The "wedding industrial complex" is a $70-billion-a-year business in the U.S. that includes dresses, venues, planners, photographers, videographers, caterers, bands, jewelry designers, florists and more.
It's an industry Kellee Khalil was first exposed to in 2010, when she helped her sister — the founder of wedding PR company Be Inspired — plan her wedding. Khalil had to go deep into Google queries and jump across several different sites to find what she was looking for, and she was shocked by how disjointed the information was. Having been raised in an entrepreneurial family, Khalil saw her frustration as an opportunity to streamline the wedding planning experience, which she knew was a massive market. After her sister's wedding, Khalil quit her banking job and moved to New York to develop Loverly.
Loverly launched in February 2012, fueled by $500k in seed funding. A year and a half later, it's a centralized hub where brides and grooms and can search for trends, color schemes and vendors and "bundle" their favorites.

Over time, the mission of Loverly hasn't changed so much as it's evolved, says Khalil. At launch, Loverly was focused on content, and the company recruited wedding bloggers (the site now has 35) to curate the best content, from bouquets to bridesmaid dresses to Blahniks. The secret sauce is in Loverly's taxonomy system, which tags each item according to color, fabric, season, brand, trend and custom keywords, making the site immensely searchable.
With a large, visual database of wedding-related products, the next step was bringing on retail and brand partners, including Kwiat, J.Crew and Nordstrom. Next came Loverly's evolution into ecommerce. In 18 months, Loverly has amassed a reach of 2.6 million users, who log 40 million image views per month and peruse Loverly for more than 12 minutes per visit. There are 18,000 vendors (bookable directly on Loverly) on the platform, and the ecommerce vertical features 250,000 products from 2,000 brands.

Now that a solid foundation has been laid, the tenacious Khalil is focused on scaling the database, the vendors, the user base, the Loverly team and, of course, the revenue.
Khalil lives, eats and breathes Loverly, and she's hired a team of smart and passionate individuals to help turn her vision into reality. Throughout the process, she's leaned on mentors, like Gilt co-founder Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, who's been through the startup rollercoaster before and can offer guidance, a second opinion and her trademark "test before you invest" mantra.
"Scaling can be one of the biggest challenges to a startup," says Wilson, who met Khalil last year at a Women's Ecommerce Network event.
Khalil knows firsthand that starting a company means making a lot of sacrifices on personal, professional and financial fronts, and the early days can be tough. You forgo a steady paycheck, you're taking a risk with your own savings, and you're flirting with failure. "You're selling a dream of something that doesn't exist yet," she says. "What if it fails?"
But when it starts to take shape, it's a beautiful thing.
Watch Khalil and her mentor, Gilt co-founder Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, talk about #scalingsmarter in the video above.