Grace Bennett runs Hello Dearest Events with her sister and their mom, a family business based in South East Queensland, Australia. What started out as attending events and handling drink service for clients grew into something bigger once the trio noticed how many people needed to rent event equipment too.
Today, Hello Dearest Events is an event rental business supplying furniture, tablescape pieces, and bar setups to people planning events across the region, and a lot of that inventory has been built or renovated by hand by the three of them.
Before Booqable, the team ran their event rental bookings entirely over email, writing up every quote and invoice one by one. It worked, but it left little room to breathe, especially with just three people covering everything from sourcing pieces to coordinating deliveries and pickups.
They wanted their customers to get a proper booking experience without adding more manual work on their end, and they wanted it to work with the website they already had. That’s what brought them to Booqable, where they connected their existing site so they could track orders from start to finish and organize their inventory into collections.
Tracking rentals orders from start to finish
Before Booqable, keeping tabs on who had booked what, and when it needed to go out or come back, lived entirely in Grace’s inbox. Every quote and invoice had to be built by hand, which left plenty of room for mixed-up dates or double-booked pieces during a busy event rental season.
With Booqable, when a customer books online, the order syncs to the backend right away and the item gets reserved automatically. It lands on the calendar and the daily planner, so the team can see exactly what’s going out and coming back each day. Orders carry a status, so a piece can move from reserved to picked up, and later to returned, right from the app or the backend.
Once an order is returned, it can be archived, which keeps a record for reporting down the line. And if someone wants to check whether an item is free for a certain date, that’s a quick look in the app instead of a search through old emails.
Grace named tracking orders from start to finish as one of her favorite things about Booqable. For Hello Dearest Events, that’s meant:
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No more writing up every quote and invoice by hand
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A clear view of what’s booked, picked up, or returned at any moment
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Real time savings during their busiest event rental stretches
That time saving is exactly what the team was after. Instead of chasing details across emails, they can see an order’s full status at a glance and put that time back into running the business.
Displaying product collections online
With furniture, tablescape pieces, and bar setups all sitting in one inventory, it was hard to give customers a clear picture of what belonged together for their event. Browsing needed to feel easy, not like scrolling through one long, unsorted list.
Booqable lets Hello Dearest Events assign each product to a collection in the backend, then display those collections on individual pages of their online store. Since their store runs through their existing website, someone browsing tablescape pieces or bar setups sees only what’s relevant to their event rental, rather than every item in the catalog at once.
For a small family business built on style and creative flair, that matters because it lets their range speak for itself. Collections have helped Hello Dearest Events:
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Give customers a cleaner, more organized way to browse by category
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Highlight furniture and tablescape pieces as their own distinct groups
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Present their catalog with the same polish as their events
Customers can now find the right pieces for their event rental without wading through unrelated inventory. That’s one less thing standing between a booking and a beautifully set table.
Achieving business goals
Grace describes Booqable as a “one stop shop that fits the team’s goals of running a creative, organized business”. As Hello Dearest Events grows, they’re hoping for more of the same results of happy repeat customers, a wider product range, and rental bookings that need less hands-on attention day to day. With order tracking and collections already doing a lot of that work, they’re well on their way.
