Bridesmaid Solves Couples’ Wedding Planning Woes with New Inclusive Platform
Just about every female that I’ve ever known (including myself) has thought about her wedding day. As young girls, we played dress up. Some lucky girl was always the bride and her most loyal girlfriends were her bridesmaids. We even played games on notebook paper, meant for classwork, at school and passed them around showing off the results. Remember MASH? For this, we listed several categories from the man we thought we would marry to the type of car we would drive and everything in between.
As we grew into mature women, we still had stars in our eyes for that fairy-tale, made-in-heaven kind of fantasy wedding. From pinning our favorite looks and ideas on Pinterest to keeping a journal of who’s going to be apart of the wedding party… or not, depending on the weather. We’re watching wedding shows like The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and even Bridezilla, living out our fantasies (or nightmares) on a television screen. Call it whatever you like, but women know what they want and how they want it when it comes to their wedding day. We have everything planned down to the very last detail. So we think.
Lenora Wilkinson has been a bridesmaid six times! Count ’em… one, two, three, four, five, SIX! So she can tell you a thing a two about how unorganized weddings can be. Hey dedication to be a great bridesmaid to all six couples at all six weddings was just practice and preparation for her genius wedding planning platform.
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Wedding soda is an interactive website that allows the entire wedding party and guests to receive invitations, budgets, timelines, directions and reminders for their individual tasks and roles.
In the clutter and confusion of wedding planning, most people just want to celebrate! Wedding soda helps to put the fun back into wedding planning, by involving each member, from guest, to vendor, to ring bearer. Participants get to celebrate their involvement on social media, gift towards upgrading your wedding, as well as rate each vendor that they were involved with individually. | WEDDING SODA
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I’m sure you can imagine the chaos of planning any major event, but what happens if you’re apart of the chaos by association? Being a bridesmaid in six different weddings, Lenora endured a lot. A lot of miscommunication and folks just simply not being organized. The bride and groom seemed to have had everything planned out well, but lack of communication and fund, among other things, caused people in the wedding party to slide right out the side door.
So I actually went to try to find something to help the bridesmaids and groomsmen because a lot of people don’t know that most wedding planners do not deal with the bridesmaids and groomsmen at all. They just take care of stuff for the actual day.
I couldn’t find anything to help so I said, I’m just going to try and do it myself. I’m going to try to come up with something that will help. For example, a couple for a wedding I was in – they got engaged a year before the actual wedding. So you can imagine the string of emails that were lost or they couldn’t find… like all this craziness. It shouldn’t be hard. There should be a seamless way to kind of… do it.
So I had this idea. I talked to my sister and she was like, nobody else is doing this… you need to try to do this. I sat out to build it.
Wedding Soda is a platform where the couple is able to upload their contact list and select their bridal teams and give their bridal team tasks. Say the tasks is, ‘purchase this dress,’ purchase these shoes’, um ‘book a flight for this day.’ It’s all in there. They can see the girls trip, the guys trip, they can see everything. Then they can see how much it’s going to cost them to participate up front. So once they accept, there is a timeline that runs. So it will tell you, ‘hey you have to get fitted by this date’ and it will keep reminding you. It may be every two weeks, every month, depending on how you set it. As it gets closer to the date, it will remind you even more. But once each participant completes their tasks, the couple is made aware. Now the couple is relieved. They don’t have to keep up with 20 people and what they’re doing, where they need to be, and what they need to buy. Wedding Soda pretty much does it for them.
The basic need is just clarification between a couple and the bridal team. Sometime people just assume that you know what you’re supposed to be doing or where you’re supposed to be. This is clear and cut so that they don’t get confused. When people drop out of weddings, there’s hurt feelings. Friendships are ruined over people not participating or saying they’re going to participate and then back out. So that’s what I was trying to avoid. I’ve see a lot! I was just trying to have a clear understanding so that there was less stress and the ability to concentrate on the fun and celebration of it.
Lenora did what most entrepreneurs do. She created a solution to a problem that’s been ongoing for ages. It’s interesting to me that even while planning my own future wedding, I had not thought much about how I would be able to effectively communicate with my wedding party. So off bat, I was like, this is a great idea! Basically, Wedding Soda provides a tool that will allow couples to better manage the entire wedding process with a checklist on steroids! It’s perfect! The only thing was the name. Where did the name come from and why?
Wedding Soda actually comes from a very late night of trying to purchase the URL. So it’s like 3 in the morning. I was exhausted and I had typed in everything from ‘Wed Pop’ to ‘Wedding Buddy’ and every single one of them was taken or cost like $2,000. I was super frustrated. The last one I tried was ‘Wed Pop’ and that was taken so I was like in Chicago, ‘pop’ means ‘soda’ and that’s how I came up with ‘Wedding Soda.’ Then I was able to come up with a whole concept with the packages.
Once the platform was built, it kind of started running itself. I had 337 weddings on the platform so far, so I’m actually able to handle them and talk to the customers myself. I get a lot of feedback – the first year was a lot of beta-testing and adjusting. There’s always something to learn, but I outsource a majority of my work. I have a bachelors in business and a masters in marketing so a lot the stuff that you would think that would be outsourced, I do myself. I have a full-time job, no kids, so at night I go home and Wedding Soda is my second job. Learning quick funnels and email marketing.
Ask someone about their branding and many times you’ll get a beautiful story. For Lenora, she wanted her platform to have a design that illustrates the love of her parents who’ve been married for thirty-plus years and of course, soda bubbles.
I brightened it with the hearts and the bubbles. The hearts are actually my parents’ favorite color. They were married for 35 years so I was able to give a little tribute to them in the logo.
Wedding Soda launched on Valentines Day in 2018. With one year under her belt, Lenora is shocked, yet grateful for the experience and all the amazing opportunities that followed, just by being obedient and walking in her purpose.
Around the time that had the idea, I made a promise to God that whatever idea He gave me, I was going to do. I feel like ideas are for a reason. When I got the idea for ‘Wedding Soda,’ I was sick and I remember sitting in CVS when I opened a Forbes magazine and there was an ad that had a bride and literally had the idea within a second. It was like all downloaded to me. So that’s really what this is, just doing something that – you know how everyone has an idea that either they do it or they don’t and you’re like, ‘man I had that idea like five years ago,’ or something like that. That’s really what it is, just my tribute to God. It’s crazy! Doors have opened. Like all you really have to do is try and it materializes into this whole business that is really meeting a need.
I run into so many brides and bridesmaids or people who’ve been in weddings and are like, ‘I needed that in my wedding, oh my gosh, I’m gonna tell someone else.’ All of my clients are pretty much word-of-mouth, because I’m bootstrapping. I’ve been doing this on my own and survived my first year which is amazing!
Going into her second year, Lenora is eager and excited to press forward with her amazing platform.
I’m not giving up. It’s been hard. Doors have been slammed in my face.
Recently, Lenora was featured on the Entrepreneur Magazine’s show, ‘Elevator Pitch, Episode 4,’ where she pitched Wedding Soda to a team of entrepreneur moguls. Her task was to pitch it in 60 seconds. That can be nerve-racking for just about anybody. Lenora got a thumbs down for her business, but that hasn’t stopped her from pressing forward.
It’s a really fun show, but they weren’t clear on exactly what it was. But to see myself on the Entrepreneurs social media, on their website – it’s so cool to be able to experience that. I’m really grateful for that whole process.
Putting together a business… putting yourself out there is hard enough. You’re going to have doors slammed in your face. The thing is, never giving up. Wedding Soda is a great platform. I believe that sometimes God positions us in a place to remain humble so that we can learn, nurture our crafts and grow. Don’t worry. It’s coming!
The wonderful thing about Wedding Soda is that is not just a service component for the wedding party. It’s also a platform for vendors to be exposed to provide their services.
The vendor’s have online storefront. The couple is able to put a vendor on a wish-list. There’s a gifting platform, like your Uncle can pay for the flowers for your wedding or put money towards an open bar, so they can upgrade you for things that are put on your wish-list. This is the way a lot of non-traditional Christian weddings are done.
Vendors that are apart of the Wedding Soda platform actually pay a monthly fee to market themselves to customers.
While there are many wedding planning/coordinating sites, none are like Wedding Soda. Lenora has carefully and thoughtfully processed solutions for numerous problems couples may face during the whole wedding planning experience.
The difference is they are only focused on the couple. There’s nothing to do with bridal party or the mother of the ring bearer. They just only want the attention of the couple and what they need for the actual wedding day versus keeping the bridesmaids and groomsmen organized. I actually concentrate on the entire wedding party.
I’ve come to this weird crossroads where I’m telling a customer that they need something when they don’t know they need it, which sometimes is hard. If you’re a bride for the first time, you really don’t know what you’re getting into and that you need help organizing your bridesmaids and groomsmen, unless you’re like me who’s been a bridesmaid, fifty-eleven times (LOL). So actually explaining to them the pain points and telling them what it is or having someone that they know that they can relate to say that. One thing brides do understand is trust. They know there’s going to be added stress. Once they go further along in the process they do realize the need and I’m able to step in and provide a solution.
The overall experience is to remove that stress completely. If we change the narrative in the bridal industry to include that then they won’t be clueless because they’ll know it’s apart of the game.
This full-package planning platform keeps everything organized with a helpful team in India. Her goal is to have successfully planned 1,000 weddings by the end of the year. Everything bit of profit she’s earned, she has pumped back into her dynamic platform.
In five years, I want to change the narrative of the bridal industry, which is crazy, but I do. I want them to understand that there’s more to the picture than just the bride and the groom. There’s untapped revenue if you were to reach out to the bridal team, and the family members, and the guests as well. Secondly, I want to have a ‘Wedding Soda India’ or a ‘Wedding Soda Nigeria.’ I want to go global with it, but learning all of the different cultures and wedding traditions takes a lot of work.
It’s not going to happen overnight. Be in for the long haul. At the beginning, I was like, I’m about to get paid! (LOL) No. It takes a lot of hard work and pushing.
Well I’m excited to see how well this platform grows and develops into a huge industry-changing giant in the future. I’ve already reserved Wedding Soda as my go-to when the time comes for me, but if you want a stress-free and excellent customer service from a team that loves what they do, then Wedding Soda is definitely what you want!
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