Online wedding service finder Get Hitched is one of this year’s winners of the Take-Off Seed Fund. The innovative business idea, an online portal that offers tailor-made matches between wedding service providers and couples planning a wedding, was awarded €14,400 in order to help it develop the next phase of business.

The start-up, which was launched last November during the MFCC Wedding Fair, was conceived with the idea of removing the most time-consuming elements from the traditional process of organising a wedding.

“Prior to Get Hitched, couples organising their wedding had to look up products/services themselves through different websites or relied on Facebook groups to ask for recommendations. Moreover, couples had to contact each vendor individually. This is a tedious and frustrating process.

“With Get Hitched, couples are now able to find, chat with, and book multiple vendors at once in under five minutes,” Ben Vincenti, co-founder of the portal, said.

“All the couple needs to do is answer some simple questions related to the wedding, such as date, anticipated number of guests and budget, and some questions related to the category they are interested in,” he added.

Based on these replies, a list of wedding services is called up by the portal’s database. The list includes venues, transport, catering, music and entertainment, invitations and souvenirs, photography, videography, wedding attire hire, florists, hairstylists, photo booths, jewellery, wedding planning and many other categories related to weddings.

The idea was considered sufficiently innovative to be awarded the prestigious funding, which is offered to start-ups in order to enable the next phase of commercialisation of the business.

When asked what he thinks made Get Hitched the ideal candidate for the scheme, Mr Vincenti replied:

“Several factors; we’ve developed and shipped a truly innovative product that has disrupted the local weddings industry. Moreover, we’re already generating a decent amount of revenue for such a young start-up, but most importantly it’s due to having a hard-working team.”

Typically, grants between €2,500 and €20,000 are awarded to the selected projects thanks to the programme, which is a joint initiative between the University of Malta and the Ministry for the Economy, Industry and Small Businesses.

The funding, Mr Vincenti said, will assist in the co-founders switching to full-time, as well as contribute to their marketing budget.

“We will also be using a portion of the funds to move out of our current semi-basement office, to create a better working environment for our team, while allowing us to scale up as required,” Mr Vincenti added.

https://gethitched.com.mt/

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