There rarely is an occasion as celebrated or as popular as a wedding. From napkin hues and flower arrangements to entire wedding themes, every couple has their own idea of how they want their wedding day to go.
However, piecing together your dream wedding is not an easy task by far.
With all the ideas pouring in—either from the net or from family and friends—it’s frighteningly easy to be overwhelmed, and planning for your wedding suddenly seems less exciting and more burdensome.
Furthermore, information on wedding vendors you’d come across on Google tends to be fragmented or sometimes even missing.
Joel Lim understands this all too well. After helping to facilitate a wedding for a good friend, he’d come to the conclusion that planning a wedding was more complicated than it was worth.
To combat these shortcomings, he co-founded Bridalgram, a wedding platform that hosts over 300 vendors offering services and products ranging from photography and makeup to decorations and bridal dresses.
A Dream To Make Dreams Reality
“Imagine four guys with no prior experience, both academic and professional, in the wedding industry decided to set up an online wedding platform,” said Joel. “The learning curve was definitely steep.”
Founded by an engineer, a fast food restaurant owner, an educator, and a recruiter, Bridalgram has a fairly unique origin.
“Before we launched Bridalgram, we actually were running another startup called Rent A Space, an online booking platform for event spaces,” explained Joel.
At that time, close to 80% of the enquiries were for wedding venues. Therefore we asked 200 couples if a complete wedding platform with vendors, promos and prices would help their wedding planning. The results were a whopping 93%.
Joel Lim, co-founder of Bridalgram
The team was also inspired by a hands-on experience with planning weddings, which came in the form of a good friend’s surprise wedding.
Their success with the event led to the creation of Bridalgram, with the aim to make planning easier for couples while giving them more control over their wedding.
“For couples in this generation, the freedom to choose is very important,” Joel said.
Decisions Made Simple
“One of Bridalgram’s main purposes is to help couples to discover the latest and trendiest wedding vendors available in the market, and encourage the couples to enquire with those vendors directly,” clarified Joel.
At a first glance, Bridalgram’s website is simple and clean, with an array of choices neatly arranged for the viewer’s convenience.
As promised, there are plenty of vendors to pick from, with brands such as 3Ants Photography and Étoilée Bridal.
However, each vendor will undergo a vetting process in order to be featured in Bridalgram.
In order to prove their legitimacy, each vendor would have to go through a sign-up process asking for important details such as their contact details, vendor category, and social media links.
Additionally, Joel will contact them directly as a final measure of security.
Even so, the process is worth the payback for the vendors, as they have the freedom to update details and promotions to their profiles whenever they like.
All enquiries will also go to them directly, in contrast to other wedding platforms who control both enquiries and profile management.
It’s worth noting, however, that transactions between vendors and customers aren’t held directly on Bridalgram.
There are many vendors who are uncomfortable with revealing their prices publicly due to the competition, and therefore will only share their pricing with potential clients who contact them directly.
Nonetheless, the Bridalgram team is doing their best to educate and change vendors’ perception on this matter, and they’re seeing gradual improvements.
Promotions And Promises
It’s no secret that weddings can take a sizable chunk out of your wallet.
I did a little digging of my own to discover how big of a hole it can make, and discovered that the total cost of an average Malaysian Chinese wedding can rack up to a whopping RM102,000.
This excludes the costs of other miscellaneous services such as hair and makeup services, fees for religious figures, and so on.
However, Bridalgram offers an alternative to this common problem.
With their vendor list, couples can pick a vendor they want according to their budget (although you’d need to sign up/log in to view their prices).
According to Joel, Bridalgram’s USP lies in the fact that they’re the only wedding company to offer a variety of FB live sessions, with a few series:
- FB Live Bridal Promo, where vendors give couples the chance to save money with deals and discounts,
- Passion to Profit live series, where wedding vendors can learn more about the current trends and insights from the top vendors, and more.
As for the future of Bridalgram, Joel has big plans for the next two years.
“We aim to not only be Malaysia’s undisputed number one wedding platform, but will also be expanding to countries like Singapore and Indonesia,” he stated.
He plans on completing the range of wedding tools available by then, and strengthening their position on live sessions.
- You can read about other Malaysian startups we’ve written about here.
Featured Image Credit: Bridalgram