OUT WITH THE OLD & IN WITH THE NEW!!

Photo by Through The Woods We Ran

We can’t believe the day has arrived!! After almost 2 years (I know it’s crazy how time flies?!?!) we are finally ready to reveal our new site. It’s been a long time in the making and not without its ups and downs. Businesses go through lots of changes and ours has been no exception.

Sometimes the changes are good and other times the changes just don’t turn out how you would have expected them too. For some, this could mean the end of the business, finding it hard to overcome the feeling of failure. And, sometimes the changes can be the start of something new and amazing.

When we launched Bespoke Bride back in 2011, we never thought it would become the a business it is today. Our focus was on inspiring couples to design unique and creative weddings and introducing them to the suppliers that could make that happen. In deciding where to take our company next, we thought there was more we could do by way of making the wedding planning process a little easier for newly engaged couples and suppliers.

A lot of research was done in those early days and we noticed there was a gap in the market for a wedding marketplace and directory, but it would be a big project and we were still only working on the blog part time so in 2013 we started on a mission to get funding to build a whole new platform.

That would be a journey that would take another two years but in 2015 we got our our first investment, which meant we were both able to work full time on the site. Then in 2016 we were lucky enough to take on a second investor which saw the start of the rebuild, we called it BB Boutique, by then it was already something we had been working towards for almost 3 years and it wasn’t even built yet.

Three years is a long time isn’t it? So much can change?

We spent the whole of 2016 dedicating ourselves to supplier sign ups on the boutique but by the end of the year, we found ourselves completely exhausted and underwhelmed as the support for what we were building just wasn’t there. We were eventually forced to reevaluate the direction for our business, realising what might have been right for us as business in 2013 wasn’t going to be right for us now.

After much discussion we decided it would be best to face the facts, the industry had changed, we had changed and our business had changed. And although there had once been a need for a marketplace or directory, there wasn’t now, the market was already saturated with them.

That realisation brought with it rather mixed emotions, upset, anger, disappointment, failure but also freedom. Freedom to dream of new directions for our business and new goals that were more aligned with who were were now. And so starting today we can officially announce that BB Boutique will be placed on the back burner for the foreseeable future and instead we will be focusing on the design and creation of our own products.

Our mission will always be to inspire couples to get creative with their weddings and we will never grow tired of connecting them with the suppliers that can make that happen. But we are as equally excited to be expanding our business into our own area of expertise and we hope you’ll join us on this new adventure.

So now back to the new site. Did you know it’s been over 4 years since we made any changes to our blog? We were in need of a major upgrade. We wanted the site to look more modern, easier to navigate and most importantly to show the new direction our brand was taking. So let’s go over some of the changes we have made.

First thing you might notice, is that we now have a static homepage, rather than a blog roll. So why the change? A couple of reasons. First we wanted our navigation bars to be a little easier to use in case you were searching for something in particular and second, our blog was in chronological feed meaning you only saw what we created most recently on the homepage. Now with our new homepage, you have quicker access to a wider variety of posts from our archives, as well as a our latest posts. Our third and most obvious reason for creating a static homepage was so that we could add a section for our own store, making it easier for you to shop our latest products.

Another big change is that we have opened up our blog for banner ads once again. We removed them from our blog last year as we didn’t like the way they made our blog feel. We wanted to find a way to integrate ads to fit naturally within our content so they weren’t so cluttered and looked more appealing to our readers. So now you will find banners ads scattered through the main body of our site, which I am sure you will agree is a much better way to discover suppliers.

The last major change and for us, most exciting, is that we have a whole new range of products in store. I won’t tell you what they are as I want you to have the excitement of discovering them FOR yourselves – trust me, it’s going to feel like Christmas day over there!

So that’s pretty much all that is going on here at the moment. We really hope you love what we have created here as much as we do and we look forward to adding even more to our brand new site over the coming weeks.

For now I am going to leave our promo video here, not only does this sum us up in a nutshell but it is a huge reflection of the excitement we are feeling today. A huge thank you to Costa Sister Productions for creating this for us last year. I know they’ve been dying to share it ever since.