Giggle Factory

Giggle Factory styles birthdays, baby showers, bridal showers and office parties across Johannesburg: balloon backdrops, themed décor, party hire and catering. Most of their customers find them on social media, through photos of past events, and then message them on WhatsApp.

We built their first site in 2025 on WordPress and WooCommerce. It was a full online store with a product configurator and delivery zones. It was also the wrong tool. Giggle Factory doesn't sell stock. Every event is styled, hired or catered, and every price starts with a conversation about the date, the theme and the number of guests.

Why the online store had to go

A store asks customers to add things to a cart. Giggle Factory's customers ask, "How much for 20 guests?" The store sat unused while quotes carried on over WhatsApp, and the owner, Amanda, was left maintaining software she didn't need.

WooCommerce was also hard to run day to day. A simple quote meant working around product listings, and an invoice lived somewhere else again. Every extra plugin added another update to keep on top of. Across WordPress as a whole, 91% of the new security vulnerabilities found in 2025 were in plugins, not in WordPress itself.

So we rebuilt it around how the business actually works.

What we built instead

Version two is a headless build: a public website, and a separate admin made only for Giggle Factory. Both read from one database. There are no plugins and no add-ons. Every feature is part of the system.

The public site is fast on mobile, where most of their visitors are. That matters, because Google found that the chance of a visitor leaving rises by 32% as a page's load time goes from one second to three. Every page leads to a WhatsApp chat, because that is still how Giggle Factory's customers prefer to book.

The admin replaces WordPress, WooCommerce and a spreadsheet. Amanda can:

• edit every word and photo on the site herself
• run the announcement bar like an alarm clock app, with countdowns to booking cut-offs and scheduled holiday notices that switch themselves on and off
• upload a whole event's photos at once, tagged by occasion, theme and what is in each shot, so the gallery's filters build themselves
• send a quote as a WhatsApp link, and have the client accept it on their phone, which creates the invoice automatically
• record deposits and part-payments, with the balance and what is due next always visible
• plan a week of social media posts, with branded tiles generated from Giggle Factory's own design templates and captions written for each platform

Client links are private by design. Each quote and invoice opens on a long random address, so nobody can browse other clients' documents by guessing a number.

Built around how leads actually arrive

Most of Giggle Factory's leads come from social media, from photos of real events. So the gallery and the social scheduler matter more to this business than any homepage banner. Event photos go up once, tagged once, and feed both the website gallery and the week's posts.

Every enquiry also starts with the number of guests. The next stage of the build is a booking builder that starts from that question. A customer picks 10, 20, 30 or 50 guests, the chairs, plates, cutlery and tables fill in automatically, and the calendar shows which dates that basket fits. Stock is held for 48 hours when a quote is accepted, and released if the 50% deposit doesn't arrive.

A site that can be maintained by AI, safely

This is where the project changed how Keno Sonic builds. Because the site's content and data live in a structured database rather than in plugin settings, changes are repeatable. An AI coding agent can make a change, test it against the real business rules and ship it the same way every time. The client can work with the agent of their choice, and routine jobs can run on a schedule.

That only works with guardrails. Every booking rule, such as never double-booking the last chairs or releasing an unpaid hold after 48 hours, is written down as an automated test that runs before any change goes live.

Still building

This is a live system, not a finished brochure. Next on the list:

• the guest-count booking builder, with card and EFT deposits
• an after-hours WhatsApp assistant that answers common questions and prepares quotes while the team is offline
• seasonal campaign pages that switch on and off by date, built to pair with Google and Meta ads
• more search and lead-generation features after launch

We'll publish real numbers here once the new site has 90 days of data.