Swap the Playroom has been helping families cut down on toy clutter since Tiffany Boothe and her business partner Emily started it during what Tiffany calls the season of toy overwhelm. As moms themselves, they knew how fast a house fills up with toys that get played with once and then forgotten, so they built a business around lending toys instead.
They rent out everything from small sensory toys to bigger play equipment, with parents and grandparents making up most of their customer base. Orders go out through porch pickup, with Tiffany handling admin and event planning while Emily takes care of customer communication.
For a while, Swap the Playroom ran on a massive Google Sheet, tracking every toy and rental manually. Looking for something built specifically for rental businesses, Tiffany and Emily moved to Booqable, drawn in particular by live availability and automated emails.
Using live availability to prevent double bookings
Before Booqable, the spreadsheet system made overlapping rentals a constant risk. With toys moving in and out of inventory all the time, it was easy to lose track of what was actually free on a given day, which meant double bookings and awkward conversations with customers.
Booqable’s live availability feature shows a real-time calendar for each product, so customers can see exactly when something is open to book. That calendar syncs directly with the backend, so there’s never a gap between what’s shown online and what’s actually in stock. Tiffany named this her favorite feature, pointing to how it lets customers book instantly without anyone on her team checking availability by hand first.
This shift has changed daily operations in a few concrete ways:
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Customers can book on their own, any time of day, without waiting on a reply
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Overlapping rentals and scheduling conflicts have largely disappeared
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Less time is spent manually checking a spreadsheet before confirming an order
Tiffany said the switch has saved them hours a week, and orders have actually gone up because the process is easier for customers. The scheduling problem that used to eat into their time has basically gone away.
Sending automatic webshop confirmation emails
Running things with just two people doesn’t leave much room for writing out individual messages for every order. Before Booqable, that’s exactly what Emily was doing, manually confirming details and updating customers on their toy rentals one by one.
With Booqable, webshop orders trigger automatic confirmation emails the moment a customer books. Tiffany and Emily can edit existing templates or add new ones for different stages of an order, and those emails pull in customer and order details on their own, so nothing needs to be typed out by hand.
They’ve also started trialing the Booqable mobile app, which they’ve found useful for switching order statuses and sending emails while away from the desk, though they’d love to see push notifications added for pickup and drop off times.
For Swap the Playroom, this has meant:
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Less time spent writing the same kinds of messages over and over
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Customers who stay informed without needing to be chased down
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A more consistent communication process even on busy days
For a two-person team, that adds up. Less time on email means more time on the parts of the business that actually need their attention.
Making toy rentals possible
Tiffany sums up the switch simply, saying Booqable is “10000 times better for customers and us.” For a business that was running on a spreadsheet with no real way to manage scheduling, that kind of change makes a real difference.
Swap the Playroom isn’t slowing down either. With live availability cutting down on double bookings and automatic emails keeping communication consistent, Tiffany and Emily have more time back in their week, and they’re focused on growing sales even further.
