As wedding season swings into top gear, NY-based Carats & Cake is looking to cash in a bit.
The company, which has been an online marketplace for couples to connect with wedding vendors since 2012, has today launched “Premium Vendor Profiles.”
Before this launch, most of the content that was browsable or searchable by users came from the users themselves.
Couples upload their wedding photos to the site and tag them with vendors, which are then attached to a very basic vendor profile with contact information. With the launch of premium profiles, vendors can upload their own images to their profile pages to show the breadth of their work.
The Premium Profiles will cost $99.99 per month, with a discounted rate for the first month of $79.99. This is the first monetization strategy for Carats & Cake to date.
However, this release puts Carats & Cake into even more direct competition with other wedding planning startups, most notably Loverly, which is rumored to be raising another $2.5 million. The biggest differentiator between the two, according to C&C founder Jess Levin, is that Carats & Cake offers verified reviews for vendors from couples that have already used them, ensuring a reliable review and context around the entire wedding.
So far, the company powers over 8,000 local businesses, with over 150k couples on the platform since the platform came out of beta in early 2013.
Carats & Cake has yet to raise any institutional funding, and has bootstrapped with the help of friends and family.