🐾 Rove & Ruff — More time for dogs. Less time managing bookings.

Meet Maya. She’s a solo mobile dog groomer in Austin.

Her workplace is a grooming van. Her day moves between neighbourhoods, driveways, and dogs with very different personalities.

But between visits, there’s another job waiting on her phone.

“Do you cover my neighbourhood?” “How much would it cost for my dog?” “Did you receive the vaccine record?” “Are we confirmed for Tuesday?”

A simple booking can become a long conversation. Maya needs the dog’s details, handling needs, vaccine record, address, and service requirements before she can confidently plan a first visit. Then come the quote, the time slot, the deposit, and the confirmation.

And when that customer returns, repeating the same conversation takes time away from the dogs already in her care.

That became our brief for Rove & Ruff: how could we turn “Can I book with you?” into “You’re booked,” while keeping Maya’s personal attention where it matters?

✂️ Automate the admin. Keep the personal care.

We didn’t want to remove Maya from every decision.

A nervous dog, a first visit, or a handling concern deserves her attention. The opportunity was to organise the information before it reaches her, then let customers complete the next steps themselves.

Rove & Ruff gives new customers a guided path from inquiry to confirmed visit—and makes the next booking simpler.

📱 The first visit: getting to know the dog

Customers begin by checking coverage, adding their dog’s details, and choosing a service. Care needs and handling history give Maya context before she meets them.

After verifying their email, customers can continue their request and submit their vaccine record.

Maya receives the request, reviews the information, and sets the approved service, estimated price, and duration. If she needs more information, the customer can update the request.

Once approved, the customer receives an email linking them back to the next step.

The distinction is clear: approved means ready to choose a time. It does not mean the appointment is booked.

The customer accepts the quote and cancellation terms, selects an available appointment, and pays the deposit. Once payment is verified, the visit is confirmed.

Both the customer and Maya receive their own confirmation email, with the details and a link to the relevant page.

🔁 The next visit: less to repeat

This is where the reduction in Maya’s workload becomes especially visible.

Returning customers find their saved dogs and visit details in their account. If they have more than one dog, they can choose who they’re booking for.

When the selected dog’s approval and records remain valid and the booking is eligible, they can rebook without another manual review from Maya.

The customer doesn’t have to start from scratch. Maya doesn’t have to approve the same information again.

🗓️ A working day Maya can actually manage

The customer experience is only half the product.

Maya’s dashboard turns confirmed bookings into a practical view of her day:

• Today puts her next visit front and centre, with the dog, service, location, and a shortcut to directions. • Day and week schedules show appointments, their duration, cleanup and travel allowances, and open time. • Availability helps her shape her working day. • Block time lets her reserve periods she needs to keep unavailable. • Appointment details bring together payment information, vaccine status, handling needs, and access instructions. • Attention explains outstanding issues, why they happened, and what needs to happen next.

For Shadow, that means Maya can see that he’s nervous, check his verified vaccine record, review driveway access, and contact Ava before arriving.

The information collected during booking stays useful during the visit.

🎨 From Figma to a working product

We started in Figma, designing the customer journey and Maya’s admin experience before building the app.

The visual direction was deliberately warm and expressive: bold typography, dark backgrounds, bright lime actions, soft pink and blue cards, and cutout dog imagery.

We wanted clear next steps without making the experience feel like paperwork.

Using the Lovable plugin, we exported the Figma designs into Lovable and developed them into a functioning application.

That meant connecting the screens to saved customer and dog records, email-link sign-in, request review, approved quotes, scheduling, deposits, and booking confirmations.

We also added breed-based dog cutouts and individual cards for saved dogs, helping customers recognise and select the right dog while keeping the visual style consistent.

💳 Payments and email, connected to the flow

Stripe handles the deposit step in test mode. The booking becomes confirmed after payment verification.

Brevo sends the transactional emails: new and updated requests for Maya, approval emails for customers, and separate booking confirmations for both sides.

We built the emails to carry the actual booking details and link people back to the right place in the app.

Duplicate protection helps prevent repeated notifications, and an email failure is recorded without undoing an approval or confirmed booking.

🧪 Built, tested, and refined

We published the app and tested the customer experience on iPhone and the admin experience on laptop.

Testing went beyond checking how the screens looked. We followed the booking journey, received emails in customer and admin inboxes, and checked that their links opened the correct pages.

We refined the sign-in and booking-resume flow, clarified starting prices for dogs needing review, added support for selecting between saved dogs, and adjusted the breed imagery to fit the original design.

🐶 The result

Rove & Ruff gives Maya a clear point to make the decisions that need her expertise. Customers can handle the booking steps around those decisions themselves.

For the first visit, Maya gets to know the dog.

For an eligible repeat visit, the app already remembers.

That’s the owner effort we set out to reduce: repeated questions, repeated data entry, and repeated approval work—so Maya can spend more of her day caring for dogs.

—

Rove & Ruff — mobile dog grooming in Austin.

Live app: https://roveandruff.lovable.app

🔥🔥🔥

When I worked as a guide, booking was one of my biggest pain points: constant back-and-forth, checking availability, handling changes, payments, confirmations, and trying not to lose track of who was coming when.

So I built HERODOT - History of Mystery around exactly that problem.

A visitor can simply describe what they want, and HERODOT interprets the request, recommends the best-fit historical tour, checks availability, handles the booking and payment, and confirms everything. On the guide side, the Guide Desk brings together guests, routes, payment state, mobility notes, local conditions, briefings, and only the exceptions that genuinely need human attention.

It is basically the booking workflow I wish I had when I was guiding.

And who knows — maybe tomorrow I’ll wander off into the unknown again. If I do, at least the bookings will be sorted.

@Lovable x @Contra