PLANNABEL.
Situation
Brides are wedding planners. The tools are scrapbooks, moodboards, Pinterest, wedding blogs and their phones' camera rolls. Hiring a professional planner is less common in the UK than the USA.
Where to begin? Discovery, inspiration, reviews and marketplaces for wedding services are fragmented across social and traditional media and retail.
Weddings are major personal and financial milestones. ~262,000 marriages, average £17,000+ direct spend per wedding. UK weddings sector valued at £10B annually.
Opportunity.
Focus on customers' fundamental needs.
"... the consumer has a different view of the marketplace. He simply has a job to be done and is seeking to 'hire' the best product or service to do it."
— Professor Clayton Christensen, et al.
Sloan Management Review, Spring 2007.
Mobile = default. Discovery, selection and purchase from mobile devices is normal and expected. Run your wedding from your phone.
Get To Done. Structure wedding planning activities into tracked, achievable chunks (not to-do lists with hundreds of incomplete tasks).
The very best for your big day. Allow experienced, qualified and rated professionals to participate.
Suppliers struggle with discovery. SEO is opaque voodoo; social media is time-consuming and (like print ads) the RoI is hard to measure.
Product.
Plannabel connects couples planning weddings themselves with relevant services and experienced professionals. Engaged and prospective couples access ideas, advice, task management apps, guest services, wedding suppliers and financial services via mobile-first software.
Browse ideas, find and shortlist suppliers.
Discussions in groups and in private.
Shared and individual tasks grouped into Activities, each one moving through the ‘Get To Done’ pipeline.
Minimise 'the overwhelm' — relevant tasks brought to your attention at the relevant time.
Experiments.
5Ws For Your Wedding is an onboarding web app that asks couples a few questions to return the dates, places and information relevant to them (instead of trawling thousands of words on Citizens' Advice Bureaux' web sites).
React and Firebase. The UI is built with React components and Formsy React form elements. The dates are calculated by Moment.js and user data persists on Google's Firebase Realtime Database.
PLB-5Ws-CALC. The date calculator's source is available on Github: moving towards microservices to support the web app and future native apps, chat bots or Siri/Echo/Alexa.
Identity.
From the outset, I visualised an illustrated character to embody Plannabel as a brand, a personality and a company.
I worked with a graphic designer to turn the concept sketches into 90% complete vector designs.
After refining the shapes in Sketch.app, I designed a complementary logotype and produced a range of assets and printed collateral.
