Carats and Cake
Is This Your Business?0.0
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Author: Kalicia Bateman
You and that special someone have gotten engaged. You may have a good idea what type of place you’d like to hold the ceremony and related events, but is the venue available? What about the food? What about the wedding and bridesmaids’ dresses? What about entertainment, décor, and other accessories? Figuring out these details can take time and be overwhelming. Carats & Cake is in business to alleviate the stress of finding and putting together the elements of your perfect wedding. Founded in 2013 in New York City, Carats & Cake connects you with real, actual weddings across the country, allowing you to see what people did for their weddings, sorted by the location of your choice. Drawing inspiration from other successfully planned and executed weddings, you can create the special day of your choice.
Top Ranked Companies
The Good
- Ideas from Real Weddings
- Vendor Selection
- Personalized Dashboard
- Charity Donation Options
You've reviewed your wedding checklist, and from the outset the task can be enormous. With myriad tasks to complete just to get to the big day, how do you know where to begin? Carats & Cake eases your burden by giving you access to actual weddings and seeing what the happy couple did to make their wedding memorable. Here's what you'll get with Carats & Cake:
Ideas from Real Weddings
This unique feature allows registered users to pick a location from every state in the country where they will instant see photos and details from actual weddings that took place in the place you selected. Here, you'll read reviews from the couple itself on the location, venue and vendors. This will give you the most unbiased look possible at potential partners in your upcoming wedding. This tools gives you a firsthand look at how the wedding looked and how the participants felt about the proceedings.
Vendor Selection
As you examine actual weddings, you will learn which vendors the couples used and how pleased they were with the service they received. You can also search vendors themselves in a number of different categories, including photographers, wedding dresses, shoes, venues, flowers, cake, catering, wedding planners, groom attire, and more. As you select each different vendor category, you won't just read about the vendor and what they offer; you will see a real-life wedding they worked.
Once you find a vendors you like, it's simple to make personal contact with them directly and start scheduling their services.
Personalized Dashboard
Once you have membership with Carats & Cake, you can set up your own dashboard, which no one can see but yourself. On your dashboard, you can list your preferred and selected vendors and outline the ideas for your wedding.
Charity Donation Options
Carats & Cake has a wonderful program that gives you the option to donate leftover food to local shelters. Simply coordinate with your venue and your preferred charity, and the shelter will pick up the food. Similarly, you may donate flowers after the wedding to local shelters or retirement homes.
The Bad
- No Shopping Tools
- Few Wedding Planning Tools
No Shopping Tools
There are no shopping tools on the Carats & Cake site, unlike competitors' sites and platforms that let you to purchase an assortment gifts, trinkets and other wedding supplies and wedding-related items. Everything on the site will give you ideas and direction, but nothing you can directly purchase for the wedding.
Few Wedding Planning Tools
Once you have found the vendors you would like to use, you are on your own from there. Carats & Cake offers no budgeting tools or helps, no checklist, no invitation tools such as RSVP tracking, guest list tools, or anything similar. There are also no post-wedding tools such as honeymoon ideas or destination tips. This is an important part of the wedding experience that this site omits.
The Bottom Line
Carats & Cake does what many of its competitors do not: it actually shows you real, recent, local weddings and provides candid reviews from the couple pictured. You can truly see a wedding in your area and see which vendors provided the couple's products and services, as seen in their actual wedding photos. Then, you can collect your favorite vendors on your dashboard and easily contact them when you are ready. With the ability to search thousands of vendors, you're sure to have all the trimmings you want for your wedding. Carats & Cake is mainly a vendor directory and review site. If you are looking for other planning tools, or you want to create a wedding website, you will have to look elsewhere.
