I'm going to be brutally honest here and say...I planned my wedding without Pinterest!!!
Not that I wouldn't have been all over it if it had existed when we were making those important floral design decisions back in the day.
And if I'm going to go the whole hog, and be painfully, brutally honest (yes it does hurt, quite a lot), we planned our wedding before people were really using the internet. No Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest, very few mobile phones, and at the time I worked in an office where client details were kept in a box full of hand-written index cards! I know!
My point is this...
Planning a wedding, or 'wedmin' as it was cutely known for a time recently, will always require a certain amount of legwork. You'll always want to visit prospective wedding and reception venues, get close up and personal with wedding gowns and flowers, speak over the phone to entertainers, caterers, and car hire companies, and all of those things eat into your free weekends and evenings (it needs to be said that though, that those things are also really exciting things to do!). But, in this day and age, the magic of the internet makes a lot of your wedding research and purchases so very, very much quicker, simpler and easier.
Specifically, the advent of selling sites stocked by small UK businesses selling everything from stationery to cake toppers, wedding accessories to confetti, table decor to favours, garters to wedding shoes, all in the one place, mean that in just a single evening, if you get yourself organised with a list and a budget, you can rattle through a big chunk of your 'wedmin' in the time that it would take to catch up on your backlog of Game of Thrones (never watched a single episode...another guilty secret of mine!)
The selling sites I'm most familiar with, mainly because I stock them myself, are And So to Shop, and Love & Lilah. Here you can shop by theme, colour, or product, and even have the sites automatically throw up suggestions for other things you might not have thought about.
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| Nalina Hair Comb by Glorious by Heidi |
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Watercolour Wilderness by Nina Thomas Studio |
I really do wish sites like this had been around when I was flailing around trying to plan a wedding, whilst also working full time in a busy photographic studio, trying to have a semblance of a social life, and occasionally get a good night's sleep.
On these sites you can while away an evening, shopping by theme, product, colour, and even have a few ideas suggested to you that you might not have thought of.
The sites are run by small teams keen to make a big success of what they're doing, and only stocked by equally small, independent, UK businesses, many of whom handcraft their products to unique designs, so you know that the customer service and 'hands on' approach is going to be first class.
With some suppliers offering free postage, samples, discounts and personalisation, what's not to love about modern day wedding planning?!
Pour yourself a glass, get your PJ's on, put the mobile away, and get wedding planning the easy way.
