Graduation Tassels Platform Docs

Graduation is a universal, calendar-driven, high-emotion, high-spend milestone that recurs for every student, every year — yet the experience is fragmented across cap-and-gown suppliers, photo studios, announcement printers, and generic social apps.

Graduation Tassels is building the connective layer: a student designs their graduation look for free, buys the matching physical tassel, receives a personal QR identity page that families scan and share, and keeps a private memory vault. Schools plug in on the other side, running their entire graduation event through the same platform. Each side reinforces the other.

school runs an event  ──▶  student gets a personalized design link
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 school demand  ◀── organic traffic ◀── family scans the QR / shares the page
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 more schools  ◀──────────  student profile + tassel purchase + memory vault

Every feature below is live in the codebase. Explore the consumer surface directly:

Next.js 15 (App Router, React 19, Server Components + route handlers), TypeScript (strict), Tailwind CSS 3.4 with a small brand token set and full dark/light support, and framer-motion for interaction.

Data, auth, and storage run on a single Supabase (Postgres) project using the gt_ table prefix, with Row-Level Security on every table. Twenty tables span migrations 0001–0009. Payments use Stripe (Checkout + webhooks); tassel QR codes use the qrcode library.

Security posture: confidential data — suppliers, costs, orders, raw QR scans, and unapproved family submissions — carries no client RLS policy and is written only via the service-role key on the server. School access is membership-scoped through SECURITY DEFINER helpers so policies never recurse.

Notably, the digital experiences — stories, advisor, studio art — are deterministic template engines, not calls to an external AI model. That means no per-request inference cost and zero COGS on digital features. Hosting is Vercel; a companion iOS app shares the same Supabase project.

Two-sided and self-reinforcing. Consumers create and buy on one side; schools run events on the other; each seeds the other. The consumer product is a free-to-paid funnel (design free → buy physical → keep memories), and the school portal converts institutions into recurring seasonal customers who deliver whole cohorts at once. Growth compounds through programmatic SEO and organic QR/share loops rather than paid acquisition.

Multiple streams, described qualitatively — no figures are asserted.

• D2C commerce — physical tassels, charms, and regalia via the configurator and Stripe; dropship-fulfilled with per-order cost/margin tracking. Primary near-term revenue.
• School SaaS (per-event) — starter / professional / enterprise plans for running a graduation event; recurring, seasonal, and expandable across a district.
• Future marketplace — creator/designer marketplace for cap designs and templates, plus premium digital features.
• Companion iOS Pro — subscription monetization of the native studio app.

The consumer site is a programmatic-SEO engine that also feeds the B2B pipeline.

• School directory — /schools/[slug] across ~150 schools, each with unique content, related majors, and CTAs; also inbound top-of-funnel for the school offering.
• Major pages — /shop/major/[major] mapping each major to a recommended bundle.
• Class-year + school landing pages — /[slug] resolves hub, custom, class-of-2026, and per-university pages, each preloading the studio.
• Programmatic framework — slugs are generated from data, so coverage scales by adding rows; sitemap/robots are generated from the slug lists.
• Seasonal freshness — the class year rolls automatically each fall, keeping pages evergreen.
• Organic distribution — QR graduate pages and shared stories create backlinks and social reach every time a family scans or shares.

Schools are the highest-leverage channel: one signed school delivers a whole cohort — and their families — at once. The portal lets a school brand its event, bulk-import a roster, hand each student a token design link, and watch metrics, turning the consumer product into an institutional workflow. The ~150-school SEO directory is inbound top-of-funnel; outbound targets districts via multi-school plans. Because student links can mint graduate identity pages, every school event also seeds the consumer network.

1. BuiltPhase 1 — Consumer studio + SEOFree studio, programmatic landing pages, storefront + Stripe.
2. BuiltPhase 1B — Identity + engagementQR identity network, memory vault, viral loops, advisor.
3. BuiltPhase 2 — School B2B portalEvent branding, roster import, per-student links, metrics, plans.
4. NextPhase 3 — Go-to-marketLaunch, seed schools, first campaigns, live supplier fulfillment.
5. PlannedPhase 4 — Marketplace + network effectsCreator marketplace, alumni graph, district expansion.
6. ThisPhase 5 — Acquisition readinessREADME, docs, data room, investor narrative.

Four reinforcing moats, argued qualitatively.

Owned and created assets (factual). Patent/trademark protection is framed as an opportunity, not a filing.

No trademark registration or patent has been asserted for this project. Any TM/patent language above describes an opportunity to pursue protection, not an existing filing.