After previously introducing its services in Singapore, wedding vendor portal Bridestory also inaugurates the service in the Philippines. Upon entering the two countries, Bridestory uses local domain, with www.bridestory.com.sg for Singapore and www.bridestory.com.ph for the Philippines. Bridestory claims that it has partnered with more than 200 local vendors in the Philippines so far. FYI, Bridestory has also been available in Australia.
Bridestory’s CEO Kevin Mintaraga told DailySocial that the team’s expansion to the Philippines isn’t based on particular partnership with local partner. He also explained that the reason of choosing the Philippines is that because the country’s market has somewhat similarities with that of Indonesia. People in the Philippines also tend to have identical behavior with Indonesians, especially in terms of preparing their money upfront before holding their wedding.
Interestingly, the people there are no stranger to English. This makes Bridestory has practically no problem in entering the country without having proper content localization. Same goes for the service’s expansion in Australia.
Mintaraga stated that Bridestory’s business model is the one that can be easily scaled up to broader market. It requires no special customization, at least we can see that from the language point of view. The challenge would be to increase the popularity of Bridestory’s partnering local vendors in each country it enters.
Bridestory indeed has the fortune. Investors have come and gone to the startup since last year, with the latest line up includes big spenders like Rocket Internet, Sovereign’s Capital, Fenox Venture Capital, East Ventures, Lippo Digital Ventures, Skystar Capital, and BEENOS Plaza.
At the moment, Bridestory maintains around 15.000 wedding vendors all over the world, with 12.000 of them reside in Southeast Asia. The vendors receive around 150.000 monthly business inquiries in average. According to SimilarWeb, Bridestory was the most visited wedding portal as per last month, with 500.000 visitis. As a gallery, Bridestory also owns the biggest wedding network on Instagram, which covers two million people in the world.
Previously, Mintaraga stated in DScussion that he was of the belief that Bridestory’s business would absolutely grow, even in niche market. Well, at least he’s proven it by leading Bridestory going international.
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Translated by Rifki Aria Nugraha
