WeddingLovely is for those who find the romance the overwhelming expectations of a rosy future together ahead slowly slipping away by the time they start planning for the wedding and reduce themselves to nervous wrecks by the time they find a semblance of planning in the whole process. In short, it is meant for everyone who look forward to get married.
Founded in November 2010, co-founders Tracy Osborn and Julia Grace through WeddingLovely “cuts down the noise with a guided online wedding-planning experience, sending timely e-mails with to-do lists, and tailoring advice and suggestions to help streamline decision making. Couples are connected to a network of curated wedding vendors to quickly and easily find services in their budget, location, and style. In addition, couples can share their planning progress with friends and family through an automatically created wedding website.” Based on a monthly subscription fee, through this streamlined, ‘fat-free’ and clutter-free enterprise, they are in the right direction when it comes to scoring over the established leviathans in the game (read Knot.com), presenting it more humanely to the end-user rather than seeing it as another opportunity to overwhelmingly serve ads while consuming content distributed confusingly, as seems to be the case now.
Founded in 2010 by Tracy Osborn, WeddingLovely’s earlier avatars included WeddingType and WeddingInviteLove ( a web application that helped you find the perfect wedding invitation designer, searchable by price and location, released in January 2011 ), all built with an eye for design and a passion to code, the latter self-taught.
Julia Grace who joined as co-founder and currently CTO of WeddingLovely had been Head of Product VigLink , an information visualization researcher and software engineer at IBM Almaden Research and part one of the world’s top User Experience Research groups, had already been giving informal advice for Tracy’s business, product features, etc. According to Julia, Tracy was looking for a co-founder but she wanted to be sure it was a good fit before jumping on board. After a few weeks of soul-searching and thinking deeply about what she wanted to do next, she joined WeddingLovely in January 2011.
WeddingLovely went live after winning a place in the 500 Startups’ chosen “little monsters” and received $ 50, 000 investment from Designers Fund as seed funding. In effect, WeddingLovely is a collection of wedding tools and directories, aimed at promoting small business, local, and independent wedding vendors. It literally simplifies the entire planning for a wedding, right from curated vendor listings as separate products integrated with WeddingLovely ( WeddingInviteLove for everything in Cards, WeddingPlannerLove for planners, WeddingVenueLove for Venues and so on ) in delightfully easy and engaging interfaces, along with the option of creating one’s own wedding website which will have you putting together the entire wedding with a few mouse clicks.
The main channels of monetisation for the service is its subscription fee of $19/month or a flat rate of $119/year for brides. There is of course a 14-day trial period also, for the ‘yet-to-be-convinced’ lot. The WeddingLovely team is also making optimum use of their content-rich and highly engaging blogs across vendor directories and the main site in opening additional revenue channels.
Though the listing comes free for vendors, they are offering Partnered Posts for $ 200 which would have these blog posts featured on their home page for 24 hours and Banner ads for $ 5-25 across three sizes. Currently with vendor listings in the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe, with over 1,500 vendors since going live and counting, its clean and user-friendly layout and user experience will surely go a long way in its objective of making people’s weddings unique and personal experiences.
