Why we built Orla.
The calendar was never the problem. We had one. It was shared, it was color-coded, and it was always a little bit wrong.
The problem was everything that happened before the calendar. The email from the teacher at 9:40pm. The group chat where somebody mentions a time change and it scrolls away by morning. The flyer folded into the bottom of a backpack. Someone had to read all of it, decide what mattered, and type it in.
It was always the same someone.
Then one morning we dropped a kid off in regular clothes on the day the whole school was in costume. Nobody was hurt. It just sat there for the rest of the week, that small awful feeling of having missed something that was, technically, sitting in an inbox the entire time.
A shared calendar. Then a shared calendar with rules about who was allowed to add what, which held for about five weeks.
A whiteboard in the kitchen. A notes app nobody else opened. Two different family apps — one we paid for, one we didn't, both abandoned by the second month. Then a second whiteboard, smaller, for the things that didn't fit on the first one.
None of them were bad. They were all the same shape: an empty grid, waiting for somebody to fill it in. Every one of them assumed the hard part was seeing the week. The hard part was never seeing the week. The hard part was knowing what belonged in it.
Because everything built for this problem looks like it was built for an office. Dense, blue, efficient, joyless — software for a project manager with a headset on.
This isn't project management. It's Sunday night. It's the fifteen minutes before school. It's one more thing at the end of a day that already had enough things in it.
So Orla is warm on purpose. Soft edges, paper colors, nothing shouting, nothing blinking for attention it didn't earn. And Mimi reads the email so you don't have to, then tells you what she found before you go looking for it.
There are two of us behind this. One of us had been carrying the whole thing alone for years and didn't have a word for it yet. We built the thing she needed, and then we made it beautiful, because if you're going to open something every single day of your life, it should be good to you.