La Chérie Weddings

Thirteen words.

That was the entire website. Thirteen words, spread across barely four pages. La Chérie Weddings is a luxury wedding planning studio in Memphis, booked through word of mouth, and the site was a placeholder standing in for a business that had long outgrown it.

A placeholder is not a design problem. It is an absence. There was nothing to critique, nothing to improve, and nothing for a couple to read. Anyone who heard Lyndal's name and looked her up found a page that could have belonged to anybody.

What thirteen words cannot carry.

It could not show how good Lyndal is. That is the part that mattered most and the part a placeholder is least able to do. Couples who work with her describe a calm, creative presence who makes a wedding day feel like theirs. None of that reached anyone who had not already met her.

It could not hold the emotion of the work either. Wedding planning is not a services category, it is a day in someone's life, and the old site had no room for a single image that made you feel it.

And it gave her nowhere to put the work. Lyndal finishes a wedding with a full day's story to tell and had no way to publish it herself. Every new gallery meant asking someone else, which in practice means it never happens.

So we told a story.

The rebuild is built as a narrative rather than a brochure. The founder is the face of it, on purpose. The photography is given room to do what photography of a wedding is supposed to do. The services are written so a couple understands what they are actually buying, in the language Lyndal uses when she talks about it.

The galleries are hers to run. She can publish a wedding the week it happens, in an editorial layout, without calling anyone. A portfolio that only grows when a developer is available is a portfolio that stops growing.

Then the site went dark.

Her site went dark mid-season. Nothing at the domain but a parked page, and a business that runs on referrals suddenly had nowhere to send them.

The new site was already built on Sanity. What was left were final touches, against a launch date that had felt flexible right up until it wasn't. So we launched what we had. Twelve hours from that call to the new site live at her domain, and the last details were finished in the open afterward.

A brand and a site only come together quickly when the client is in it. Lyndal explained her business plainly and had already built a visual language around her work, so there was something real to take direction from instead of something to replace. A lot of the speed came from her.

The brand book beneath the build.

The website is the visible layer. Beneath it sits a 38-page brand book that sets the positioning, the voice, the logo system, color, typography, photography, and the rules for putting it to work. It was built so the brand reads the same whether a couple meets the founder in person, lands on the homepage, or opens a proposal.

Every page of the site pulls from this book, so the brand a couple feels on the website is the same one they get in the room.