http://www.wedaways.com

WEDAWAYS is an online booking, planning and travel itinerary platform for luxury destination weddings and honeymoons. 

 
 
wedaways-8.jpg

 
 

About wedaways

Internationally renowned, Renee Strauss is synonymous with weddings. She founded and operated the premier luxury bridal salon in Beverly Hills for more than thirty years. Renee also stars in TLC’s reality show “Brides of Beverly Hills” and is a contributor to the Huffington Post.

When we met Renee she was looking to start a new venture. She wanted to found a start-up with her co-founder Pamela to help couples in North America plan their dream wedding at luxurious destinations around the world. While both founders had deep expertise in travel and wedding planning they were new to the technology world.

Renee met with 17 different companies before she chose to partner with DesignedUX. She chose us for our extensive experience building startups and our partnership approach.

 
 
 

Destination wedding and honeymoon planning, perfected.

 

 
 

The Project

Research & Customer Discovery

DesignedUX partnered with Wedaways as an extension of their team. We began with developing a brand strategy and business plan. The brand strategy included a new logo design, brand identity and style guide.

We used the business model canvas to help define the business opportunity and model. We worked with the founders to define the customer discovery strategy and they travelled to Italy for 4 weeks to understand if luxury hotels would be interested in working with Wedaways as partners. This was the first of two trips.

DesignedUX completed a thorough competitive analysis and helped to identify market opportunities. We built a financial model complete with 3 year projections for various revenue scenarios.

When the Wedaways team was satisfied with the business model and had validated customer discovery we began to conceptualize the product requirements. We conducted several product ideation workshops with the two founders to come up with a complete set of requirements for the design phase.

 
 
wedaways-7.jpg
 
 

Design Phase

Our design phase began with user research. We wanted to understand what couples needed to make the daunting task of planning a wedding simpler and more enjoyable. We defined user personas that included a summary of the obstacles couples, venues and wedding planners face when planning a wedding. We used these insights to come up with a technology solution to solve these problems.

 

Couples

The biggest challenges facing couples are time constraints, lack of knowledge of venues and options and fear of the unknown all while keeping the budget under control.

Our solution included designing a wedding planning dashboard for couples that included:

  • Dashboard overview

  • Budget calculator and tracker

  • Payments schedule with reminders and reporting

  • Guest List Management

  • Save the date invitations and RSVP

  • Travel Itinerary

  • Tasklist with tracking and recommended completion dates

  • Online payments for venue and wedding planner

  • Favourites bookmarks

  • Comparison of up to 3 venues

  • Real time messaging with venues and planners

  • A six-step online process for proposals, estimates and contracts including signature and contract tracking

 

The result? An end-to-end solution for couples to research, plan and pay for a luxury destination wedding from anywhere in the world with the assurance that the destinations were reputable and vetted by experts.

 
 
wedaways-11.jpg
 
 

Venues

The biggest challenge for venues is to attract couples and promote the unique and desirable amenities of their properties. Communication with customers from around the world in different time zones also poses challenges.

Our solution was to build a custom travel directory for Wedaways that showcased the beautiful properties available to couples in luxurious destinations around the world. Photos and an elegantly designed microsite make the properties ‘pop’. Couples now have a one-stop shop to learn everything they need to know about their desired venue.

We also integrated a world map view for couples to know exactly where the property was located without giving away the address which could create a leak in the customer funnel.

Properties are searchable by location type (beach or mountain), available amenities, property services and room services. The properties also have the opportunity to show exciting activities available in the area. A key detail for destination weddings is to include the distance from the airport to each property.

We also designed and built a dashboard for properties to manage their microsites, update photos and communicate with prospective couples. The Wedaways platform manages the entire proposal, contract and payments workflow all in one place.

 
 
wedaways-12.jpg
 
 

Wedding Planners

The biggest challenge facing wedding planners is finding new customers and working with venues. For destination wedding planners time zone differences and venue locations also pose a challenge. We build a comprehensive wedding survey to help couples define their needs, wants and desires for their special day. Wedding planners received the request for proposal through the Wedaways platform and could respond with some options for couples.

Through the instant messaging tool on Wedaways, wedding planners can ask for clarification and more information. The next step is to share a proposal with the couple, settle on a custom package and set-up the payment schedule.

 
 
wedaways-9.jpg
 
 

Admin Tools

We built a custom administration dashboard for the Wedaways team to monitor and maintain all transactions on the Wedaways platform. This included custom analytics and reporting. We also built tools to support all three user types including microsites set-up, payment auditing and user management. Finally we build in a custom content management system so that the Wedaways team could make updates to the site without requiring a technical team.

Additional Features we incorporated to support Wedaways

  • Paid memberships - We build 3 membership levels with access to different packages of features

  • We integrated online payments via Stripe with payments tracking

  • Automated emails with reminders and notifications

  • Newsletter and save-the-date custom designs

  • SEO optimization

  • Honeymoon survey and planning tool

  • Custom blog

 
 

 
 

Our Work

 
 

Brand Strategy

  • Logo Design

  • User Personas

  • Stylescapes and Mood Boards

  • Style Guide

  • Business Cards

  • Splash page

Design of Website and Web Application

  • User Research

  • User Journeys

  • User Experience Design

  • Information Architecture and workflows

  • Wireframes

  • High Fidelity Mockups

 
 

Website and Application Development

  • Developed a custom Ruby-on-Rails web application with a Wordpress Blog

  • Responsive design for mobile, web and tablet

  • Stripe Integration

  • Built a custom document signing and contract workflow

  • Built custom microsites and dashboards

  • QA testing

  • Customer Discovery

  • Research and Competitive Analysis

  • Identify and Define Revenue Streams

  • Define Business Requirements

  • Identify Partner Opportunities

 
 

 

Interested in working with us?

We'd love to hear from you