Simone Sant-Ghuran is one of the pioneering wedding planners in Trinidad and Tobago, having launched the first wedding website in the country, www.trinidadweddings.com, in 2004. She said her sincere desire is to help visitors and clients to have the best wedding planning experience possible.
Sant-Ghuran said when she started in the wedding planning business there were only a few event courses being offered by the national hospitality school.
“So I attended those, but mostly I learned about events on the job and through experience, which really is the best way!
“Back then, I worked for one of the largest banks in the country and my department was responsible for staff and corporate events. After I left that job, I did HR, marketing and business development at a few other jobs before leaving the corporate world entirely.”
She took a year to plan her next step and realised there was a gap in the wedding planning market, with no online resource for wedding vendors and engaged couples.
“During that year, I did marketing consulting and event management, but more importantly, I started planning for www.trinidadweddings.com, which I started in 2004. We were the first wedding website in the country.
“Our main service is internet advertising and providing promotional and marketing support for brands and wedding vendors with private events, product reviews, give-aways etc.
“When we started in 2004, online advertising was very new, and social media as we know it now was almost non-existent, so wedding vendors were understandably hesitant. Before us, wedding vendors used to promote themselves strictly offline or in traditional media like newspapers and the Yellow Pages. Engaged couples got their information from books, the newspaper, and magazines.”
In addition to the website, trinidadweddings.com offers wedding consulting services, a wedding column, a wedding app, and a magazine.
[caption id="attachment_1072558" align="alignnone" width="761"] Trinidad Weddings magazine 2016 cover. -[/caption]
Sant-Ghuran comes from a background of entrepreneurship, as her parents ran a hardware store in Central Trinidad where she grew up.
“They left banking careers to become entrepreneurs and I was one year old when they launched it. The hardware was where I grew up, since our store was downstairs our house and I learned many things about the real world of business there.”
As the business grew, Sant-Ghuran decided to expand and move to a physical format as well as being online, in order to feature more in-depth stories and content in another medium.
“The first testing of the waters came in 2009, when we put out a digital magazine issue on our website. We had hundreds and hundreds of downloads and so the following year, we decided to do a print hard copy and we called it the TW Wed-Zine (a play on the words ‘weddings’ and ‘magazine’).”
The magazine, published once yearly, was sold at bookshops, pharmacies and retailers across TT from 2010-2018, as well as online through the website.
Sant-Ghuran said the magazine
