Any­one with a lit­tle expe­ri­ence of media jobs in social media will appre­ci­ate that a start­up that soars to a $15 mil­lion val­u­a­tion and looks set to close a Series B round worth at least $2.5 mil­lion less than three years after its launch is tick­ing a lot of pos­i­tive box­es. And rumor has it that New York social media start­up Lover­ly, a kind of Pin­ter­est for soon-to-be brides, is poised to do just that.

Bridal inspi­ra­tion 

Social media man­agers who’ve heard of Lover­ly will know that it serves as a cen­tral mar­ket­place that helps prospec­tive brides find out about and save great wed­ding ideas. That means help­ing them find the right peo­ple to hire, as well as all the things they might like to buy to make their spe­cial day seri­ous­ly Spe­cial, with a cap­i­tal ‘S’.

Users can curate a board of ideas (hence the Pin­ter­est com­par­i­son), and make them pub­lic for oth­er brides-to-be to find inspi­ra­tion in. The boards can be both edi­tor-curat­ed (such as hon­ey­moon ideas, or brides­maid dress­es for beach wed­dings) and user-gen­er­at­ed. The site’s pro­pri­etary tag­ging sys­tem auto­mat­i­cal­ly adds between 4 and 20 tags to each image, index­ing fea­tures like style, col­or, loca­tion, and sea­son, plus addi­tion­al items like who the pho­tog­ra­ph­er was, who the dress design­er was, the plan­ner, the florist, etc. It even tags fea­tures such as where the desserts came from, where the venue was and what the rentals included.

Fledg­ling to powerhouse

In two years, the start­up has shot from a fledg­ling with $500k in seed fund­ing to a ver­i­ta­ble pow­er­house host­ing a quar­ter of a mil­lion pur­chasable prod­ucts from more than 2,000 brands. And the pur­chasable stuff con­sti­tutes a mere frac­tion of the total images avail­able on the platform.

Social media man­agers inter­est­ed in suc­cess sto­ries might also like to note that Loverly’s app has attract­ed in excess of 90k down­loads since 2013, and its web net­work now reach­es more than 2.6 mil­lion peo­ple in search of wed­ding inspiration.

It has recent­ly launched the “Real Wed­dings” fea­ture which lets users col­late pro­fes­sion­al pho­tographs of their wed­dings on a sin­gle page, let­ting peo­ple who want to look at a par­tic­u­lar event (instead of, say, the col­or of a prod­uct) see the whole splen­did show in one go.

As things stand, Lover­ly is nei­ther deny­ing nor con­firm­ing the Series B story.