, so any campsite can shape it around how they already work. We launched it as a beta in 2022, and it has been running real bookings and real payments every season since. Fourteen years of one-off fixes went into it. We are ready to open it up to the rest of the UK.