A wedding magazine, for Christians!

Going into the wedding industry is always a good thing. Fueled by dreams of young girls (and maybe boys) of being one half of a pair, sealing a special love in a romantic, once-in-a-lifetime (and not to mention, elaborate) wedding ceremony, it is no wonder this industry will never die. This industry is made of dreams come true. (Be prepared to spend around 10k for this whole thing. And congrats on starting off marriage life broke.)

The current online wedding scene in Singapore comprises of web fronts of wedding planners (actress and DJ Vernetta Lopez recently won the Spirit of Enterprise 2008 award for her wedding planning agency, Eternally Yours) and sites like WeddingOnline and SingaporeBrides that contain tools to help you plan your wedding (budget, car rental, bouquet choosing). Plus, MediaCorp owns one of the largest players in town, StyleWeddings, which is essentially their popular print magazine brought online.

Now in comes newbie, TheWedding.SG, helmed by a group of three sweet-looking, young ladies. A print and online magazine, it will be published monthly and target couples on their first date (that’s not a couple yet!) and those looking to make a lifetime commitment. At first glance, I didn’t take to the puny, unreadable and unclassy font on the front page (can’t see your CSS file, but it looks like Arial to me! I’m against Arial for such a site). But this was the only part I found fault with. The rest of the site has a pretty nice professional feel.

The key differentiating factor of TheWedding.SG is that there is religion underpinning their whole philosophy, specifically, Christianity. Articles and interviews will feature Christian themes and values, making this more appealing to Christians who already espouse these values. And this also means that the mag is quite niche as (1) it targets Singapore (4.8m people – yes, our population grew 5.5% in 2008) (2) out of which say about 20% are of marriageable age (.2*4.8m=960k) (3) and only 15% of these people are Christians: .15*960k=144k people! Only! And that’s not even including already married people. But then again, since couples go into wedding planning with their wallets wide open, advertisers will be willing to pay to get their brand and services in front of them.

Their business model consists of ads, directory listings and possibly advertorials (the whole usual magazine shebang). Advertisers will be able to see their ad both in print and online as the site will display the current mag online and archive previous issues. This might make advertising money go a longer way since the magazines will be archived online.

Essentially, the website is print brought online (again). I’m not sure how smart or stupid is this because while print has had difficulty infiltrating the web space because people usually want to surf all over, I think there is space for a good magazine that is usually read linearly. After all, what’s more brainless than flipping the pages of a mag from front to back? But the problem with such a linear mag online is that there is all that zooming in thing to read the text. Perhaps the Christian twist will give them an edge. After all, GodTube has done pretty well.

TheWedding.SG will be having an official launch next month, on none other than Valentine’s Day of course (14th Feb, for all you unromantics). In the meanwhile, if you want to win some dining vouchers to take that special someone out, consider taking part in their declaration-of-love contest, “My Valentine”. Prizes for winning entires in the contest will be presented then.

Photo (of rose) courtesy of elvissa.