For visitors who'd rather read than walk.
# The customer's half of the customer record
You're Lourdes, owner of Echevarría Tailoring. Small specialty
boutique, 1,400 customers, five years of records. The CRM vendor
just doubled their price. Migrating means losing five years of
customer history.
The hook on Merkle Trust's landing: the customer record is a thing
both you and the customer should have. The substrate makes it
possible for both to have it, neither to lose it, and the vendor
to be exchangeable.
Four real paths exist. For a small specialty boutique, the order is
operator-first.
Subscribe to a regional operator. A small-business-compliance
operator runs the chain on infrastructure that meets the data
protection rules in your jurisdiction (GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, PIPEDA, or
the active state-level regimes across the United States). The
operator handles the compliance scaffolding.
Paste the markdown into your LLM. Card files into Claude or
another LLM. Lightest path.
Clone GarrisonNode from GitHub. Self-install on the boutique's
back-office machine. Open source. The path for shops with technical
capacity.
Join the mesh. GitHub install plus mesh anchoring with peer
boutiques. The deepest path.
A sandboxed Merkle Trust loads the synthetic boutique with 1,400
jointly-held customer records. Each record contains identity,
measurements, fitting history, communication preferences, and
purchase history. Both the boutique and the customer can sign
updates; neither silently alters the record.
The walk takes the vendor-migration walkthrough — the part that's
been keeping Lourdes up. The chain shows what happens when the
boutique's current CRM vendor doubles their price and Lourdes wants
out: the records do not migrate because they were never inside the
vendor's system. The vendor was an interface, not a holder. The
records lived in the chain; the vendor read and wrote against them.
A new vendor — or no vendor, just a custom interface — picks up
where the old one left off. The customers do not need to be told.
Their records are unchanged.
```
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
VENDOR EXIT — ECHEVARRÍA TAILORING
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
records held by: the chain
vendor's role: interface
records migrated: 0 (unnecessary)
customer impact: none
The vendor is an interface, not a holder.
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
```
Records are jointly held. The boutique's half is sealed on its
side; the customer's half is sealed on theirs; the joint chain links
the two without merging them. Either party can sign an update;
neither can silently alter the other party's signed entries.
The customer is portable. The customer can take their record to
a different tailor or to their own laptop. The chain travels with
them. They do not lose their measurements or their fitting history
because they switched shops.
Correction and deletion are sealed events. A customer requests a
correction; the business signs; both hold the update. The previous
version remains in the chain history marked "corrected." A deletion
request is sealed as a deletion-with-rationale, not as a hole.
The .md button puts the joint-record pattern summary into your
tag-along bundle. Comment field routes a specific data-protection
question to your own claude.ai session.
Run a ceremony. Fifteen seconds.
Progress bar reads "done — 1,400 customer records, 5 years of joint
history, all anchored. New business anchor at " followed by the
first eight hex characters of the root.
Sealed: "Every customer record is sealed. The customer's half is
sealed on their side; the business's half is sealed on yours; the
joint chain links the two without merging them. Nothing has been
altered since the date of seal."
The most useful close for a small-business owner is to start small.
A pilot with twenty long-term customers; expand from there. The
package, the cert, the recovery seed — all ride along.
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That was the simulated path through Lourdes's vendor exit. The full
card breaks out the operational reality of joint records — instead
of legal-policy theater — the customer-portability mechanic, and a
small-business-pilot prediction that's yours to test.