Photo: Courtesy of Ilana Stern
What do real brides have to say about the wedding planning experience? Well, it's not all happy tears at the bridal boutique and indulgent cake tastings. Over the next few months, guest blogger and Weddington Way founder and CEO Ilana Stern will share the ins and outs of planning a California wedding, running a business, picking the perfect wedding planner, and customizing your dream dress.
When it was time to create our wedding stationery suite, my fiancé Jeff and I knew we wanted our personality as a couple to be reflected in the design. Naturally, we started with the save-the-dates. No design could convey our personalities better than a photo of us jumping for joy together in front of the Taj Mahal. We recently went on a trip to India (for the wedding of Karishma, one of my bridesmaids and employee #2 at my company Weddington Way), and this photo was a personal favorite from the vacation.
I uploaded the image to Minted and had a lot of fun crafting my save-the-dates. I loved everything about the Minted experience. I was able to work on the invite designs on my couch at midnight, which is perfect because I work crazy hours. Minted has super cute designs and I enjoyed using their tools to customize all things paper for our wedding. Plus, they had great customer service—the Minted team was very responsive to all of my questions as I went through the complex design process.
Jeff and I ended up creating two different postcard save-the-date designs: one for the 'grown ups' (family and parents' friends, see above) and another one for the 'kids' (our friends, see below). Doing this allowed us to have a lot of fun, while being generationally appropriate. It also set the tone for our wedding. After receiving a save-the-date, our guests knew that our wedding is going to be less formal and more fun.
Photo: Courtesy of Ilana Stern
We enjoyed using our photo for the save-the-dates so much that we decided to use personal snapshots in all of our wedding stationery. We used pictures from our engagement shoot for the wedding invitations and thank you cards. The versions we created with our pictures on Minted felt the best—they felt like us.
Photos: Courtesy of Ilana Stern
For brides who are having trouble deciding how to design your stationery, buck convention. Design something that really reflects your personalities—using shots from your engagement shoot is a great way to make that investment pay off!
—Ilana Stern
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