East Midlands-based wedding planners and stylists, The Rustic Wedding Company, have been helping brides and grooms plan and style beautifully decorated, personal wedding celebrations with exquisite detailing and personal touches for the past 12 years.
From humble beginnings, when Lesley McCall wanted to use her skill for finding and styling unique decor, it blossomed into the award-winning, professional wedding planning and prop hire company of today. They offer both full styling packages and dry hire prop collections; these include wedding arches, backdrops, chargers, linens, lanterns, signage and other small props.
Their customers are typically couples planning stylish countryside weddings in barns, marquees, and other character-filled venues. While some clients choose full styling support, many prefer the flexibility of selecting and hiring their own décor items.
As demand increased, Lesley and her team needed a rental platform that could support both sides of the business while remaining easy to use. After exploring several options, they chose Booqable because of its user-friendly interface, attractive design, prebuilt booking page, and the ability to manage bookings, inventory, and customer information in one place.
Managing a growing team with Booqable’s user-friendly interface
Before implementing Booqable The Rustic Wedding Company used a custom Google Sheets solution for booking and inventory management. Although this was fine when starting out, as the business grew it was time-consuming and cumbersome.
There was constant need to check availability of items across several weddings simultaneously, and minor mistakes could easily lead to a clash in bookings. Booqable presented a far clearer picture of The Rustic Wedding Company. The availability calendar gives the team up-to-date information about what is and isn’t available and The Order List collates upcoming bookings.
The Dashboard is invaluable for day-to-day operations where it helps the team with collections and returns, and The Customer and Inventory Databases stores all essential data centrally. This has proved vital for a business that comprises of an core team and the freelancers that help with larger projects at busy wedding times throughout the year.
“My favorite thing about Booqable is that is so user friendly. Before selecting a booking system I had a look at various other similar software systems but the Booqable system was the most straightforward to grasp.” explains Lesley
The interface helps the business by:
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Giving the team real-time visibility into inventory availability.
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Keeping customer and booking information organized in one system.
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Helping staff coordinate collections, returns, and upcoming weddings.
The result is greater confidence in booking accuracy and far less time spent checking spreadsheets. Instead of worrying about stock availability, the team can focus more attention on supporting couples and delivering beautifully styled wedding days.
Turning website visitors into bookings with the online booking page
Also an area to tackle was turning inquiries to confirmed DIY hire bookings. Couples were viewing Booqable’s brochure but sending over an email inquiry, which in many instances created a lag time. For those couples prepared to make a decision immediately, the time it took to wait for a response was undesirable.
Booqable’s booking pages was the answer, this allowed The Rustic Wedding Company to link their already existing website to an online reservation experience. This allowed couples to view products they could hire, combine any pieces that suited their wedding theme and check whether there was stock and book the items on their own terms.
This was a logical transition from the company’s visually led website to their rental booking pages. Lesley noticed the difference almost immediately. “Clients can now browse availability and make bookings much more easily, creating a smoother, more efficient experience.”
The booking page helps the business by:
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Allowing couples to reserve items whenever they’re ready.
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Providing clear visibility into product availability.
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Reducing the back-and-forth communication previously required by email.
This has helped increase booking conversions for DIY hire customers while creating a more professional experience overall. Couples can move from inspiration to reservation much faster, giving them greater confidence throughout the planning process.
Building for future growth with Booqable
Now the hire collection, which is continuously expanding, is managed by The Rustic Wedding Company more accurately, more visibly, with an equal standard of quality on the system and a very positive booking experience for clients.
Having replaced spreadsheets with an appropriate rental system has reduced many tedious tasks, strengthened customer trust and a perfect ground for further growth. When summing up their experience with the rental system, Lesley mentioned: “It’s just a really intuitive system; it simply does what it needs to do and nothing unnecessary is added on top”.
As the company’s DIY hire service is growing and larger items like tables and chairs may soon be added, the available tool, Booqable, should be very helpful to manage these developments whilst keeping the team focused on planning unique weddings for all couples.
