Why I built Gilded

My wife is a wedding planner. I built this after watching her lose one too many evenings to writing proposals and chasing down payments.

None of it was hard work, exactly. It was the same work, over and over: rebuilding a proposal because last year’s lived in a Word file she’d have to hunt for. Sending it as a PDF and hoping. Following the signature into a separate signing tool, and the deposit into a separate payment one. Then, months later, building the day-of timeline from scratch, because nothing she had already typed out about that wedding was anywhere near it.

Four things about one wedding, in four places that had never heard of each other. Every gap between them was an evening.

So Gilded keeps the proposal, the signed contract, the payment schedule and the day-of timeline on a single record. That’s the whole idea. When the couple signs, the payment schedule is already there. When the day comes, the timeline knows who the vendors are and what was agreed months earlier.

What it deliberately isn’t

There are good tools for creative professionals in general — photographers, designers, florists, planners, all served by the same forms and the same pipeline. Gilded is not one of them. It is for wedding planners, and specifically for the ones who execute the day: the run of show, the vendor calls, the person holding the timing while everyone else is enjoying themselves.

That narrowness costs us plenty of customers, and it’s the point. It means the contract already knows what a rehearsal dinner is, the timeline already knows what first look means, and nobody has to bend a generic project template into the shape of a wedding.

Where it is now

Gilded is young, and it is being built against how the work actually goes rather than how a demo goes. If you already have weddings under contract, you can bring them in as they are — you don’t have to wait for a new enquiry to start using it.

If something in here is wrong for how you work, I’d genuinely like to know. hello@gildedhq.com reaches me, not a queue.