Ditching the idea of approaching a costly wedding planner, and planning your wedding all by yourself? But for those who have tried it, you would probably realise how difficult is it to be calling potential wedding venues, just to be informed that your ideal date is not available for booking or their cost is over your budget.
And that is exactly what co-founders of Singapore’s newest wedding planning platform, Celovebrate, hope to address, by revolutionizing how Singaporean couples plan their weddings by streamlining the process.
“The amount of information available to plan a wedding in Singapore is overwhelming—you have to weed through numerous sites and forums to find a gem,” said Sean Tan, co-founder and CEO of Celovebrate. “With Celovebrate, we’ve created a platform that uses a proprietary algorithm that helps to match the users’ input and connects the couples instantly with venues that match their date, budget and party size.”
Celovebrate was conceptualized after its co-founders watched friends go through the difficulty of finding a wedding venue that met the couple’s vision, as well as their budget.
“We were driven to create a platform that makes wedding planning more efficient,” said Tan. “We understand the pain couples go through, balancing their budget, party size, date and expectations while plowing through mountains of research, calling venue after venue to find out your date is unavailable, or even worse, failing to even get a response from the venue.”
Celovebrate’s online portal brings a fresh new approach to the wedding industry, with professionally-vetted venue listings delivering clear, up-to-date images and descriptions. Unlike other sources of wedding information available online, Celovebrate’s website isn’t overpopulated with ads, providing an elegant and simple interface for users.
“Transparency and honesty are our core values,” continued Tan. “The venues our users see are locations we have personally vetted. Celovebrate doesn’t promote any one venue in particular during the search, which means our users are provided unbiased feedback for their search.”
According to Celovebrate’s website, users receive instant feedback on venue availability and are able to plan the wedding they want, when they want it, and at the cost they can afford. By inputting the preferred party date, size and cost into the platform, Celovebrate instantly provides a list of venues that match the user’s criteria and guarantees a future appointment booking within 24 hours of a user’s request.
“Up to 40% of all weddings in Singapore take place in venues other than hotel ballrooms and our research shows that trend increasing in the coming years,” continued Tan. “With Celovebrate, we bring the user unique venue options, and we make it easy and painless for them to find those quaint settings.”
“Our venues have been carefully selected and is working closely with us to offer their premise for booking.
Thus the dates reflected in the search are the close to (>90%) the true availability of the venues.”
Celovebrate currently partners with nearly 30 venues, which includes names like Spruce, Alkaff Mansion, Lady M, House@Dempsey, and many other recognizable venues. “With more than 26,000 weddings in Singapore in 2013 alone, there is clearly a demand and audience for a platform like Celovebrate,” said Tan.
“We’re excited to continue to grow the number of venues that participate on our platform, and in the coming months, will expand to include other wedding planning services.”
“Right now, there is no price differential, but we’re aiming to be able to offer discount/rebates in the coming months.” said Mr Tan in response to the question of cost benefits in using “Celovebrate”.
