our story of wedding marketing done brilliantly
After seven years in the wedding photography business, Rosalind Bordo had learned a thing or two about the challenges of marketing in the wedding industry. Often her best leads had come from word-of-mouth and networking referrals from other wedding vendors with whom she had worked. Rosalind quickly found that the best way to show her appreciation was to provide those vendors with beautiful images for use in their own marketing collateral. The only downside was that after each wedding she was faced with the time intensive process of pulling a different set of specific images, burning, packing and mailing separate disks and often re-posting galleries of images multiple times so that vendors could make their selections. This is silly, she thought. All we really need is a centralized database of images that allows photographers to easily share their images with other wedding vendors!
One day, over cups of hot chocolate, Rosalind shared her idea with Siri Eklund, a good friend from their MBA days at the Kellogg School of Management. Siri was intrigued by Rosalind's idea and suggested that, in addition to just sharing images, such a tool could enable users to create all kinds of customized marketing materials as well as share referrals. The backbone of the business concept would utilize social networking principles to provide the continual transfer of value.
The more they talked, the more they realized that with their strong business backgrounds, Rosalind's experience as a wedding photographer and Siri's years of marketing luxury goods, their skills complimented each other perfectly. They would develop a detailed business plan for a software service where networking would be more than social. It would be smart.
