Building Atlas & Aisle: How We Designed a Platform for Destination Weddings from Scratch

Built for traditional weddings: one event, one RSVP, done. They handle "Will you attend the wedding?" beautifully. They completely collapse when you need "Will you attend the Thursday welcome dinner? The Friday ceremony? The Saturday pool party? The Sunday brunch?" - each with different venue capacities, catering requirements, and guest lists. Multi-event support is either absent or bolted on as an afterthought.

Designed for ticketed events with public registration. The core model - strangers buying tickets - is wrong for weddings where you're inviting specific people and tracking their responses. Plus-one handling is primitive. Guest relationships (couples, families) aren't understood. The aesthetic screams "corporate conference," not "celebration of love."

The default for destination weddings because nothing else works. But spreadsheets require manual data entry from every email, text, and phone call. They don't handle plus-ones elegantly. Version control becomes a nightmare when multiple people update them. There's no guest-facing interface - guests can't see their own RSVP status, event details, or make changes without contacting the couple.

Beautiful for sharing information, but they're content platforms, not data platforms. You can display event schedules, but you can't collect structured RSVPs per event. You can show a contact form, but you can't track who's attending what with which dietary requirements. The data still ends up in a spreadsheet.

A wedding isn't a single event - it's a container for multiple events. Each event has its own date, time, venue, capacity, dress code, and description. Events can be added, removed, or modified independently. The welcome dinner is a different entity from the ceremony, even though they're part of the same wedding.

Not every guest is invited to every event. The intimate rehearsal dinner might include 30 people; the ceremony might include 150. Atlas & Aisle tracks which events each guest is invited to - their invitation scope. Guests only see and RSVP to events they're actually invited to.

The atomic unit isn't "attending the wedding" - it's "this person is attending this event." A guest might attend Thursday and Saturday but not Friday. Their plus-one might have a different pattern. Atlas & Aisle captures responses at this granular level, then rolls up to event totals and overall attendance views.

When a guest indicates they're bringing a plus-one, Atlas & Aisle captures that person as a full guest record - with name, dietary requirements, and their own per-event attendance. Plus-ones aren't a checkbox; they're guests who happen to have been added by another guest rather than the couple.

Some information is guest-level (name, email, relationship to couple). Some is per-event (attending/not attending, meal choice for that specific event). Atlas & Aisle captures data at the appropriate level, so event-specific requirements stay with events and don't create confusion.

Each event shows: confirmed attending, confirmed not attending, awaiting response, and capacity (if set). Planners instantly see where they stand for each event without manual calculation. The welcome dinner has 45 confirmed of 60 invited; the ceremony has 112 of 150.

For events with meals, Atlas & Aisle shows dietary requirements breakdown: 8 vegetarian, 3 vegan, 2 gluten-free, 1 halal - for that specific event. Caterers get exactly what they need without manual compilation.

Overall RSVP progress shows what percentage of invited guests have responded. Drilling down reveals who hasn't responded to which events - enabling targeted follow-up rather than generic reminders.

Full administrative access to everything: guest list, events, settings, communications. Both partners can have their own login with equal access, or share credentials - their choice.

Wedding planners can be granted access to manage on behalf of the couple. They see operational data (headcounts, dietary requirements, logistics) without necessarily seeing personal guest notes or financial details.

Sometimes a parent or sibling helps manage RSVPs. Limited access allows them to view and update guest responses without accessing couple settings or sending communications.

We could have built a technically superior platform that missed the point. What made Atlas & Aisle work was deep understanding of destination wedding planning - the workflows, the pain points, the edge cases. Technical execution was necessary but not sufficient. Understanding the domain was the differentiator.

Partial solutions create more work than they save. If Atlas & Aisle handled RSVPs but not dietary requirements, couples would still need spreadsheets. We committed to solving the complete guest management problem - or the platform wouldn't be worth using.

Getting the data model right was the hardest and most important work. Once we had the right structure - guests, events, attendance as the core entities - features flowed naturally. A wrong data model would have constrained everything built on top of it.

Atlas & Aisle serves couples - but the most frequent users are guests going through the RSVP flow. We spent as much time optimising the guest experience as the admin experience. A platform that's great for admins but frustrating for guests fails at its core purpose.