Testing an idea with tradespeople, then taking it to wedding suppliers
Tradie started as a service that follows up on quotes for tradespeople after a site visit, so they win more of the jobs they've already priced. I designed the brand, launched a landing page and called tradespeople to test the idea. There wasn't enough interest, so I took the same idea to wedding suppliers, whose bookings depend on how quickly they reply to enquiries.
- Company
- Tradie
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Founder: research, brand, product design and engineering
- Team
- Just me
The idea
A tradesperson visits a home, prices the job and sends a quote. Then they're back on another job, nobody chases the customer, and the work goes to whoever follows up first. Tradie would do the follow-ups for them.
Designing the brand
The brand's direction was ‘a tradesperson you'd trust with your keys’: plain, warm wording with the odd dry joke, a dark green palette with one bright green kept for actions, and documentary photos of real jobs. I documented it in a brand guide, with every colour, font size and spacing value defined once in a single tokens file so the site and anything after it stay consistent.
Testing it with tradespeople
I put the landing page live in March, with a free early-access sign-up, and started calling tradespeople. The honest answer was that not enough of them wanted it. That was worth hearing before I'd built the product, so I stopped and asked a better question: who has this problem and feels it more?
Same idea, different customers
Independent wedding suppliers, such as priests, DJs and caterers, have the same problem in a sharper form. Their bookings start as enquiries, and a slow or generic reply loses the booking. In October I archived the Tradie brand and rebuilt the product for them: a website for each supplier, and a dashboard where AI drafts a reply to each enquiry for the supplier to check and send.
- A kit of website sections that takes each supplier's own colours and fonts, so every site looks like theirs
- An enquiry inbox and dashboard, with each supplier's data kept separate
- Email sent from the supplier's own address
- An AI step that sorts each enquiry and drafts a reply in the supplier's voice
The supplier sends every reply
The AI never sends anything on its own. A wrong price or an off tone could cost a supplier a booking, so the draft is a starting point that they edit and approve.
Impact
- Websites live for wedding suppliers, including a UK wedding and events planner
- A site for a Hindu wedding priest in private preview
- The enquiry dashboard and AI drafting built, ready for suppliers to start using