Case studies
The State of Matter.

Romance Capsule
tailored booklets celebrating your better half

A 34-pages booklet, combining memories with your loved one, photographs and interesting facts about your relationship. The perfect gift for a special occasion in two. An an app to personalise & automate the entire order process.

Industry

Specialty gifts

Timeline

November 2019 - Present

Every project has a purpose...

Each person represents a new story, waiting to be celebrated.

That's what inspired us to create unique, personalised gifts, that could share such stories in both digital & print.

With Romance Capsule, we wanted to introduce a new concept, a booklet that celebrates love and special memories, unique, but personal enough to fit any couple out there.

We packed into one product so many fun facts: how old is a relationship on different planets, kilometers traveled through the galaxy, the number breaths or heartbeats since two people are together, calories burnt kissing, dates when important milestones for the relationship will be celebrated and many many more.

Romance Capsule was a brand new product. While certain similar projects existed back in 2019, they were nowhere near the level of creativity, flexibility and personalisation we were aiming for.

...which requires a unique approach.

We prototyped the concept using a simple web form and, once we knew we’d reached product market fit, we built the full-fledged app you can see through these images.

The system was architected for our own & tailored business needs, with growth in mind. Every database column, backend method or application component was built to allow future expansion and to require minimum refactoring.

Over time, we ended up with a solution able to:

  • accept orders fully personalised online, based on the “what you see is what you get” principle

  • process content dynamically, based on customer preferences

  • deliver relevant notifications to customers: ‘continue your order’, ‘here’s your shipment tracking code’ and more

  • track customers at different moments in their journey and provide meaningful business insights

  • facilitate the same user experience across multiple countries and languages

  • support marketing and ad campaigns

  • accept various payment methods

  • generate invoices based on settled orders and transfer data to accounting

  • publish time-based announcements or notices

We’ve deployed the application live in the spring of 2020. Since then, it has received constant updates, both from a technical and also a content perspective.

We’ve built this solution for customers aged 16 - 45, in a relationship, with an interest in personalised gifts, looking to celebrate special moments with their loved ones and to store their memories in an everlasting format.

Key metrics

booklets personalised
91.560+
transactional e-mails
110.310+
customer journey notifications
7
countries in service
7
languages available
5
multi-currency payment methods
6

Achievements

  • The project started from Laravel v5.8 and got maintained in time all the way to Laravel v10.

    tech
  • Developed the customer facing application in full.

    code
  • Implemented integrations with several 3rd party systems.

    code
  • The business increased its revenue 7-fold in the first year since revamping the solution to this version.

    growth
  • Implemented client-side tracking of core events for Google, Meta & TikTok.

    marketing
  • Built a custom back-office ERP system powered by Laravel Nova.

    product
  • Defined the CI/CD pipeline with Github Actions.

    tech
  • Developed the payment mechanism, with Braintree in 2019 and Stripe since 2020.

    code
  • Tailored multiple e-mail notifications around the user journey.

    product
  • Implemented multiple dashboards for ecommerce tracking, insights & analytics.

    product
Personalizing the Romance Capsule booklet, next anniversaries

Personalizing the Romance Capsule booklet, next anniversaries

The preorder form, collecting information before the personalization step

The preorder form, collecting information before the personalization step

Personalizing the Romance Capsule booklet, #1 movie and song on the day of the relationship

Personalizing the Romance Capsule booklet, #1 movie and song on the day of the relationship

Order confirmation screen

Order confirmation screen

The next functions got packed into one tool

customers can add up to 17 photos in an order

visual photo editor with support for 3 layouts

complete online booklet personalisation

interesting & fun facts based on the anniversary date

multiple cash & digital payment methods available

choice of product add-ons on top of the order

delivery at shipping address or pickup point

support for product- and locale-based discount codes

tailored ERP system for back-office, production & logistics

integration into proprietary invoicing system

translated into 5 languages and localised for 7 countries

...and the technologies that enabled it

Laravel Laravel
Vue Vue
jQuery jQuery
Github Github
Stripe Stripe
Sentry Sentry
Mailchimp Mailchimp
Adobe Creative Cloud Adobe Creative Cloud
Google Tag Manager Google Tag Manager
Google Analytics Google Analytics

Do you want to see the application?

Visit project

Talking legal

In order to comply with the European compliance regulations and the data protection component required for businesses, we have conducted or engaged the tool in several data privacy & protection activities.

Cookies

Coordinated and implemented the cookie consent management, kept under active maintenance together with the cookie policy.

Policies

Created and performed ongoing adjustments of relevant documentation, such as the terms & conditions and privacy policy.