Bridal Startup Says 'I Do' To Boosting Sales Online By PAULETTE THOMAS Question: I design and sew bridal veils for my small business, Emily Street. Several bridal salons recently expressed interest in offering my services as a veil designer to their clientele or carrying some of my veils in their shops. Should I charge a percentage of my sales or sell the veils at a discount and indicate what I think their markup should be? This is complicated because I produce custom-design work and each item needs to be priced differently. ~ Elizabeth, Tacoma, Wash. Elizabeth: One can structure these transactions in as many ways as there are to be married. You can sell them outright to the salons as a wholesaler. Often retail is a 100% markup from wholesale, so you'd have to price accordingly. The price could include the value-added detail-custom work to follow later, or that could be an add-on if the bride chose it. You also could establish a consignment relationship whereby you set a price and share in the proceeds only if a sale is made. Another option might be to display a few veils in a particular store or in a catalog kept in the store. The store could consider you as a service provider, letting you keep, say, 90% of the take. You might be even more daring and buy a little equity in one of their businesses, or arrange for one to buy a piece of yours. The store could advertise itself as the only resource for Emily Street custom veils. But there is a way to think much bigger and at the same time simpler. Expanding your presence on the Internet is a logical way for home businesses such as yours to operate on a grander scale. I took the liberty of admiring your elegant Web site, and it's a work of true romance. Nothing conveys "forever" like those soft-focus sepia tones. It prompted me to wonder how much of this business occurs online. So while you're pondering, take a guess at what is one of the most frequently searched subjects on the Internet. Yes, it's weddings and all the attendant paraphernalia, and that includes, of course, the gossamer veil floating over the bride. How do we know this? Because Brad Fallon of Atlanta's SEO Research (as in search-engine optimization) has done all the hard work for us. The firm investigates search-engine results and helps businesses devise the key words in their Web sites that propel their rankings up and down Yahoo, Google and other search engines. If, say, your business pops up on the first page of someone's search, it means big, big bucks for your business. So while one likes to imagine the sweet young bride fondling fabrics all over town while her mother tearfully follows, Mr. Fallon says that image is a tad dated. "Every bride has e-mail," he says, "and all of them are going online, researching venues, weddings cakes, finding photographers." His own story should impress you. In the course of his search-engine work, he was so taken by the hits on wedding sites that he and his wife set up an online-wedding business of their own that is growing like an out-of-town guest list. "My wife and I just got married a year ago," he explains. "We purchased wedding favors online." He never knew that something called "wedding favors" existed before he and his wife Jennifer Nichols bought 150 little place-card holders formed to look like a little bride and groom driving merrily away in a car. They liked the idea of selling wedding favors -- cheap inventory for beginners, such as themselves. They invested $50 a month for a Yahoo online store. He, of course, knew the best way to compose the key words on the Web site to attract the most hits. His wife took over. She established their product list, bought inventory from Atlanta's wholesale marketplace, and put photos of their items on the Web site. MyWeddingFavors.com grossed $10,000 in its first month. "I said, 'Good job, honey, that's pretty good,' " recalls Mr. Fallon. The second month, revenue hit $30,000, and now, less than a year later, the site is approaching $200,000 monthly. The couple is also launching their own line of products in addition to what they buy from wholesalers. Elizabeth, you've done the hard, creative part by designing the beautiful veils and showing them off at their glamorous best on your site. With a small investment in attracting search engines, you've expanded your market from Tacoma to the world. It can't cost too much to ship a matte tulle veil with mother-of-pearl trim, can it? Mr. Fallon suggests trying a pay-per-click-advertising model, whereby you pay Yahoo or Google only for the hits your site receives. The words "unique veils" should be in your advertising, he says. "She should be doing Google ads today, not tomorrow," he adds.