Novela — Plan and design a dream wedding

Idea
April, 2022

Weddings are big business ($96 billion in the U.S.), yet planning them remains stressful and complex due to a lack of information transparency, the multitude of vendor touchpoints, and lousy financing options.

Novela’s founder, Adam R. Healey, validated the idea with couples and potential users of the platform and discovered the challenge of finding venues, florists, and photographers for your weddings in all the different places. That’s why he decided to make a product that will unite all these vendors in one place.

Novela is the first transactional marketing platform for weddings, using customizable ‘collections’ to make information more transparent, decision-making more streamlined, and financing & payments easy.

Solution

We worked on the platform to make wedding planning with intelligence, style, and grace. Novela brings together engaged couples, wedding vendors, and Novela wedding curators. Currently, all the сontent management is done manually via the Airtable database.

We divided our work on the platform into 2 parts:

The platform is aimed at the US market, starting with Charlottesville, Virginia, the hometown of the founder.

Building MVP
June, 2022

For the launch we designed and developed a user-friendly web platform for both couples to be wed and vendors.

Couples can easily access more quality wedding content at scale, make informed planning decisions or find fresh inspiration.

Vendors can easily get promotion possibilities, control business information, get bookings and optimize revenue through dynamic pricing.

We also created a short quiz for couples to find the best wedding option for them.

By answering a couple of questions on Novela’s website, couples can give curators all the info to plan the budget for the wedding, venue, and style.

In the beginning, we thought that a simple no-code or low-code solution would be enough for the platform, but as we spoke more with the founder, we realized that he wants to implement the complete system for vendors using the platform. So we started to use Airtable and planned to develop a content management system that requires more coding.

It’s better to find out all the details of the product to be developed right from the beginning in order not to make sudden changes during the actual development.

Functionality

Novela users are now able to fill in the onboarding questionnaire, pay for customizable wedding collections, and receive email notifications.

There are currently 2 roles in the system: vendors and curators.

Onboarding

Registration (made via email invitation)

Forgot/change password

Listing

Create/read/update own vendor listing & team

Create/read/update own venue listing & spaces

Add photos to vendor listing

Create/read/update/delete own testimonials

Real Weddings

Read list of published/unpublished weddings + filter

Tag/unlink vendors in the wedding

Add internal notes for the Curator

Create/read/update one real wedding

Add/remove vendors from real wedding

Add/tag photos/add photos to listing shoebox

Onboarding

Credentials are provided to curator by developers

Manage Vendors

Read/filter/search list of vendors

Create, read, update, delete one vendor listing

Preview/read status/read history of changes vendor listing

Preview/send an invitation link to sender

Real Weddings

Read/filter/search list of real weddings

Create, read, update, delete one real wedding

Add photos/tag to real wedding

Submit/review/review status a real wedding for curator's review

Read history of changes of real wedding

Preview a real wedding

We also started to develop Wedding Collections to provide couples with packaged plans for their weddings, including venue, catering, decorations, photography and planning.