Bella Pictures is the largest wedding photography company in the United States. Their success was only limited by the constraints of the technology used to deliver, select, and share wedding photos.
FINE re-architected and built the web-native application that supports the entire wedding project workflow – from planning wedding invitations through to photographer image upload, wedding album design and creating and ordering products using your wedding imagery.
The highlight of the system is the personalized wedding websites that each wedding couple utilizes, each site with its own vanity URL.
These personalized portals are the window for all pre-wedding activity:
⁃ Salesforce integration to automatically create web portal account customer image upload for wedding invitation creation and “save the date” cards
⁃ Custom Flash-based product design tools for online ordering
⁃ Ecommerce integration
⁃ Fulfillment integration, including order management and customer service workflow
And when the events begin – engagement party, rehearsal nights and the big day itself – the technology platform comes even more into play:
⁃ Couples can customize portal settings
⁃ Password protection
⁃ Custom homepage imagery for couples
⁃ Show/hide function for each and every photo available
⁃ Friends can upload photos AND videos
⁃ Ecommerce workflow for retouching services
⁃ Ecommerce workflow for a series of wedding photo products
⁃ Custom support and order management workflow
⁃ Custom Java Web Start (JWS) application built to run on photographer PCs to ingest new photos (including intense salesforce integration)
⁃ Salesforce integration for tracking and evaluating CRM data
⁃ Support for multiple affiliates to Bella Pictures, each with their own skin
The application moves a massive data online due to the nature of the imagery industry – probably more than any other online data platform with the exception of social network photo sharing sites.
⁃ Utilizes Amazon S3 for easily scalable high-availability data storage and EC2 to stream dynamically created ZIP archives
⁃ More than 50,000 weddings in the platform
⁃ Up to 100 weddings in a day during peek seasons (100+ GB per wedding moving through the system)
⁃ The result is a massive amount of optimized data-flow and management
The Bella Pictures platform has had a significant impact on the company’s ability to attract customers and, more importantly, to deliver an optimal experience for one of the most important purchases they’ll ever make.