Shaadi Vines was an Indian wedding-tech startup that brought wedding planning online. Its main product was a digital invitation that worked as a complete wedding website, surrounded by the tools a couple needs to plan the big day: a guest list, a budget planner and a shared photo gallery.
I built the Shaadi Vines web app in Next.js: the marketing site, the invitation websites, the couple's planning tools and the blog. The product is no longer live, so the screens here come from the original build.
Client: Shaadi Vines, India
My role: Web developer
Stack: Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, Radix UI, Material UI, Zustand, React Hook Form, Quill, AWS S3, Partytown
Results
8 invitation designs, each one a complete wedding website.
1 link per wedding for the schedule, venues, directions, RSVP, gallery and a live stream of the ceremony.
10 ready-made budget categories built around Indian wedding functions, from catering and the baraat to the honeymoon.
0 sign-up needed to try the budget planner, thanks to a demo filled with sample data.
Every guest finds their photos: pictures are grouped by person and downloadable in a tap.
The challenge
An Indian wedding isn't one event. It's the mehandi, sangeet, cocktail party and wedding, often across several days, with hundreds of guests travelling in. Couples were juggling printed invites that get lost in WhatsApp, guest lists in spreadsheets, budgets split across a dozen vendors, and photos scattered across dozens of phones.
What I built
Invitations that are complete wedding websites. Each design holds the couple's story, both families, an itinerary of every function with maps, an RSVP form, a photo gallery and the live stream. I built every design from reusable sections filled in from the couple's details, so new designs were quick to add.
A step-by-step form instead of a design tool. Couples enter their details one step at a time, with validation as they go, then pick a design and see their invitation come to life.
Guests, RSVPs and a budget planner. A guest manager replaces the wedding spreadsheet, and RSVPs arrive straight from the invitation. The budget planner splits every category by function and tracks estimated against paid amounts with progress bars.
Shaadi Vines wedding budget planner showing catering split into wedding, mehandi, sangeet and cocktail, each with its estimated budget, amount paid and a progress bar
Photos sorted by person. A shared gallery groups photos by the people in them, so a guest can tap their own face and see every picture they appear in.
Fast on mid-range phones. Most guests open their invitation from a WhatsApp link, so analytics run off the main thread with Partytown, unused CSS is stripped, and media comes from AWS S3 with long-term caching.
Read the full case study, with the complete architecture and more screens, on my website: akshatarora.in/work/shaadi-vines
0 likes · 17 views · Feb 27, 2024
A mobile-first Next.js wedding app: 8 invitation designs that work as complete wedding websites, RSVPs, a budget planner with 10 categories built around Indian wedding functions, and a gallery that sorts photos by person.
