Unsplash’s Jakob Owens
A Dallas-based wedding planning startup called Fêtefully just announced a successful round of seed funding. Company founder GiGi McDowell, who was born in Oak Cliff, raised $1.3 million, making her one of just 98 Black female founders to raise over $1 million in venture funding.
Funds raised included $100k from Google Black Founders Fund and support from Slauson & Co., which aims to “democratize access to entrepreneurship” (as well as Gurtin Ventures, John Kim, Jeff Dodd, Rob Houdek, Chris Yeh and Techstars).
McDowell became interested in event planning at an early age and combined that later in life with money-making savvy.
The origin story
At five years old she used her mom’s credit card to order a copy of Bride‘s magazine, was transfixed and decided to become a wedding planner. She says she planned her first event when she was 13.
“Fêtefully is the result of my lifelong dream. As a Black female founder, it’s important to me that with this round of funding we’ll be able to expand into new markets and grow our planning community which will allow us to capitalize on the momentum experienced during COVID,” she says in her statement. “We’re excited to have the support and leadership from our investors who believe in our vision to revolutionize technology to better serve the wedding/events industry and our strategic partners who add intangible value to our leadership team as we continue to build and scale Fêtefully.”
Gigi — who now has 17 years in the event-planning world — says she has worked alongside mentors including Angela Proffitt, Brigette Romanek and Estee Stanley — all well-respected names in the wedding and event planning industry. The key to her success has been — in addition to her entrepreneurial drive — streamlining processes that “meet couples where they are,” she says.
Aubrie Pagano, Fêtefully advisory board member and general partner at Alpaca VC says she’s known McDowell since 2017.
“I have never met a first-time founder with more intuition on how to make money,” she says. “She was doing millions in revenue on a Google spreadsheet before ever getting a term sheet.”
Fetefully combines “the knowledge and expertise of professional wedding planners” with technology that manages everything from task planning and appointments to tracking guest information and facilitating vendor communication and payments.
It’s all happening at the perfect time. The wedding industry is on track to grow 2.1% this year, up 62% since the pandemic started, according to the press release from Fetefully.
The milestone
A 2020 Fortune article notes that in 2018, only 34 Black female founders had ever raised $1 million in venture capital for their company, a number that tripled by 2020. That was based on ProjectDiane and digitalundivided’s biennial report on the state of Black and Latinx women. The number of Black and Latinx women founders in Texas that year was just 20.
“These stats are the ones that are going to spark conversations and lead to real, true systemic change,” Lauren Maillian, the CEO of digitalundivided told the publication.
Grant Gurtin, founder and CEO of Fêtefully funders Gurtin Ventures says McDowell has all the qualities his team seeks in a successful entrepreneur
“Her combination of vision, determination, and deep insight into her customers’ problems make her the perfect candidate to disrupt the traditional wedding/event planning space.”
For more information about Fêtefully, please visit fetefully.com and follow Fêtefully on social media at @fetefully_.
