Our Story
Founded by an owner
who got tired of being
sold the wrong tools.
StokeForge didn't start as a VC-funded startup. It started on a shop floor, inside real manufacturing companies, where the software options were either overkill, overpriced, or just plain wrong for the job.
The Founder
Jay Pierson didn't set out to build software.
Jay built things. Real things — precision workholding fixtures for machine shops and beautifully crafted tiny homes for people looking to live differently. Over two decades, he founded and operated companies that touched real materials, managed real teams, and had to perform on real deadlines with no room for excuses.
Pierson Workholding grew into a trusted name in the precision manufacturing world. On the other side of the product spectrum, Piccola Tiny Homes proved that thoughtful design and lean manufacturing principles could produce something extraordinary at small scale. Two very different businesses. One common thread: the software options available to run them were, almost without exception, terrible.
Not terrible in the obvious way — most of them had impressive demos, polished marketing, and long feature lists. Terrible in the way that only becomes clear after you've signed the contract, fought through implementation, trained your team, and realized the tool still doesn't quite fit the way your business actually works.
Jay Pierson
Founder, StokeForge · Pierson Workholding · Piccola Tiny Homes
“I was buying software and then expected to cram my business into these so-called solutions that promised to solve my problems. But I just ended up with more complexity, more monthly fees, and more headaches.
The Companies Behind the Software
These tools were forged in real businesses.
A precision manufacturing company producing custom workholding fixtures for machine shops across the country. Running Pierson Workholding meant managing complex quotes from engineering drawings, coordinating production across multiple jobs simultaneously, and tracking raw material purchasing with zero margin for error.
Every StokeForge Quoting™ and StokeForge Production™ feature was born from a problem Jay actually encountered running this company. The quoting system processes the same kind of RFQs. The production boards track the same kind of jobs. The purchasing flows handle the same reorder decisions. This is not software imagined from a conference room — it was lived before it was built.
A tiny home design and manufacturing company built on the belief that thoughtful craft and lean production principles could deliver an extraordinary living experience in a fraction of the space. Piccola Tiny Homes required a different kind of operational discipline — customer-facing quoting with lots of configuration variables, production scheduling for custom builds, and strategic clarity about which market to serve and how.
It was inside Piccola that StokeForge Strategy™ took shape. Jay needed a tool to align his team around priorities, evaluate competing opportunities, and turn leadership discussions into accountable action plans. When he couldn't find one that was simple enough to actually use, he built the framework that would become StokeForge Strategy.
The Problem
The software market for small manufacturers is broken.
Bloated
Software sized for enterprises, sold to small shops. 80% of the features go unused. 100% of the price gets paid.
Overpriced
Per-seat pricing, annual lock-ins, and add-on modules for features that should be standard. The bill grows faster than the business.
Misaligned
Built by people who've never run a shop floor. The workflows are wrong. The terminology is wrong. The priorities are wrong.
When Jay went looking for software to run his companies, he found two kinds of solutions. The first kind was enterprise ERP — powerful, comprehensive, and priced to match. Four-figure monthly charges, six-figure implementation budgets, and a six-month go-live timeline were standard. The kind of software that requires a dedicated consultant to configure and a full-time trainer to explain. And after all that, it still didn't quite match how his business actually worked.
The second kind was the free and familiar fallback: Google Sheets, Excel, Access — tools everyone already had and nobody had to sell anyone on. They were flexible, free, and completely wrong for the job. Spreadsheets don't send alerts when a job falls behind. Excel doesn't route an RFQ or draft a quote. Access doesn't know your vendor lead times. What started as a temporary workaround became a permanent liability, held together by formulas nobody fully understood and tribal knowledge that walked out the door with every departing employee.
Neither option respected the reality of running a small manufacturing business — where the owner is also the sales manager, the production scheduler, and the strategic planner, often in the same afternoon. Where the team is small, time is short, and every tool that requires babysitting is a tool that gets abandoned.
What the market called "solutions" were really just another set of problems wearing different logos. So Jay stopped looking and put a team together — starting with the tools his own companies needed most urgently, proving them in production before ever calling them a product.
Our Philosophy
Three words that drive every product decision.
Every feature request gets evaluated against the same filter. If it doesn't make StokeForge more powerful, simpler, or more focused — it doesn't ship.
01
Powerful
Small doesn't mean simple problems. A 12-person shop still needs to quote accurately, schedule jobs, manage inventory, and make good strategic decisions. StokeForge tools carry real capability — they just don't bury it under layers of configuration nobody asked for.
02
Simple
If your team needs a training session to use it, it's too complicated. Every StokeForge tool is designed to be picked up by a shop owner on a Tuesday afternoon without reading a manual. The interface is the documentation. The workflow is self-evident.
03
Focused
Each StokeForge product does one thing and does it completely. StokeForge Strategy is for strategy. StokeForge Quoting is for quoting. StokeForge Production is for the shop floor. StokeForge Purchasing is for ordering. There's no feature creep, no module sprawl, no upsell to a higher tier just to unlock something you actually need. Focus is a feature.
The Platform
Four products. One connected platform.
Each tool is built to stand alone — and designed to work better together.
StokeForge Strategy
LiveStructured strategic planning with AI-assisted goal drafting, effort/impact prioritization, and cross-cycle trend analysis. Built to replace the annual offsite that nobody follows up on.
StokeForge Quoting
LiveAI-powered RFQ processing that watches your inbox, extracts line items, and generates draft quotes in minutes. Built to end the quote backlog that costs manufacturers real revenue.
StokeForge Production
Coming SoonReal-time shop floor management — kanban boards, machine calendars, auto-alerts, and shift management. The tool that replaced the whiteboard at Pierson Workholding is being packaged for every shop.
StokeForge Purchasing
Coming SoonKanban-based ordering that turns shopfloor scans into purchase orders. Inventory tracking, vendor communication, and accounting import — without the phone calls.
See what it feels like when software just works.
No implementation consultant. No six-week onboarding. No feature you'll never use buried behind a paywall. Just tools that do exactly what they say.