Why I built RouteCheck

I once delivered a dining table a customer had waited more than six months to have made. We got it to the house, and then I had to tell them it wasn't going into the dining room — the hallway and the turn at the bottom of the stairs were both tighter than anyone had accounted for. That was the day RouteCheck started.

My name is Anton Jack and I've been a furniture delivery driver for seven years. I've worked for a lot of companies in that time, delivering everything from beds, wardrobes and sofas to table tennis tables and outdoor kitchens — and there has been one consistent problem across all of them: items getting stuck somewhere between the front door and the room they're meant to end up in.

The line I hear most often is “I measured the doorways and thought it would be fine.” And the doorways usually are fine. It's the hallway, the turn at the bottom of the stairs, the landing and the bannister that catch people out — the parts nobody thinks to measure.

I've been sent out plenty of times to take those measurements myself, with a tape measure and, honestly, a bit of guesswork. It's hard to know whether a super king headboard will clear the bannister at the top of the stairs without catching the wall, especially when the margin is a couple of centimetres. And that call — telling a customer “yes, you're safe to order” or “I'm sorry, you'll need a smaller bed” — is a difficult one to make, and an expensive one to get wrong.

After that dining table went back on the van, I kept thinking: why has nobody built an app that takes the measurements for you? So I built it.

RouteCheck uses the LiDAR sensor already in a modern iPhone to measure the whole route — every doorway, stair and turn — against the real size of the item, and records the evidence as it goes. No tape measure, no guesswork, no nasty surprise at the door. It's designed to mirror how a crew actually moves a product through a house: the same turns, the same tight spots, the same decisions — so the answer it gives is the one that matters to the manufacturer, the retailer, the delivery firm and, most of all, the customer waiting at home.