The first wedding on Aisle was not ours. A couple we had never met signed up on the twenty-ninth of March, and they get married next month. Ours went into the table three days later, and we got married in June, at a hotel above Merano that we had booked out for the weekend. We invited 110 people and 80 came. The hotel sent one bill at the end of it and there was no sensible way to collect from anyone, which is the part we built first and the reason any of the rest of this exists.
Today there are 1,130 weddings on Aisle, and 225 of them arrived in the last seven days. When I last wrote to everyone, on the second of August, there were 578.
Here is what that number counts. A couple signed up and started a wedding. It does not count weddings that have happened, and it does not count couples who will still be here in December. The number I look at first each morning is smaller and much less flattering: how many couples come back in their second week and add a guest. That one tells me whether we have built a product or a signup form.
A thousand is still worth marking. In April it was Perrie and me, a list of venues we were emailing one at a time, and three weddings, one of which was our own.
What shipped since the second of August
The gallery has been on the site since July, and until three weeks ago it held exactly one wedding’s photographs: ours. It shipped with no way for anyone else to put anything in it. Two couples wrote within days of each other to say they could add their photographer’s name and their photographer’s Instagram, but not their actual photographs, which was an accurate description of what we had made. You can now select photographs from the Photos panel and they go to your gallery, where guests can find the ones they are in.
Plus ones work the way they should. You grant the seat, the guest names the person, and nobody has to invent a name for someone they have not met yet. Registries got two more doors: link out to a registry you already keep at Zola or a shop, and turn on a public registry page for the colleague or the second cousin who was never on the guest list and still wants to send something.
The 5% fee is now a choice. A couple who quietly cover some of their guests’ rooms asked whether it could be charged at checkout instead of coming out of their payout, because padding the prices by hand meant redoing the arithmetic every time a room changed. It is a toggle on your Stripe card, and the fee is the same 5% either way.
Guest sites can ask for a texted code before they open, which is in Settings under how guests sign in. A phone number from your list is enough for most weekends, and some couples would rather the address of the after party sat behind a second step.
Fifteen dress codes have pages of their own now, from white tie to vineyard chic. If one of them is yours, take it into your site as a chapter and edit it there instead of typing it out.
The site itself bends further than it did. Rename any chapter, choose the colour your cover type prints in, pick the paper and the ink and how the cover crops your photograph, and publish from the same screen where you build it. You can also do all of that by asking Claude or ChatGPT, which reach Aisle through our MCP server. That is the first step toward something larger: building your whole wedding site in a conversation, looking however you want it to look, rather than choosing from what we thought to offer you.
Where the list came from
Almost every line above started as a sentence somebody sent us. The gallery was two couples in one week. The fee toggle was one couple’s awkward arithmetic. Four of the smaller fixes came from one couple who wrote a long, specific, slightly annoyed message, which is the most useful kind of message we get.
So: walt@aisle.wedding, or reply to any email we send you. It comes to me and I read all of it.
Next
Ten thousand weddings. The honest obstacle is inventory. We have 6,635 venues across 47 countries and 180 of them are in the United States, so an American couple looking for somewhere within driving distance often finds nothing. That is what we are working on next.
Thank you for being one of the first thousand.
Walt