Change Agents: Kellee Khalil has Loverly wedding ideas
NEW YORK — Kellee Khalil grew up in an affluent Los Angeles suburb kissed by Pacific breezes. But she may as well be a million miles from Palos Verdes as she trudges up three flights of stairs to the sweltering lower Manhattan confines of her company's AC-less offices. There, she's met by Oliver, a small dog who is as much greeter as resident rodent chaser.
Not that she'd have it any other way.
Khalil, 28, is the driven — you could accurately say obsessed — founder of Loverly, a website (lover.ly[1]) that combines the features of Google and Pinterest in its quest to be an integral part of the nation's $50-billion-a-year wedding industry.
Loverly's appeal hinges on the notion that today's connected, device-toting bride has eclipsed the era of stuffing massive folders with dog-eared bridal magazine clippings. Instead, she craves a handy and highly social digital version of that all-consuming quest. Although still in start-up mode — the company launched a little over a year ago, unveiled an iPhone app in February and has only 13 staffers — Khalil is confident her big day will come.
"The idea is simply that your wedding binder lives in the cloud," says Khalil, whose site aggregates and curates information from 35 wedding bloggers as well as 1,800 vendors representing 200,000 products who cater to everything from traditional to LGBT nuptials. "I'm building this for my generation of brides. For us, it's all about the visual Web, whether you're on a computer, tablet or your phone."
There are other players out there, notably TheKnot.com[2], which similarly hopes to snag the attention of young women in a life-altering moment where cost often takes a backseat to myriad other concerns. But it is Khalil's vision and determination that have convinced some investors she will come out on top.
"Six minutes into Kellee's pitch I said, 'I'm in,'" says Jordan Levy, a partner at SoftBank Capital, which provided Khalil with an early stage investment. "She said, 'But you haven't heard the rest.' I told her I was investing in her. She's the whole package: extraordinarily bright, passionate and totally committed."
Levy acknowledges that no company has yet to break out in this potentially lucrative space, one fueled by the USA's nearly 2 million marriages a year. His first bit of advice to Khalil was to be more of a shopping site. "She was all about her great content," he says. "I felt it was more a search and e-commerce play. She's coming around."
Khalil's particular insight was to provide a destination where brides-to-be can lay out their wedding dream in broad strokes. Loverly's search algorithm tags items according to categories such as style, season, designer and location, then instantly pulls up relevant photos, articles and products.
What's more, social networking combined with wedding-obsessed bloggers allows Loverly to see what's trending in real time, she says.
"In 2012, horse-themed weddings were big," she says. "But this year, we noticed that the whole casual mason-jar look was being replaced by a black-tie feel, partly the result of the Hollywood movie The Great Gatsby. Technology helps keep us connected to what's happening out there, which in turn helps those on our site see what's popular."
One feature Khalil is particularly proud of is the color bar that streaks across the top of the site; click on a hue and you'll instantly find all manner of wedding accouterments — dresses, shoes, hats, flowers — in that shade.
Las Vegas wedding planner Brit Bertino says that while Loverly "still has kinks to be worked out," it has the potential to make her life easier.
"I'd love to be able to have my brides keep all their ideas on one website, as opposed to sending me e-mails with links all the time," says Bertino, who sits on the board of the Wedding Industry Professionals Association. "Going to newsstands to get a magazine isn't happening as much anymore, it's all online. Brides do use Pinterest, but what's nice about a site like Loverly is that it's just focused on weddings."
Khalil says she's determined to make the whole process "more delightful. ... Planning a wedding is already overwhelming; finding a bridesmaid's dress shouldn't be."
A FAMILY OF ENTREPRENEURS
If Khalil sounds like she speaks in perfect marketing catchphrases, that's not so much by design as it is innate. On the younger end of a family of five raised by hardworking Lebanese immigrants, Khalil seems to have gotten a heavy dose of the family's fierce entrepreneurial spirit.
Her father, Charles, who emigrated in 1971, rose from being the janitor at a southern California gas station to running a marketing company that represents gas stations in negotiations with vendors looking to place their products. One brother, Jirard, goes by his YouTube video-game testing moniker, The Completionist, while an older sister, Leila Lewis, founded Be Inspired PR, a Los Angeles firm that represents wedding planners.
And yes, here the penny drops, but not yet. Khalil attended the University of Southern California, and when not powering through business classes was conjuring up companies. Her first idea was to buy Italian leather and ship it to Spain, where workers would turn out Balenciaga-quality handbags at a fraction of the cost.
"I realized I needed half a million dollars to get off the ground, so I decided to get paid to learn business first," she says, launching into details of her tenure as the only woman at a company that did lease-to-own deals on heavy machinery. Within months she was a top-grossing salesperson, and soon was rewarded with a BMW 7 Series.
"People thought I was driving my dad's car," she says with a big laugh.
At 25, she had a "quarter-life crisis," left the leasing company with a pocketful of savings and decided to help her sister grow Be Inspired. The company had just started using blogs and social media, and Khalil instantly realized the advantage of immediacy that these outlets had over traditional magazines, which are months in the planning.
Her brain starting churning, but she hadn't yet reached her tipping point. First came another volunteer task, and a daunting one at that: Khalil helped plan her sister's wedding, which for personal and professional reasons was epic in scope. There were seven different events up and down the California coast, culminating in a 10-page spread in Martha Stewart Weddings.
That task proved to be the light-bulb moment that soon led to a move to New York and the creation of Loverly. The epiphany? Despite innumerable contacts and famous designers on speed-dial, Khalil still found the task of organizing the wedding a bear.
"I was 40 pages deep in a search on Google, then if I found what I wanted I'd drag it over to another page, then start e-mailing links. It was kind of a nightmare," she says. "And I figured, if it's this hard for me, what's a bride in Wisconsin who may be on a budget and has no sister to give up her life for 12 months to help going to do?"
Lewis applauded her sister's defection. "I'm the oldest in the family, but we are maybe the closest in terms of being business minded," says Lewis, whose company is based in Manhattan Beach, Calif. "I thought her idea was brilliant, there was nothing like it in the space. It may not be Pinterest yet, but give it time. I sense there's a need."
GROWING A STARTUP
Armed with $75,000 in savings, Khalil moved to New York in 2010 and started to network in the tech community. After settling on the name Loverly — "I'm a big My Fair Lady fan," she says — she spent much of her savings on lawyers and Web developers, eventually offering one of them the chance to work for her exclusively.
"He moved from Canada when I offered him my couch and $4,000, but he's 6-foot-4, so I slept on the couch until he found a place to live," Khalil says of those early bootstrapping days. "But I knew eventually the funding would come."
A few years and nearly $1 million in backing later, Khalil is focusing on raising Loverly's awareness and, next up, developing an iPad app to add to the company's existing iPhone app. For now she is iOS exclusive.
"More than 30% of our visitors come to us through mobile devices, and of those, 82% are on Apple products, so that's what we're concentrating on now," says Khalil.
But there's a bigger number in her sights: currently, only 12% of wedding-related purchases are made online, a figure that Khalil feels is bound to increase. "People do a lot of research on the web, but a lot of the actual buying is done in shops that are local to the bride," she says. "My goal is to drive that number up."
After all this wedding talk, one question remains. Any wedding bells in the air for Loverly's founder?
Khalil's eye dart to the side of the room. She stays mum, then smiles.
"No, but I'm working on it," she says. "It'll be insane. I'm scared for my future husband."
USA TODAY's Change Agents series highlights innovators and entrepreneurs looking to change business and culture with their vision. Email Marco della Cava at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.[3]. Follow him on Twitter: @marcodellacava[4].
References
- ^ http://lover.ly/ (lover.ly)
- ^ http://www.theknot.com/ (www.theknot.com)
- ^ This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (rssfeeds.usatoday.com)
- ^ http://twitter.com/marcodellacava (twitter.com)