Posted by Lee Wang, COO, WeddingWire Editor's note: In honor of Valentine’s Day, and in the spirit of Cupid’s arrow, today we hear from a business that’s in the business of weddings. Our guest blogger is Lee Wang, COO of WeddingWire, a wedding technology marketplace that connects couples planning nuptials with wedding professionals. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.
Our goal at WeddingWire is to make wedding planning fun and simple. We connect engaged couples to event merchants, provide them with consumer reviews, online planning tools, and help them stay organized as they plan their big day. We also help event merchants manage their workflow and their business more efficiently through our SaaS business management tools. Using our suite of productivity tools, event merchants can generate new prospects, book appointments, manage their social media, create engaging content, and send digital contracts. They can even collect payment, all without leaving WeddingWire.
We recognize the importance of making work simple, exciting, and enjoyable for our employees at WeddingWire to help power our success. Google Apps plays a big part in that. We’ve used Google Apps to help run our entire IT infrastructure since 2006, when it was a beta product. We were also in beta, with four co-founders working out of our CEO’s pink living room. Today, our organization has grown from four to more than 320 employees.
As we scale our organization, we are often in need of new ways to help keep our team connected and productive. We have WeddingWire team members working around the world, from Los Angeles to Raleigh to international locations such as Brasov, Romania. We rely on Google Hangouts to ensure that everyone from Los Angeles to Brasov can participate in company-wide meetings. Google Apps makes it easy to switch from a physical meeting to a virtual video meeting since Google Calendar and Google Hangouts are so seamlessly integrated. Whether for daily use or for difficult weather-related situations, our essential business functions can always carry on.
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| Lee Wang and the executive team |
We believe that constant thought sharing and collaboration makes us a smarter company. Google Apps helps us realize that philosophy online. In the office, we have an open seating plan and lots of common areas, so employees are can have more and better conversations. The ability to instantly collaborate with Google Docs in real-time to solicit feedback or edits on an idea, project or article, makes us work better and smarter as a team. When we recently rebranded our flagship website (
WeddingWire.com), we created a master Google Doc where key stakeholders across the entire organization could add their updates and comments. Everyone from website developers and marketers to sales reps and executives could jump in and know the latest status and sentiment at any time.
Google Apps gives our employees a way to work together better from office, at home, or across the world. It gives us the opportunity to be spontaneous and team-oriented, and frees us up to make work more fun, for us and for our customers. When your job is helping people in love plan the biggest – and most exciting – day of their lives and empowering the businesses of those who serve them, you want to do it right.
