Hi Jennifer, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I have worked in wedding & events for over a decade now. I enjoy working with brides, seeing their different venues, setups, working with their budgets and helping them brainstorm ideas and see them all come to life on the big day. After seeing so many, I caught onto the popular trend of matching bridesmaid robes or pajamas for the bridal party pictures. I decided to start my own Etsy shop personalizing and selling them, I even sold them directly to my own brides. I was shocked at how quickly I sold them and how much money I had made so my husband Michael decided to build our own Shopify site to sell them.
We named the business Kadlee which was wildly successful. From the day we took the site live in May 2017, we were making sales and profitable every single month. We did anywhere from $500-$1500 in sales every day. I suggested we add a buy/sell tab to Kadlee to help drive more traffic to our site so users could sell their own items on there too. Michael said we need to stay focused and not make this a hodge podge site so we focused solely on selling new inventory ourselves. We hired a marketing agency to take a deep dive into our ad campaign to bring us even more business and after seeing the overwhelming volume of search traffic for bridesmaid robes/gifts, they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. We sold the company 13 months after we had started it. Some luck? Sure. Strategic thinking and hard work? Of course.
After selling Kadlee, we revisited the idea of the buy/sell page for wedding items and decided if we could run our first business successfully then let’s launch forward with another. It was fun, we enjoyed having our own company and working for ourselves. After extensively scouring the internet to see what competition there was (or wasn’t in our case!), we were reassured this was such a great idea. Thanks to the acquisition of Kadlee, we now had the funds to build Wedzee so we incorporated in July 2018 and off we went. I feel SO STRONGLY this is so needed so we decided it was worth the risk. I knew if we didn’t do it, someone else would. We are in public beta with a planned official launch for early 2021. Wedzee consolidates all other wedding shopping options into one very easy to use secure platform. We allow the sale of new, used, and custom items. We are pulling together artisans, wedding eCommerce and small businesses, in addition to recent brides looking to offload their pre-loved items. Wedzee truly is a one of a kind smart marketplace. I didn’t have one “ah ha” moment making me realize why I needed to create Wedzee.
My reasons for starting Wedzee were cultivated over time and boil down to a few key points. 1. I am ambitious and goal-driven and enjoy challenging myself. I DO NOT like monotonous jobs “working for the man.” I consider myself to be financially smart and organized and want to work for myself. I want to work and need to work to feel truly fulfilled. 2. I have worked with so many brides over the years; I see the trends, I see what tools they have and what they use and want to use. More importantly, I see what they don’t have that they need. 3. There is no direct competition, this space is wide open for the taking. If someone else was already offering a fully-functional wedding marketplace, I wouldn’t try to compete but the beauty is Wedzee is the only one. 4. I read success stories of other marketplaces and websites. Specifically, Reverb who picked a specific vertical (musical instruments of all things) and was acquired after seven years for $234 million. Also, that of Zola, Honeyfund and The Knot. 5. I have been asked countless times about where to look for this and that, where can I buy this or how can I stay within my budget. What about after the wedding, what do I do with all this stuff. eBay is a hodge podge and Craigslist is sketchy. I see the need for this. I want to give these brides an answer. Since I couldn’t find one, I created the answer.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Oh gosh, nothing ever goes quite as planned! Covid-19 clearly threw a wrench in our plans. However, the pandemic forced us to pivot and better build our company foundation, fine tune our user personas, and add additional value propositions to our site. We set out with the intention to use a marketplace builder template but could not find one that enabled all of the functionality needed to integrate shipping so we decided to build the entire site custom. It was a much more expensive and longer undertaking than anticipated.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am the Founder and CEO of Wedzee. This is my second venture in the wedding industry; my first company was a bridal e-commerce site acquired in 2018. From my experience working in weddings and events, I know what is lacking and I know what is needed. The problem is that millions of brides are collectively spending billions of wedding shopping online but they are browsing dozens of websites to cross everything off their list! There is no focused platform to securely both buy & sell these items. The solution is Wedzee! Wedzee is a marketplace targeted exclusively to the wedding industry that provides a secure way to buy, sell, and ship items nationwide. It serves as a landing zone for all things weddings and is comparable to an eBay meets Etsy for the wedding industry. We target both the C2C and B2C sectors of the market. Marketplaces when executed properly have proven to be extremely successful and this vertical is untapped.
I want to pull countless bridal boutiques, wedding eCommerce sellers, and the millions of handcrafted wedding items onto my platform. Wedzee consolidates these options into one very easy to use one-stop shop platform offering new and used items to meet every bride’s budget. 88% of wedding planning is now done online. The typical journey a bride goes through when planning her wedding from engagement through booking vendors and creating a registry have existing solutions, but where the industry is lacking is when it comes to buying and selling items. Wedzee will complement NOT compete with the other big key players in the wedding space – Weddingwire, Zola and The Knot. Wedzee fits right in here because we will target their same users but fill a gap that they don’t. These are also ideal targets for future acquisition. In the US Weddings are a $78 BILLION dollar industry with 2.5 million weddings each year. You have to understand just how big this market is!!! Our Total Addressable Market of $15 BILLION which is scattered amongst various sites because there is no one true go-to site.
Wedzee is very well positioned to capture a large portion of this massive market because we only have indirect competition! Our competitor’s either lack industry focus or functionality. Brides are spending money every single day. These are lifetime moments people will spend money on. It’s not ever an issue of if the market is there, it’s a matter of who is doing it right, offering all of the functionality needed. Wedzee is in beta with a full public launch scheduled for early 2021. We will quickly grow from Florida to the Southeast and then Nationwide. We are currently raising our pre-seed round. Our site is ready to launch; we simply need the funds to market it. We have a very strong founding team, as well as an excellent advisory board including the former VP of IT and worldwide operations from eBay. I know the wedding industry like the back of my hand and there is NO ONE innovating and taking over the market in this way. My vision is HUGE and it’s only a matter of time until Wedzee is synonymous with the wedding industry. Thank you.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
There are three things guaranteed in life – death, taxes, and marriage. Not even a global pandemic can stop weddings. Instead, the industry pivoted to micro-weddings, zoom weddings, and other creative ideas. As a business, the pandemic forced us to hit the pause button when it came to launching the website with advertisements and instead better focus on our business foundation, user journey and personas, and fine turn the design and enhanced functionality for our website.
Pricing:
- FREE to list items for sale
Contact Info:
- Email: info@wedzee.com
- Website: www.wedzee.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shopwedzee/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shopwedzee
- Twitter: @shopwedzee
Image Credits
Andi Diamond Photography
