Wedding Mapper Connects Brides in Local Communities with Ask-A-Bride to Boost Wedding Planning Collaboration
Ask-A-Bride enables free, interactive do-it-yourself wedding planning with local brides
Peak wedding season is approaching and more than 2.2 million U.S. couples plan to wed this year. With do-it-yourself planning on the rise, Wedding Mapper, the premier online destination for engaged couples worldwide, is unveiling the industry’s first bridal collaboration service, Ask-A-Bride. Through Ask-A-Bride, brides can now ask newlyweds direct questions about their wedding décor, theme, location, vendors and more. Ask-A-Bride offers brides access to Wedding Mapper’s online community of more than 35,000 brides who have shared their wedding stories, photos and vendor reviews in over 10,000 cities worldwide.
“After months of planning, brides become local wedding experts and have extensive knowledge to share with brides-to-be going through the same process,” said Julie King, vice president of sales and marketing for Wedding Mapper. “Through Ask-A-Bride, we enable brides to learn directly from local newlyweds who are typically excited to share their wedding knowledge and experiences.”
To leverage Wedding Mapper’s Ask-A-Bride service, brides explore Real Weddings in a destination city and select the “Ask a Question” button to contact a particular bride. An email is then sent to the bride who can choose to respond to the question on WeddingMapper.com. Ask-A-Bride launched in beta in February 2009, and hundreds of brides have since used it to receive direct advice on topics ranging from vendors to wedding personalization to floral décor. To date, 70 percent of questions submitted via Ask-A-Bride have received voluntary responses from brides within one week.
With reduced budgets, brides are taking on more wedding planning tasks themselves, according to The Wedding Report‘s Q1 2009 State of the Industry survey. To support a budget-conscious bride, Wedding Mapper offers other free, do-it-yourself planning tools and services including “Ask the Expert,” where brides get personal questions answered by wedding expert and author, Sharon Naylor. Brides can also create custom wedding maps, explore 35,000 Real Weddings, examine vendor reviews, find local wedding events, or post questions on local and global message boards.
“Today’s bride is increasingly engaged in the wedding planning process seeking to make her day personal and unique,” said Julie King. “We foresee more brides joining the DIY movement in 2009 and look forward to supporting them with interactive wedding planning tools that make it fun, efficient, and best of all, free.”
About Wedding Mapper
Wedding Mapper is the premiere online destination for engaged couples worldwide, featuring interactive planning tools and more than 35,000 Real Weddings with photos, stories and detailed vendor reviews from more than 10,000 cities around the world. Delivering personalized solutions for engaged couples, Wedding Mapper’s innovative platform connects users with wedding experts and married couples, facilitates conversation on its hyper-local message boards, enables customization of wedding maps, informs users of local events, and more. For businesses, Wedding Mapper offers the industry’s first auction-based localized advertising platform built on proprietary technology that enables vendors to reach local, qualified prospects in a cost-effective manner. Founded in January 2007, Wedding Mapper is a privately-held company based in San Francisco, CA.
