Art Class Booking Software for the Workshop and the Six Weeks

The Saturday workshop and the Tuesday course are sold to different people for different reasons. One is a gift or a first try, booked by somebody who has never touched clay and might not come back, and the decision happens fast, more impulse than plan. The other is six weeks of the same faces, bought once at the start, with dates that aren't negotiable because the work has to move through the kiln between sessions. Both are services on the same booking page, each with its own dates, its own length and its own number of places, and both are paid for as they're booked.

There is nothing flexible about the number of wheels you own. You can fit another person in the room, just not at a wheel, and a workshop where every piece has to go into the kiln afterward is capped by what one load will actually take. Classes and courses carry a capacity limit you set, so a class stops taking bookings at the number the studio can physically make work. A life drawing session around one model, a hand-building table and a wheel-throwing class can each be their own service with their own number, because they don't run out of room at the same point.

What a class costs to attend and what it costs to run are two different numbers, and the gap is materials: clay, canvas, glaze, gas. Optional paid add-ons per service let a booking carry the second bag of clay, an extra firing, a larger canvas or a set of brushes somebody would rather not buy twice, chosen and paid for at the point of booking instead of being tracked down after the fact. A promotion code can carry a first-timer offer on a new workshop without you rewriting what everything else costs, and refunds and extra charges run from the same dashboard.

Nothing sells a workshop like a photograph of what came out of the last one. Put the booking widget on your own website with a script tag, on Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly and other site builders, and someone can go from that photograph to a paid place without leaving the page. If the studio hasn't got a website, run a standalone kiwilaunch booking page on your own custom domain, with a design you set yourself, and put that link wherever the photographs already go. Either way the place is booked while the enthusiasm is still there, which for a workshop is most of the battle.

You aren't going to stop mid-demonstration to answer it, and there's clay to the wrist either way. The kiwilaunch iOS app holds your calendar, your customers, your bookings and your payments, so between the morning workshop and the evening class you can see who's coming and check what's already been paid. Tap to Pay on iPhone takes a card at the studio door for the extra bag of clay, or for the person who walks past, looks in, and wants next Saturday, with no reader to buy.