Ida & Ella

Intro

Ida & Ella run a monthly supper club in the Westhoek: one long table, thirty-five seats. Every booking came in through Instagram DMs, with no way to see what was actually still available. A single booking can take up to four seats, which ruled out plugging in something like Tally or Typeform, they count responses, not seats. So I built them a proper booking system from scratch, solo, from the first sketch to a working staging deployment.

Booking and waitlist

The booking engine checks availability live instead of trusting a stored seat count, so two people can’t book the same seat at the same time. I tested that directly: twenty bookings fired at once for the last three seats always leaves exactly one winner. On top of that sits a waitlist that offers open seats automatically, with a twelve-hour window to claim one.

Brand and illustrations

The visual system is pulled directly from Ida & Ella’s own hand-drawn logo: warm paper tones, one accent red, no dark mode (I tried it once and it just didn’t feel like them). The illustrations come from the same source, scanned pieces of their original artwork, two figures, a bottle, a vase, but only used where they’re actually doing something on screen, like the bottle that visibly drains as a held seat’s countdown runs out.

Payments and testing

Payments run through Mollie, with the whole stack hosted inside Europe. The build is backed by 245 automated tests.