What Bride Squad sells, and who it is for

Bride Squad is a shop for one weekend. The order goes in about six weeks before it, it is placed by one person, and it has to cover eight or nine people who have all said yes to a group chat and not yet said anything about a size. Nine shelves of things that answer that, with the pack count and the colour printed on every card.

What is on the shelves

The Bride Squad catalogue splits first by what a thing does over the weekend, because that is the only question you can answer before the theme is settled. Worn across the shoulder: sashes, veils and tiaras. Worn on the body: shirts and tanks. Worn on the head: caps, cowgirl hats and sunglasses by the bagful. Drunk from: tumblers, party cups, can coolers and flutes. Hung on a wall: balloons, banners and backdrops. Taken home in a bag: tote bags, gift bags, favours and tattoo sheets. Worn small: lettered makeup bags, scrunchies and little jewelry. Played: scratch decks and quizzes. And slept in: robes, pyjamas and socks.

Across those nine shelves run the pages people actually type. Bride squad sashes, bride squad shirts, bride squad sunglasses, bride squad balloons and sixteen more, each one the same catalogue cut a second way, by the job rather than by the aisle.

Who it is for

The maid of honour, or whoever ended up with the spreadsheet. That person is buying for a group rather than for a person, and everything about how these pages are built follows from it. She needs to know how many come in the pack before she needs to know what it costs, because a set of twelve sashes and a single sash sit side by side in a search result looking identical. She needs to know which pieces demand a size from every person, because those are the ones that hold the whole order up. And she needs to know which things are bought once for the room, because counting the balloons per head is how a budget doubles between Tuesday and Wednesday.

That is why the count sits above the price on every card here, why the size run is printed wherever there is one, and why the pieces that need a decision from eight people are flagged as the ones to order first. A shop built for a bride buying one thing for herself would be laid out completely differently, and would be no use at all to the person actually placing this order.

What a card can settle for you

A card here describes an object: what it is, how many come in the pack, what colour, what it costs. Those four are what a photograph on a white background cannot settle, and they are what decides between two boxes that look identical in a search result. Whether the sash makes the photographs, whether the game rescues the second evening, whether a particular person can wear a particular metal for two days: you know your group, the room and the weather, and a card does not.

Where a page has to say something about a body rather than a table, it names the organisation whose job that is: the federal labelling rule that puts a choking warning on latex balloons, the agency guidance on what a decal tattoo is and what has been reported about them, and the dermatologists' account of why inexpensive jewelry gives some people a rash after two days. All three are set out on the methods page rather than paraphrased into a promise here.

The one checkable thing we state about ourselves is the year, 2018. Everything else worth knowing about a piece is on its card, and how the figures on those cards are kept current is set out on how we update the catalogue.