Two coins, one pull, and something to take home.
Knick Knack is a restored vintage vending machine you can hire for an event. Guests put in 2 quarters, pull a chrome drawer, and receive a keepsake made for the occasion. Leanna Manning started the business in downtown Hattiesburg in March 2026 and runs it herself.
The experience was easier to show than explain
In person, Knick Knack makes sense quickly: guests put in 2 quarters, pull a chrome drawer, and receive something made for the occasion. Online, customers needed enough context to imagine that experience at their own event.
Instagram showed the machine well, but the practical questions were harder to answer there: what does it cost, what can go inside, and is it available on June 14? The website needed to answer those questions without flattening the experience into a conventional rental.
The pull is part of the keepsake
The machine already gives guests a reason to participate, and Leanna found a way to make that interaction part of the wedding itself. One of the 4 slots can hold a guest-book card, so guests pull a drawer, leave a note, and take a keepsake home.
The same small ritual now does 2 jobs: it gives guests something to keep and gives the couple a guest book nobody skips. The site's job was to make uses like this easy to understand and imagine at a real event.
The site had to sound like Leanna
We wrote the site, but the voice came from listening to how Leanna describes the business — dry, confident, unfussy.
“No warehouse and no crew. Just a very heavy machine and a lot of ideas.”
On a site selling something unfamiliar, the copy is doing more work than the layout. It has to explain the idea without making the machine sound like a gimmick.
Designed to match the machine, and the brand she already had
Leanna arrived with her branding done, so the site's job was to extend it rather than replace it: cobalt, coral, warm cream, and a petrol near-black, with a heavy condensed display face in caps and an italic serif for the wink.
The palette comes from the machine itself: mid-century coin-op Americana without adding another visual language on top of it.
Weddings, gallery openings, markets, parties
Rather than describing the product and hoping people imagine a use for it, the page walks through the events it belongs at — and gives weddings a section of their own, because that's where the guest book idea lands hardest.
Eight fields, all of them required
Date, venue, guest count, event type, how they'd like to run it — all 8 fields are required.
Leanna is a one-person company. The difference between an inquiry with all the details and an inquiry without them is the difference between one reply and six messages back and forth.
A 5-month-old business with 1 machine and 1 person now has named use cases, 2 ways to pay, and an inquiry form with the details needed to quote the event.
Technical details
The inquiry form posts to our own endpoint.
The data goes straight to Leanna without passing through a form service. It works with JavaScript switched off, and a hidden honeypot field handles spam without asking customers to solve a puzzle.
One page today, more when it earns them.
The copy is already segmented by event type, so weddings and gallery openings can each become their own landing page when there’s demand to justify it. Nothing needs rebuilding to get there.
No CMS yet.
It's a brochure site for a business a few months old. We built it so adding one later is straightforward, and left it out until it's worth having.
- Built with
- Astro, compiled to static HTML
- Content
- In the repo — no CMS yet
- Hosting
- Vercel
- Fonts
- Anton, Instrument Serif, and Google Sans, self-hosted
- JavaScript frameworks
- None
- Routes
- One