Andrew Martins, Managing Editor
In the eight years since graduating from Hillsborough High School, Flora Wu Ellis’ life went through some major changes. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Princeton University with a degree in economics and finance in 2008, earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and within a few years, she moved to California to pursue her career.
And while each of those life changes were major steps in their own rights, she says her wedding to her husband Matt last year was one of the biggest.
“I wasn’t one of those brides that was dreaming of their wedding day all their life,” she said. “After I got married and went through that process though, I realized that wedding planning didn’t have to be this difficult.”
It was that realization that caused the 31-year-old Hillsborough native to leave a career in tech to start her own online wedding planning web app called Unveil.
Along with her co-founder Michael Huang, Ellis described the company as a way for couples to tackle the “big project management nightmare” that should be one of the happiest times of their lives.
“During the wedding planning process, you generally reach out to three, five, 10, even 20 vendors for each category and that includes photography, videography and venues,” she said. “In life, there are a lot of tools to make you efficient and keep you organized, but surprisingly in the wedding industry, there are none.”
Through Unveil, couples can organize their plans, seek out wedding-related businesses in their areas and compare those services.
Ellis said she began working on the project shortly after her own wedding was done. After the celebrations were over and life slowly began returning to normal for her and her husband, she began researching what went into most weddings and planned dozens of weddings for others to learn more about the process.
“I wanted to learn what brides need, what’s missing today and areas that we can be helpful, so we spoke with over 100 brides to understand what they need to plan their own wedding well and without stress,” she said.
Since putting in the legwork, Ellis said she and Huang are funding the company themselves and offering the app as a free tool for couples, with additional services coming at a premium.
With a large segment of newlyweds being in their 20s and 30s, Ellis said she felt connected to her target audience as a fellow millennial. As such, she said she’s keen to the wants and needs of that often coveted market.
“As millennials, we’re used to going online…and knowing exactly what’s available in our price range, but people before us are okay with calling 10 or 15 vendors because that’s the way life was,” Ellis said. “For us, we expect information to be online but the wedding industry is not like that. It’s not transparent.”
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, more than 2.1 million weddings happen each year. Separate studies have shown that the average wedding in the United States costs approximately $35,329, making the wedding industry more than $70 billion annually.
Noting the success of online juggernauts Amazon and Airbnb for their popularity with that market, Ellis said most of her contemporaries look to businesses like hers to ensure money can be used elsewhere – like a down payment on a house.
“A lot of my Harvard Business School classmates have money for a wedding planner but they actually chose not to. I think millennials really care about value – they’re savvier than ever and they care about control,” she said.
Since the business launched this past summer, Ellis said she looks back to her youth at Hillsborough and remembers dreaming big, but within reason.
“I always thought it would be cool to start my own company, but I didn’t want to start a company just to start one,” she said. “It’s a very long, lonely process and it’s a lot of hard work to start a business, but it makes me happy to hear from a user who found that what I made was helpful to them. That’s been really fulfilling.”
