Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Renée Strauss. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Renée , thanks for joining us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

After being in luxury bridal retail in Beverly Hills for 3+ decades and starring in TLC’s  Brides of Beverly Hills, the retail market rapidly changed.

Luxury bridal designers began opening their own salons selling their merchandise directly to the public, thereby cutting out the middleman — the general retailer — me.

In addition to that challenge, many bridal manufacturers started to sell wedding gowns online. It was really unbelievable to witness a woman buying a wedding gown online, but it was happening. This, combined with the fact that due to the popularity of the TV show more and more people visited my bridal salon for pictures with me rather than to buy a gown, I couldn’t see a future for much longer. So I made the executive decision to close the store. I didn’t even try to sell it because I wanted to hold on to my name.

Admittedly, I was like a deer in headlights during the first few months, terrified of what I had done. Even after years of being in business and having built a global reputation, I was afraid everyone would forget me overnight. But then the email came.

It was from the Italian Trade Commission in New York, who, along with their counterpart the Italian tourism board in Rome, who had sponsored me as a hosted buyer to Milan Bridal Week (SposaItalia) for almost 25 years. They were fans of the TV show which was hugely popular in Italy! They invited me to work directly with the Italian office and lead trips of wedding planners to tour five-star luxury properties in Italy and open up the destination wedding market. The title they gave me was North American Wedding Destination Ambassador to Italy. I accepted the offer and started the project.

Immediately, once I began hosting these international trips with planners in tow, I saw how many fans I had in Italy. So after a few trips, being entrepreneurial, as I have been in my entire life, I saw a new opportunity to create another business.

So I contacted my daughter, who was living abroad working in the start-up world, and invited her to join me in Italy, and take a 3-5 week road trip traveling the country and see really where this popularity from the show would take us. So she joined me. We drove to the north, south, east, west, and even Sicily and visited 150 properties. It was a real adventure.

We came back to the US I convinced Pamela to move home. And on Dec. 31, 2015, she did. And on January 1, 2016, we rolled up our sleeves and started working on a plan to feature luxury Italian properties to the North American wedding market by building a website

We began with about 5 Italian properties and built a website. Then I invested in a company to continue where we could not, and after almost a year of working with them and launching version 1 of Wedaways (I came up with the name in the middle of the night), we shut down the website the day it launched. We just had a gut feeling it was wrong. And we were right.

We found another company to help redesign the site, and we shifted from creating a B2C site to a B2B-focused business working directly with wedding planners and offering to be their travel booking arm for their weddings requiring full property buyouts, room blocks, and honeymoons. Pamela learned to sell travel. I continued inviting properties to join the portfolio that we were building and sharing it with planners who were looking to expand their offerings.

But it wasn’t enough. We instinctively knew we needed to create a community. This would be the answer to scaling. Bring on planners that would evangelize Wedaways and bring the clients to us. For this, we needed to prove ourselves over and over again.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I ran away from home before I was a teenager in Chicago, Illinois. I mostly worked in restaurants. I was enrolled in 9th grade, but I barely made it to class and, for all intents and purposes, dropped out of school in 8th grade. I grew up in a chaotic home environment. My dad was a traveling salesman, and my mother owned a catering business and was never home. My grandparents, who lived next door, were holocaust survivors and raised one child, my mother. So the three of us (my two brothers and I) were more than 4 handfuls, and although they did their best to help, my grandfather died when I turned 11, and my grandmother was at her wit’s end.

I always sought order from chaos. I tried all kinds of entrepreneurial endeavors, even as a kid, for example, collected coffee tins, and loose change from our neighbors, and bought little plants, and delivered them to the old age home near our house. I wrote a neighborhood paper. I wrote poetry books with colorful crayons and stapled them together to read and re-read escaping into my own world.

By 15 years old, I thought I knew it all. So I took the money I earned working in restaurants and bought a one-way ticket to San Diego, California. My parents had been considering moving there due to my father’s asthma and had a real estate connection that allowed me to stay in their home. It was January 6, 1974. Within 2 months, I was working in the stockroom of a bridal shop at the nearby shopping center.

I saw a product being sold for $1000 – $1500, and all that needed to happen was for the woman to fall in love with it, and WHAM! Sale made! Over the next few years, my longing for stability never waivered, and eventually, I went back to school – to find more people in my community. So I took Hebrew classes at the local jr. college. That led to a teaching position in a local private Hebrew Day School teaching kindergarten children prayers and bible stories. Over time, I taught more classes and became a substitute Hebrew teacher in local high schools and even at San Diego State University.

Within a few years, I ended up in Los Angeles. I got married and purchased a menswear business with my husband, that was in downtown LA on Skid Row. Although it was a great cash business, the neighborhood was awful, so we agreed to go into BRIDAL! Something I had always loved.

Within a year, we purchased a waning bridal salon in Beverly Hills (that in and of itself is quite the story) and, within 2 years, changed the name to Renée Strauss for the Bride. Within a short amount of time, I had 4 kids (in 5 years), and the business was thriving. I started selling to TV, commercial, and motion picture productions.

After being offered the opportunity to create the wedding wardrobe for Guns N Roses November Rain, Disney’s Father of the Bride, and a few others, we bought and moved to a larger building down the street.

I learned and incorporated marketing strategies into my business and truly capitalized on the fact that we were in Beverly Hills and cater to the luxury market.

Decades later:
Wedaways was born out of years of experience – ups and downs, and twists, and turns and successes and failures.

My daughter’s innate common sense and gift for analytical thinking combined with frequent international travel throughout the decades of her growing up, and accompanying me on business trips gave us both excellent knowledge of the world.

Loving both customer service and luxury travel gave both Pamela and myself an excellent foundation to create this very unique business in this very unique way.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Pivoting. Wow, I have done this many times. Pivoting, reinventing. Surviving. Thriving. And doing it all over again. It’s the nature of entrepreneurship.

In 1989, after having completed the contract with Disney for the wedding wardrobe of Father of the Bride (I’m in the movie as well), a new designer came to the scene with enough money for advertising (in those days, print was everything) to shut the rest of the bridal world down and almost did. Vera Wang. I had 4 small children at that time and a marriage I was about done with. And a store filled with merchandise no one wanted. Fear was real.

So I decided I would go to Europe and buy wedding gowns — that concept had cachet.

The fact that my luxury bridal salon was in Beverly Hills, I capitalized on the wealthy market, always looking for new and different and giving them what they didn’t know they wanted. European wedding gowns that no one in the US sold. Thankfully, it was a successful endeavor.

The success was so great that I shopped in the four European markets for years and years: Paris, Milan, Barcelona, and Harrogate in England. Had I not done that I most certainly would have failed.

I pivoted again when I added wedding planning services to my business.
And again, when I started the reality TV show.
And again, when I shuttered brick and mortar and started the gig with the Italian Tourism Board.

And now I have Wedaways with my amazing daughter, who is at the top of her game and growing, and I get to do all the creative marketing activations that I haven’t described herein.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

All the years I was in business – from menswear to bridal — I would walk around the store(s) and say out loud, “GOD I NEED TO BREAK OUT OF THESE 4 WALLS. I KNOW I CAN DO SOMETHING BIGGER. HELP ME. LEAD THE WAY”.

And the universe heard me.

I also would say out loud: I need a business partner to help me get there!

The bridal salon was internationally known because I shopped in the European markets and got to know the European wedding market really well.

Then I gained celebrity status because I landed Brides of Beverly Hills, hugely popular in Europe, Canada, and Australia.

And then my one and only daughter grew up becoming, in front of my own eyes, the smartest woman, the clearest thinker, and the most grounded individual I had ever met. Here she was. My prayers were answered in my very own daughter. The best business partner ever.

Contact Info:

• Website: wedaways.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wedawaystravel/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wedaways/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/restrauss/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReneeStraussBH
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@WedawaysTravel

Image Credits
Rachel Havel Photography Twah Dougherty Photography Valerie Darling Photography Charla Storey Photography Shannon Skloss Photography