Left: Molly Lanigan, Right: Megan Hermeling

WeddingWire.com is a web site where future brides and grooms can plan their weddings using an impressive suite of free planning tools. Last year, the site began an association with Martha Stewart. I had the opportunity to talk to two WeddingWire managers, Molly Lanigan and Megan Hermeling about their roles and contributions to the company, and about the rapid growth that WeddingWire is experiencing. Molly is the vendor relations manager and Megan is the community manager. You’re about to hear the interview and it starts now.

To save the audio to your computer, right click and “save as.”

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Molly, how long have you been with the company and how has your role changed since you started with WeddingWire?

Molly Lanigan: Sure. So I’ve been with WeddingWire for a little over a year now, since March of 2008, and I started with about five other people in the Vendor Relations Manager position and came on to work under Erica Smith who’s the Director of Vendor Relations here. So basically my roles change. We started by kind of just, you know, learning all about the wedding industry and the vendor side of things and now everyone kind of has their own territory and much more comfortable in my position now.

Great. And Megan, why don’t you tell me about your history with the company?

Megan Hermeling: Sure. My position is Community Manager at WeddingWire. I’ve been here since January of 2008, so a little over a year, similar to Molly. I started out on the bride side of things, still as the Community Manager, but more checking on all the user generated content-managing that content-and I’ve moved into the marketing side of things. So now I’m handling all of the bride marketing for WeddingWire.

Ok. For newly engaged couples that haven’t yet been to WeddingWire, tell them about some of the free tools that are offered on the site.

Megan: Sure. This is Megan. WeddingWire is the best resource for engaged couples to use and to plan their wedding online. We have over 100,000 wedding vendors in our database so any engaged couple coming on to the web site is sure to find somebody in their local area that they can use. We have a whole suite of planning tools as you mentioned. They’re all free for the engaged couple. So we have anything from the guest list-you can build your guest list right into WeddingWire.com. You can manage your budget. You can create a seating chart. And then we have a whole wedding web site tool. You can build your own wedding web site and leave any information for your guests for the big day.

Yeah, sounds excellent. Really a one-stop resource. I bet you there are a lot of surprised brides that are like, “Wow! I’m surprised I can manage all of this online. I sort of thought I’d have to be in charge of it myself, but I can get a little help here.” Right?

Yes, absolutely. And everything’s free and I think that’s the best part about it. They’re not used to getting all this stuff for free. It’s really a great resource.

Meghan, you mentioned WeddingWire.com allows engaged couples compare or at least sort through 100,000 online vendors which is just a huge amount to me. Can you give examples of some of the different types of vendors that engaged couples might be interested in?

Molly: Yup. This is Molly speaking. Josh, we have over twenty different categories of vendors that brides can kind of search through, so really anything that an engaged couple might need for their wedding, our vendor catalog has that. So, you know, that ranges from ceremony and reception venue to photographers, invitations and favors, wedding cakes, band, catering, beauty and health, and as far as to a name change service, so really a range of different vendors that we have. To give you kind of an example, our top three most searched categories specific to the Boston metro region are the ceremony and reception venue, photography, and wedding cakes. So, there are definitely a lot of vendors on the site that brides can search through.

As the vendor relations manager, tell me about how you’ve contributed to this huge database of vendors. You guys mentioned 100,000. How do you monitor and maintain such a huge vendor list?

Molly: Yeah, sure. So kind of on the vendor side, there’s a lot of things that we can do to monitor and maintain it. When I have conversations with vendors, you know, I’m always asking them a little bit about their business and trying to convey to them how important it is for them to kind of build out their storefront and, you know, to put some pictures up there just so it’s friendly for the bride side as well. In terms of kind of how we’ve grown so much, there’s lots of different ways, and Megan will get into the review side in a second but not only is WeddingWire a great for brides to come to execute the planning process, but it’s actually also a great place for vendors to be able to network with other vendors. So, you know, if one vendor hears about WeddingWire, they sign up for an account, they can tell five of their, you know, friends who they have through the wedding industry, and it’s a great cross marketing tool for the vendors.

Ok. So in not every case do you two have to seek out these vendors. They might just come to you.

Megan: Right. Ideally, yes. Ideally, they would hear about us from another vendor or from one of their clients and come to us. And as Molly mentioned Josh, we also get a lot of our vendors from our newlyweds who have graduated from WeddingWire as an engaged couple into a newlywed. We ask them to write reviews of all of their wedding vendors, just so we can give the new crop of engaged couples some insight on who they should use, who they shouldn’t use… And these could be vendors that we already have on the site, but also vendors who have yet to sign up with WeddingWire, so our users definitely help us build the database.

You mentioned “who they shouldn’t use…” Interesting. That leads me into my next question and it could be a controversial one. Are there any horror stories where a vendor just wasn’t up to par and you had to remove them from your database or even take further steps?

Megan: Well luckily no horror stories and I will knock on wood, so hope that we won’t have horror stories in the future. But we have a great team at WeddingWire who validate all of our vendors. They approve all of our wedding vendors to help us prevent those horror stories that you talked about. And our vendor members are very respectful. They’re respectful of our guidelines. They’re respectful of their peers and they’ve built a strong community within WeddingWire so I don’t think they take that too lightly. So I think luckily, no horror stories yet.

Excellent. Megan, I was looking at your forums and there are just so many posts within the day that I was checking them out which tells me it’s a very active forum. I haven’t really perused the forums yet, but I look forward to that. It must be satisfying though, that people are choosing to discuss their wedding planning on your site rather than somewhere else.

Megan: Absolutely. We have an amazing community of users on WeddingWire. It’s a place where couples can share their commonalities, ask questions of other engaged users, and then also ask questions of our wedding professionals. Our vendors are the experts in their field, so they are sure to have the answers to most of our questions that our brides have.

I read the community posts every day, and that certainly keeps us at WeddingWire in the loop of current trends and what’s going on in the wedding industry so we can keep up with our brides and make sure we’re still offering what they want.

I think that’s so cool to have a job where you are able to hang out on forums.

Megan: Yeah! (laughter) It’s a pretty good job!

Molly: Just to add something quickly Josh, in terms of the forums, we also just… One of the newest features to WeddingWire is our vendor forum. So there’s actually a place now where vendors can go on the network and discuss any topics that are coming up. That ranges from, you know, “Where is the best place to advertise?” Or whether or not to charge for, you know, consultations fees, so that’s kind of our newest addition to the network and the vendors seem to be enjoying that as well.

Ok, sounds like something that I might have access to, working at LCI. I will check that out.

Who would like to tell me about WeddingWire’s relationship with Martha Stewart?

Molly: I’ll tell you about that Josh. This is Molly. Martha invested about forty percent stake in the company back in February of 2008. The technology went live back in May of 2008, so it’s almost been up and running for about a year. And to kind of give you a little history, Martha was obviously attracting the number of brides that she wanted to her wedding section through her Weddings magazine, but the bride’s weren’t staying there because there weren’t any planning tools or a vendor catalog for them to really execute the planning process.

You said on Martha’s “wedding section.” Did you mean on her personal web site or her company’s web site, or her section on your web site?

Yeah, so the way it works is actually if you go to just www.marthastewartweddings.com, so her web site, all of our planning tools and vendor catalog live there. So the engaged couples might not know that it’s the same exact vendors and planning tools that they can find on WeddingWire, but that’s kind of the great thing about it is that we’re, you know, reaching the brides and the vendors through, you know, two different avenues-through WeddingWire.com as well as through MarthaStewartWeddings.com. So yeah, so Martha kind of put some money in the company and it’s been, you know, a really great relationship on both ends so far.

What about WeddingWire’s history? We know that in 2008 you partnered up with Martha Stewart, but how long has WeddingWire itself been in business and where is it based?

Megan: We are in Bethesda, Maryland currently. We started out as a much smaller company. It started out as five people working out of our CEO Tim Chi’s basement and that was in 2006. And they worked really hard, these five people. And the full web site launch was in May of 2007, so almost two years ago now. And since then, we have just signed over about thirty people so we have about thirty people in the office now. And we are no longer in the basement, we are in a real office building.

Are you able to see or hear about any firsthand connections between your vendors and the couples that make contact with them and ultimately do business together? If you do have that opportunity, it must be a satisfying feeling to know that you’ve facilitated that link.

Molly: Yup. This is Molly Josh. Yes, absolutely. I have the opportunity to be able to speak with vendors all day, so it’s great to be able to hear kind of their experiences with the WeddingWire. Sometimes I hear stories when they say, you know, “It’s great that they referenced a promotion that I had up on my storefront, Molly. I’m so excited. They’re a great client.”

In terms of the bride side, we get e-mails all the time saying, “Thank you so much for all the planning tools and the vendor catalog. The reviews are great.”

So on the vendor relation side, I… It’s definitely satisfying to hear the great relationships between the vendors and the brides of the connections that they’ve made through the network.

Ah, and folks are able to leave comments about the vendors, is that right?

Megan: In the reviews section, yes, yeah.

Ok, reviews then, yeah. Megan, you must hear about some of the connections on the forums, right?

We definitely do, yup. I see that every single day. So it’s nice to see. You know, and we try to answer any questions or try to fill any voids that we see that our brides tell us. So it’s a great way to get that instant feedback from the community.

Thanks to Molly Lanigan and Megan Hermeling for taking time out from their activities at WeddingWire to talk to me about the company and all of the free resources they offer future brides and grooms. The web site is WeddingWire.com.

If you want be kept aware of more interviews with fine people like Molly and Megan, subscribe to LCI Paper’s podcast so that you’ll never miss an episode. To do so, visit our blog at www.lcipaper.com/blog

Recommended Links:
WeddingWire
Martha Stewart Weddings

Joshua Birch
josh@lcipaper.com