Wedding planning giant The Knot is expanding with a new Galway office and 100 jobs
The company is one of the biggest wedding planning providers in the world
GLOBAL WEDDING PLANNING giant The Knot Worldwide is setting up a new office in Galway and is planning to hire 100 staff.
The company is one of the biggest wedding planning providers in the world and owns a number of other online lifestyle brands including The Knot, WeddingWire, Bodas, The Bump and Lasting.
“(Galway) seemed like a great location … it has the background in terms of marketing and journalism skills and a lot of folks that were in the typical demographic for our staff worldwide,” Jessica Finnefrock, executive vice president of global business operations, said.
The Knot Worldwide typically hires people in their late twenties to early thirties.
Following a recent merger, The Knot and WeddingWire became The Knot Worldwide, which offers wedding planning tools, a vendor market place, wedding websites and registry services. The company currently employs 1,500 people globally.
The first wave of staff for the Galway operation has been working since March. The office is currently set up in The Portershed serviced offices. According to Finnefrock, the company will be hiring its next 10 to 15 employees in the summer, and is hoping to employ about 100 in total in Galway over the next few years.
“As the team gets bigger, one of the things we’re going to be looking at in 2020 is additional office space, moving from the Portershed into something that’s a bit more of a permanent location for the team,” Finnefrock said.
Vendor marketplace
“The heart” of the company, according to Finnefrock, is its online marketplace for third-party vendors to advertise to couples. As a free service, the business model is built on advertising from its vendors.
The Galway office is set to become a hub for copy and content which will promote those businesses on the site, something which Finnefrock said is a “relatively new function” for the US side of the business.
“A lot of the folks we work with are small business owners. Many of them need help when thinking about how best to represent their businesses online,” she said.
“This is a team that’s working with them to think about things like the visuals, the photography … then really importantly the actual written descriptions of their businesses … to ensure that content actually ranks well and it’s written with an SEO focus”, she said.
“Our international businesses has something similar to what we have now in Galway but this is the first primary investment like this for our English speaking countries.”
Jessica Finnefrock
Other staff members in the Galway office are also working on a discussion forum for soon-to-be-wed couples to share advice “and sometimes do a little bit of ranting a raving about the wedding planning process”, according to Finnefrock.
Those team members help couples in similar areas or getting married in the same month to get in touch and share advice.
Note: This article was amended to clarify that The Knot is a standalone brand part of The Knot Worldwide group.
