The associate every owner wishes they had: welcoming, organized, always on. Iris answers for Holkin Design day and night: what we build, what it costs, where to start. Ask her anything; she'll tell you straight, and she'll know when it's time to bring in John.
No forms, no signup. The chat on this page is her
What she does
Everything you'd want from a very good associate.
Answers grounded in facts we approve, in your language, at any hour, and the judgement to know when to bring in a person.
At your service
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Straight answers, day and night— services, pricing, process, timelines, grounded in a knowledge base we author and approve. If she doesn't know, she says so; she never invents a number. She replies in seconds, at any hour. And that speed decides it: reach a new enquiry in five minutes instead of thirty and you're 21× more likely to qualify it. InsideSales
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Your language, your level— French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and more. She replies fluently and the whole panel shifts with her, not just her side of the chat. Brand-new to websites? She'll skip the jargon entirely and start where you are. Most people would rather buy in their own language anyway 76%, CSA Research, and French is the first official language of roughly 1 in 5 Canadians StatCan, 2021.
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Travels with you— follow a link she gives you and the conversation comes along. Tour the studio, browse the work, come back. You pick up mid-thought, never from the top.
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Tells the stories, not just the specs— ask about the studio's projects and she'll give you the story behind each one — the sites, the AI tools, the games — then point you to the right case study.
On your side
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Knows when to bring in John— big scope, unusual ask, or you'd just rather talk to a person: she offers the handoff herself and passes John the context, so you never repeat yourself. Most people want that door kept open: 89% say a business should always offer a way to reach a person SurveyMonkey, 2025.
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Reports back — and learns— every month she writes John a plain-English account of what visitors asked, what she answered, and what she missed, alongside a live dashboard with an analyst he can question. Your 👍/👎 on any answer feeds the same tuning loop, and every client concierge ships with this exact reporting. That loop isn't something we grafted on later: it's Foresight — one of four principles (support, accountability, foresight, empathy) John set out in Business Experience Management, a series he published in 2016–17. He described this loop a decade before he could build it.
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Secure & Private by Design— no account, no tracking, no cookies following you around. Your conversation is recorded so we can keep her answers accurate, with emails and phone numbers stripped before anything is written and your IP never stored; the text is deleted after 90 days. Ask her what she keeps and she'll tell you straight. Most chatbots get that wrong. The whole policy, and it's short.
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Tested like an attacker would— probed with real injection and data-extraction attacks before every significant change goes live. Try to trip her up. Visitors do, and she holds the line politely.
The name, the flower, the eye
An iris is a flower, and the part of the eye that does the watching. Her mark is both at once: a bloom whose heart is an attentive eye, because a good concierge notices things. The name also belongs to the Greek messenger who carried word between worlds, which is roughly the job description.
The rose at her centre is hers alone. Nothing else on holkindesign.com is allowed to wear that colour, so when you spot it, you already know who it is, and that help is one click away.
One frame, many manners
The same engine, wearing somebody else's name.
Every concierge we build starts as Iris and ends up unrecognisable: its own voice, manners, palette and knowledge. Only the parts that must never vary stay identical.
Iris
THE HOST · THIS SITE
Warm, unhurried, honest about what she doesn't know. You've met her. She's the chat on this page.
CC
The Card Curator
A COLLECTIBLES SHOP
Counter-side candour — talks collectors out of grading $3 commons; never quotes a price, never predicts a grade.
The Event Concierge
AN EVENT VENUE
Event-minded — hours, spaces, micro-weddings. She toured the rooms because she knew them.
Wren
THE HOME CONCIERGE
Steady and plain-spoken — knows the town street by street, walks you through the biggest purchase of your life, and won't guess at a single number.
Fern
A DENTAL PRACTICE
Calm and careful — answers the practice's real questions after hours, takes down what the office needs, and points a true emergency to the right care instead of guessing.
Same secure, battle‑tested frame underneath: each business gets its own name, voice, manners, and knowledge of its own world, down to the streets of its own town. The next hat is yours.
Up close
What that actually looks like in someone's business.
Not a mock-up: the real interface, doing the real job on a real site.
Wren
A real‑estate brokerage
What it becomes when a regulated industry is poured in.
A structured concierge for a real-estate practice, built once, and ready for the next agent who needs one. Shown here in Port Stanley Dusk, the studio's own skin.
Knows the town street by street — a local gazetteer places a named street or address next to a real landmark, and says so and defers when she doesn't know one. Orientation a visitor can actually use, without ever rating a neighbourhood or profiling who lives there.
Answers only from facts the broker approved — land-transfer brackets to the dollar, every market claim dated, and a build that refuses to ship if a published figure drifts from its source.
Refuses by name, not by vibe — valuations, commissions, conditions, eligibility. Each refusal has a matching adversarial test, so we know it still holds.
Holds the line in every language it speaks. Refused in English, asked again in French, refused again: tested, not assumed.
Cannot quote, commit, or transact. An agent's licence is not something to leave to a chatbot's good judgement.
Same frame as Iris. Different everything else — an antique‑gold monogram, an aged‑leather input tray, and a voice that will talk a collector out of grading a $3 common.
Never quotes a price, never predicts a grade. In retail those are the regulated edge, so they're refusals, not guidelines.
Reports back to the owner — a live dashboard and a monthly plain‑English note with an analyst he can question directly.
Grew the business, not just the inbox — a drop‑off partner directory and a "become a partner" funnel, built into the conversation.
Answers only from the practice's approved facts — hours, insurance, policies. Not in her knowledge? She says so.
Backend + AI
Name & number taken only after explicit PHIPA consent, then handed to the office's own inbox.
Backend + AI
A deterministic tripwire — fires before the model reads it. Bleeding or trauma → 911, in EN/FR/ES.
FernAfter-hours concierge
Northside Family Dental
Are you open Saturdays, and do you take CDCP?
F
We're open Saturdays 9–2, and yes — Northside accepts the Canadian Dental Care Plan for eligible patients. Want me to note you for a Saturday and flag CDCP for the front desk?
Yes please, book me in.
F
Happy to. I'll take your name and a number and pass it to the office to confirm a time. Sharing those means you're OK with the clinic contacting you — shall I go ahead?
My tooth got knocked out and my mouth won't stop bleeding
F
I'm sorry you're going through this. Please don't wait — call 911 or go to your nearest emergency room right away. I'm also alerting the on-call team that you reached out.
Ask about hours, insurance, or booking…
Northside Family DentalMessage the Team
Fern
A dental clinic
What it becomes when the next question can't wait for morning.
A calm after-hours concierge poured into a dental clinic: grounded in the practice's approved facts, non-clinical by design, and built to Ontario's PHIPA. Shown here in Fern's own porcelain-and-mint skin, as the fictional Northside Family Dental.
A dental concierge that never plays dentist — she answers about the practice and takes the booking, but diagnosis, dosing and clinical advice are off the table by design. Intake and triage only.
An emergency line that never hesitates — deterministic tripwires route severe bleeding, trauma or swelling to 911 or the on-call dentist immediately, in English, French and Spanish alike.
Refuses by name, not by vibe — every clinical question she declines has a matching adversarial test, so the line still holds after the next change ships.
Built to health-privacy law from the first line — a name and number are taken only after explicit PHIPA consent, then handed to the office's existing inbox. No new software to learn.
Iris isn't a showcase built to be shown. She's the studio's own front door, which is why everything she does is something we've already had to live with.
STUDIO →Iris is the living flagship of the Holkin Concierge
Every capability she has was built, tuned, and attack-tested in-house first. Then the proven parts ship in the concierges we build for local businesses, branded to them: their name, their voice, their knowledge, their leads. She's the demo that never has to pretend.
A concierge that answers your customers day and night, captures leads, and sends you a plain-English monthly report of how it worked for you. Ask Iris about it — she loves talking shop — or reach John directly.
The full plain-English list of what every Holkin Concierge ships with — manipulation resistance, spam & bot protection, privacy-first data handling — and our privacy policy.
The full plain-English list of how your concierge stays usable with a screen reader or a keyboard alone: tested by a real person, not just software, checked on every deploy, and built to WCAG 2.1 AA and the AODA.
