Hearth Studio

Case study · Photography · In progress

A client dashboard for a wedding photographer.

A custom client portal for galleries, contracts, and invoices — built around how a working photographer actually runs a studio. Currently in build; launching with a real-client beta.

Year
2026
Work
Custom dashboard
Role
Design + build
Duration
In build · launching this season
gallery.hearthstudio.work
Galleries
Clients
Invoices
Contracts
Calendar
Hawkins · Belmont
October 12 · 412 photographs · ready for review
Share Deliver
AllFavoritesCeremonyPortraitsReception

The challenge

Wedding studios run on three apps and a folder of spreadsheets.

Galleries live in one tool. Contracts in another. Payments in a third. The wedding-day timeline is a Google Doc shared the night before. It works at eight weddings a year. It stops working at thirty.

Off-the-shelf studio platforms either cost more than a second-shooter or feel like a help-desk built for a 50-person team. The brief is the opposite: one calm workspace, shaped to the studio it belongs to.

The approach

One workspace, calm by default.

We're building a single dashboard that puts galleries, contracts, payments, and the day-of timeline in one place — for the photographer and their clients. The design language is warm and quiet, because that's what wedding work feels like at its best.

Boring stack, on purpose. Static-first marketing surface, a small typed dashboard for the studio side, real-money plumbing through Stripe. We want something that will still be running, easily, in 2031.

The result

Launching with a real-client beta this season.

First studio is already onboarded for the beta. Real wedding season starts in a few weeks, which is the only deadline that matters: by the first ceremony, every booked couple should be living in the dashboard.

Once it's running in production, we'll publish screenshots, real numbers, and a proper case study here. Until then, this page is honest about being a work in progress — which feels right for a tool that's still being shaped by the people using it.

A small note: we’re keeping this case study deliberately light until launch. Screenshots, metrics, and a real client quote will land here once the first wedding ships through it.

Have a project in mind?

Want something like this?

Tell us what you're working on. We'll tell you, honestly, whether we're the right fit.

Let's talk