Weddingstar, a perfect marriage of business and romance
get a foothold in the industry, but had already come a long way.
Even when Brink was playing hockey he knew he had to set himself up for something after he hung up the blades. Through the hockey team's connections, Brink met with a supplier of honeycomb products and before he knew it had the Canadian
distributorship for a line of decorations that included Santa Clauses, Easter bunnies and, most importantly, bells. While selling to retail stores, buyers were often interested in the red and white Christmas bells and asked if they came in different colours for weddings. He always said yes.
"I was just going with the flow," he
laughs. "What I was doing, now that I've been in business for 30 years I can see this, was I was listening to the customers and giving them what they want."
The first catalogue was filled with Easter, Christmas and birthday items and a half-dozen different coloured wedding bells. Now knowing where he wanted to take his business, Brink began looking for other wedding products he could sell. Streamers, napkins and more became part of the mix and things began to take off. Today, 30 years later, Weddingstar carries around 3,000 items, of which Brink estimates 90 per cent are exclusive to Weddingstar.
The key to the business is personalization, a lesson Brink learned during a price war in the early 1990s. When a couple of other competitors were slashing prices, Weddingstar had no choice but to follow suit.
"We had to lower our prices to compete and we almost went bankrupt that year," he says. "As tragic as that was, it was the best
thing that's ever happened to us because it made me realize we had to be different and unique."
At that point Weddingstar started to design and develop its own products, and it's been that way ever since.
"We're not worrying about competitors and what they're doing," Brink says. "We are just doing our own thing and trying to be unique and be different with our products."
"People are looking for uniqueness, they're looking for personalization. When it all used to be the same, everyone could start selling streamers and bells or whatever. Now to match us is difficult because everything is so unique to us."
These days Weddingstar employs about 70 people at its headquarters and about 30 more at Confetti, a recently acquired U.K. company. The company also has distribution houses in Australia, Russia and Argentina.
The company started in 1984 in Brink’s parents’ basement and soon moved to the basement of Red Owl
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