Guides for Brides have been crowned Business of the Year at the prestigious Venus Oxfordshire Awards on Friday.
Guides for Brides launched in 1995 as a printed directory to help brides find local wedding businesses. Since then these local guides have been transformed into a top wedding planning website and mobile App covering all of the UK, along with useful wedding planning tools and essential advice.
Unlike most wedding websites, Guides for Brides has always been run by people who have worked in the wedding industry so they genuinely understand the needs of brides and are able to use technology as well as their depth of wedding planning knowledge to meet those needs. Their wedding planning App leapt to Number 1 in the iTunes chart for both iPhones and iPads soon after it launched and has remained there ever since, a testament to Guides for Brides' ability to recognise the wedding planning tools that brides really want.
The Wedding To-Do List is the most popular feature on the App, and the Guides for Brides team have used their many years of knowledge from inside the wedding industry to put together the ultimate list of everything you need to think of during your wedding planning. An iTunes reviewer commented "I love this app. It's been really helpful for my partner and I to keep on track with our budget and remember what needs doing. You can also add what you personally want to remember too. It's been a godsend."
On guidesforbrides.co.uk, which received 4.7 million hits per year, the wedding venues search is the most popular section and the Real Wedding features have proved a big hit for couples looking for inspiration. The Wedding Fair Diary is updated weekly and the team attend most of the national wedding shows as well as running a number of regional shows, both being a great way to speak to couples in the process of planning their weddings to find out what else they would like to see on the website.
Guides for Brides are judges and sponsors for the Wedding Industry Awards and the Wedding Ideas Magazine Awards. By judging the newcomer awards they get a close insight into newly emerging trends months before others and are able to share this knowledge with the many brides using the website and receiving their newsletters.
At a gala dinner for 200, the judges took to the stage to praise Guides for Brides for the "huge amount of good growth over the last few years, ambitions for what they are going to do over the next few years, for being really adaptable to what their clients needed and how they can flex to meet those requirements and for achieving a huge amount of customer engagement."
The team of 17 are all passionate about what they do and spend a lot of time speaking to brides and grooms as well as wedding planners and other wedding professionals. A lot of the company's success can be attributed to their ability to embrace and adapt to the changes in the way couples want to plan their weddings, with helpful articles and inspirational photos on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest in addition to the main website alongside an essential wedding planning App.