Brella's Software Re-Launch & Expansion
Brella co-Founders and co-CEOs, from left: Melanie Wolff and Darien Williams
WLCM is a team of parents — four of us had babies in the past year! — so we know well the challenge of finding high-quality, flexible and reliable child care. Mission-alignment and the ease of working with the Brella team make this long-term partnership a joy for everyone.
Melanie, Brella’s CEO, and I were texting when Tom Hanks got his COVID diagnosis and the NBA canceled its season. For some reason, that was the moment the reality of the pandemic hit us, and things got all-caps pretty fast. Brella closed its doors for three months, and we theorized about what their pandemic and post-pandemic scheduling system would look like. Ultimately, on-the-ground iteration and observation answered those questions. Melanie and and her co-CEO, Darien Williams, pivoted Brella’s model quickly and more than once to answer parents’ needs safely — and they succeeded.
Brella came out of the pandemic stronger than ever: with a waitlist, funding to expand to two new locations, and an updated model. This necessitated a re-think around their software systems, both parent-facing and administrative. Front of mind was the need to build a system that would flex with Brella, and we now better understood the variables that needed to be at play. For example:
The option for Brella to set and edit booking “blocks” so that, rather than booking by-the-hour, parents booked a block of hours. This was pandemic-friendly to, among other things, enable set cleaning periods for the center.
The alternative option for Brella to set a minimum booking duration, with parent-defined start times. This is would create more stability versus by-the-hour bookings.
A tiered-release model for hours to become available for booking. This ensures that some hours are always available for last-minute bookings. How many hours should be reserved and for how long is an unknown, so the system allows Brella to create multiple “waves” of releases and to tweak them over time.
The ability to book bulk hours over multiple days, with a variable discount after a minimum hours are booked in a session. The discount, and when it applies, is editable over time.
Tuition booking, with variable limits on the maximum number of tuition students that can be booked per room. Brella is still experimenting with some aspects of this offering, like how to enable schedule changes within the tuition model, so we created a workflow that can be custom-executed until we get a clearer picture of what’s needed.
The ability to add, edit and manage new Brella locations and all booking and pricing variables associated with each location + the ability for parents to book at multiple locations and set their “home” Brella.
We also made changes and improvements to existing system to improve usability, for example:
Our front desk display of who is in the center and when children are scheduled to check in and out was redesigned to give Brella a more holistic and clear view of the center at any given time
Parent and child profiles and booking workflows were updated to match the new parameters at play in Brella’s new booking models
Another aspect of the work that became clear over time was exactly what Brella needed to know to understand how the business was working. We built a reporting interface that displays analytics benchmarked against their core KPIs (key performance indicators). Software analytics by definition provide business intelligence, but these data points aren’t valuable until they’re collecting the right data and contextualizing it in the right way; our work here was to translate what we observed happening in Brella’s internal spreadsheets so that the number-crunching would be automated, the system would generate clear visuals, and the data would be exportable.
These are just some of the high-level updates we made for this re-launch. Brella has highly flexible, bespoke technology befitting a child care company that is doing things like no one’s done before. We’re proud of this re-launch and only regret that the public can’t see how amazing the admin system truly is!
Tour a few screenshots (and Brella!) here.
