Notes from a Bridal Studio

TLDR.

Three years, countless brews, plenty of rejection and more than a few questionable ideas later, Revide goes live today.

This is a slightly rambling account of how a bridal studio in Lancashire, a kitchen island, and a lot of stubborn optimism turned into the biggest solo project I've ever worked on.

Whether it succeeds or fails, I wanted to capture the moment before we press the button.

Main

So here we are. The eve of the going live of something I have been working on for the best part of 3 years (perhaps more than 3 years if you believe that all of life’s events are pre-ordained - but I digress).

I am sat here at the island in my kitchen, our kitchen, where 99% of the online meetings I attend are held, feeling a sense of pride, a sense of astonishment that we’ve built better than we could have dreamt of, and a sense of what’s next? (but more on that later).

Now, you will see from the next few paragraphs that I am not the best writer, nor am I the best at grammar. However, I hope that you will give me a degree of latitude when reading this. I haven’t creatively wrote since high school in nineteen hmm hmm hmm. The only time i have written expressively is in my wedding vows in the summer of 2025 and that was easy as I knew i was going to say it outloud and could adlib if anything sounds s**t when it came out of my mouth.

However, I thought that in this new age of digital, the AI era as the news is calling it, I felt the urge to just write, without control, without shoving the stuff through chat gpt or claude, without trying to make this article fit around SEO and without revision about my thoughts and feelings on the day before the biggest solo project i have ever worked on.

And here they are.

You are reading this on our new platform called Revide (fun fact - I originally called the platform Dress Versus - which, looking back, would have been a terrible name - thanks to my wife Melissa for telling me to change). Revide, should you not know already (where have you been?!) is the world's first discovery platform for every single bridal store that is known to exist. Brides can discover their store by filtering in our search and book an appointment directly to find their wedding dress. They can also search and book events such as Sample Sales or Trunk Shows.

It really is that simple.

Well that’s what I thought at the start of this journey in 2023. In honesty, the Revide project has turned into something so much bigger than any of the team first thought. To explain why, I have to take you back to the start.

The Start

I’ll start with Feathers & Florence (F & F). F & F is the baby of my wife Melissa and I. We opened the doors to our luxury bridal studio in Longridge, Lancashire in 2022. Since then we have expanded to a new location, taken on new designers and opened a coffee bar within the new studio to boot. And we love it. We are on this business journey together, we spend more time together because of it and we feel the same stress because of it. I keep telling myself “it's great!” but in reality business is not for the weak hearted (but perhaps i can tell that story another day).

Early on in this journey in the bridal fashion industry, two things struck me. The first is that brides have very little guidance on to where to start their wedding dress shopping experience. Some brides have been searching since they were 5 years old, some use instagram, some as on Facebook groups and some know a store in their local town. The second is that store owners are brilliantly knowledgeable about wedding dresses. Experts in their field and very passionate. BUT, they are not marketers. Some, with varying degrees of success, chance their arm at instagram and facebook, some host at wedding fayres (or showcases as they are now called) and some don’t do anything.

And here's the issue, the store owners don’t know where to start either. They wanted to start in bridal for the fantastic, beautiful and rewarding industry that it is. NOT, to be a slave to instagram algorithms.

Revide, as I initially designed it was to bring together the brides who don’t know where to start, with stores and their owners, who also don’t know where to start.

In our bridal business, we spend £300 - £400 per month on advertising on instagram. Some days we will achieve 10 followers, some days zero. Some days we will get lots of engagement, some days we will get none and some days we will have 3 appointments book in, and (yes, you guessed it) some days we will get none.

We are not experts in digital marketing, nor do we want to be. We love wedding dresses, we don’t love marketing. We don’t love spending hundreds of pounds on digital marketing.

We believe Revide will take this pain away. Revide will promote each store who engages with us, create demand, create engagement and create bookings for the stores. On the flip slide, Revide, will interact, inspire and obtain bookings with brides for the stores.

All 3000 of the UK stores are present on the platform. For the stores that have an online booking platform of their own we will link in with this and send bookings directly into their calendar. For those stores that do not have a booking platform, we hope to become their first choice.

In 2023, I thought that when we built Revide and solved this problem, that would be the end of the project. Press the big red go live button and away we go! However, nothing is as straight fowrard is it. (but again i’ll talk about the future towards the end).

BTW, this is turning into a long piece of writing already. I am so sorry if you’ve invested to this point. I promise to wrap it up soon.

The journey from idea to go live has been tough. Not tough like working in a coal mine tough. But tough in thinking, planning, getting the right people on the team and, the worst part, all the rejection is tough. I actually don’t think i can put a number on the amount of investors i have spoken to and have a short, but very polite rejection.

From the early days I was fairly certain that I would have to fund this project without any external investment (because who would invest in an ugly guy from East Lancashire right??). So self fund I have.

The positive news is that on this journey I have had the support of and met some wonderful people. None of them wanted to put their hand in their pockets to help, but wonderful all the same! (just for clarity, this is a joke by the way, I have never asked any of them for money).

The list is long but i would like to pay special attention to:

Rizwan - my tech partner and the guy who believes

Ammar - the tech genius who makes it all work

The Codev team - geniuses who never show their faces but i know they also care deeply about the project

Laura and her team - for the initial Revide design

The team at Hyper - Bill who gave me such good initial guidance

Tasmin - for her brilliant use of words in our first pitch decks and first holding pages

Phillipa - for spreading the sales word and always telling me I have good ideas (even when I think you may think that the idea is rubbish)

Dan - for creating our first holding pages and always being a friendly ear

Family - for never telling me my idea is s**t, for being the ultimate “yes” people. I thrive off positive reinforcement and you guys give me just what i need

And finally, Melissa, for loving me and leaving me to it, for letting me dream of what we can achieve and guiding me though some sliding doors decisions. Melissa is the co-founder or Revide and the bridal store owner whose life I want to make easier by inventing this platform. Without Feathers & Florence none of this would be possible.

The Present

And so to now.

We go live tomorrow, Monday 22nd June 2026. This is, what the tech world calls, our MVP, minimum viable product. The minimum we could put out with the budget that we had. And I am so so proud of it. Rizwan, Ammar and team have worked wonders with my initial designs and brought it to life.

Why have we gone live now? I hear you not ask. Well, I did initially want to go live in 2024, well in 2023 this looked possible from my innocent eyes. What a fool I was. In honesty, i was looking for the right tech partner for 12 months (then I met Riz) and money. Money, money, money, how does anyone launch anything in this climate? And i don’t mean global warming, i mean the financial climate of cost of living, wars all over the world and a tight-ass government.

I would ask you to use the platform as much as you can and feedback to me what you like or dislike about it. You can email me direct liam@revide.xyz.

The Future

We are finally here, the end of this rambing text.

On the journey, with the wonderful people I have named above, It has become clear that Revide is not just meant to be a discovery and booking platform. In fact, I think that, due to advancement in AI, the discovery element of Revide will become obsolete quicker than any other element of the wider project.

A few weeks ago I met with a local tech entrepreneur who built his business from zero to a few million quid sale and (as with all geniuses) he said something that confirmed and accelerated a thought process which had been brewing for some time.

The bridal industry is fragmented, antiquated and it is calling out for standardisation.

I believe Revide can be that standardisation.

Now, I will not say too much about how this looks (we don’t want anyone stealing our ideas now do we). But what I can say is that we are now working on building out Revide Pay and Revide AI. Both of which will standardise the payment process for brides and stores and standardise and qualify the information that brides receive when they are searching for their dream dress.

We are also planning and making moves on launch in Europe within the next 12 months.

I would be so happy to tell you more over a brew (virtual or in person of course!).

The one thing to say is that Revide may not work. It may fail and 3 years of work will be gone in the time its taken me to write this journal (1 hour 12 minutes so far but who’s counting). However, you can be guaranteed that i will throw everything I have at this project.

To finish, if you are a bride or a store, and would like to be on this exciting journey with us then please do reach out. I mean it when I say, I will never turn down the opportunity to learn more about you and your journey. After all, this platform would not exist without you as a bride or you as a store owner.

And tomorrow, i’ll be sat back here at my island helping actual brides find their dream dress and stores find their target market brides.

Nearly 4 pages, Christ, I only wanted to write one side of A4.

Liam 🤍