Planing your wedding, when magazine advice goes wrong
Sitting here writing this today, with the snow outside and the log burner going, its often just browsing through a few emails answering wedding planning enquiries that we come up with blog ideas or items we feel couples need to be made more aware of.
Today I’m going to talk about the differences in advice you may read in some of the glossy magazines and what you may be told by a wedding professional and when you might need to put down that glossy magazine and pick up the phone or email your local wedding pro.
First off, wedding magazines are a fantastic place to start when you first get engaged and there are some excellent magazines available. We know the feeling, its just about sunk in that you are engaged and you need to start planning and organising your big day and often the first port of call is to pick up the latest wedding magazine to see what it’s all about and where to start. Wedding magazines will give you a great insight into the various styles of wedding available, styles of dresses, cake designs and show you some superb examples from some fantastic photographers along with the latest styling trends.
But heres the thing, wedding magazines are created and written by media professionals and writers with the sole aim of making their magazine attractive enough for you to buy and for us to advertise in, some will have wedding experienced specialists on board as writers but some however will not.
So how does this affect you?
This means that wedding magazines are still a great place to start and a great place to pick up ideas, but as professionals we often wince at some of the advice being offered and some of the sensationalist headlines designed to do nothing more than make you choose one magazine over another.
We often see for example articles on weddings for under £1,000 or £10,000 but these are populated with wedding photographs from styled shoots or real weddings that in reality cost 20-30x as much at least. We also see articles on DIY cakes or dresses for under £300, typically accompanied by product photos that cost as much as 10x the amounts being suggested in the article, whilst fantastic reading the reality is often somewhat different.
Why do they do this?
Our best guess is that if they actually printed photos of the DIY cake they made in the office or the 1K wedding, the photos would be frankly unimpressive and possibly even quite shocking which does not help to sell magazines at all. More worryingly, whilst definitely not always the case, consider if the writer behind the article has never actually worked or planned a wedding ever.
So when should I speak to a professional?
Any real wedding professional – which by definition is someone that works within the wedding industry supplying the products you are looking to buy to real couples will be more than happy to offer advice when asked.
Speaking to your local wedding professionals can help you streamline your wedding planning and spend your wedding budget more effectively. Your wedding professional can provide you guidance on areas such as realistic pricing expectations, actual time frames, numbers, suitable styling and current trends as opposed to those often advised in the glossy magazines.
Overall my advice if you are recently engaged is to pick up a few magazines, take a browse through the photos to see what styles you like and then locate and speak to a wedding professional to get the facts needed to effectively plan your day to your budget without any unnecessary disappointment.
If you would like to speak to us about help with planning or managing your big day then drop us a message today. Heres to a happy and wonderful planning journey and remember your local wedding professional is only ever a call or email away.
2 Responses
Excellent advice. The wedding budgets in wedding magazines are a really distorted example of what things cost.
They take an average from the whole country and also include freebies (photos by Uncle Bob) etc which really lowers that average cost down.
Speak to a few suppliers in your area and you will get a much more realistic average budget.
I’m not that much of a online reader to be honest but your blogs really nice, keep it
up! I’ll go ahead and bookmark your site to come back later on. Cheers