Every December, Pantone unveils color trends for the coming year, and this year it chose turquoise as the color of 2010, with other colors such as tomato puree, violet, fusion coral, pink champagne, dried herb and eucalyptus ranking high on their list. And this got me thinking … who really follows these trends?
I ask this question because we recently conducted a survey of brides at My Wedding Workbook (a Web site that I own that provides online wedding software for brides) on things such as their preferred styles and colors, and brides’ preferences really don’t align much with the experts chosen colors. First of all, there was no real runaway winner. Navy was the winner with 13.2% of brides reporting that this was their main color, with black next 9.7%, dark red/burgundy 8.3%, brown/chocolate 7.9%, green/hunter 7.9%, purple/plum 6.9% and light blue/aqua 6.6%. But what it seemed like was that brides really went with either their favorite color and/or a more conservative, familiar color. Which tells me one thing … people choose the colors that they’re comfortable with.
This really isn’t anything new, but it does hint at a dirty little secret in the wedding industry. You see, the wedding industry is huge, with annual U.S. revenue estimates varying from as low as $40B to as high as $100B yearly. For an industry to sell this much stuff, it needs to constantly reinvent itself and to create new variations, varieties and permutations of products and services. Fashion can be a fickle thing, as what was cool and alluring last year is tired and stale this year, and wedding fashions and decor are no different. But the wedding industry in particular seems very adept at creating such variations of products in so many different colors and styles that not only are the choices baffling, but they are also always getting more and more elaborate and expensive.
I’m not blaming anyone here, because in our competitive marketplace, companies are always innovating, refining, specializing and customizing. But what this does do is cause untold amount of confusion and “decision paralysis” among engaged couples who are faced with a mountain of choices and an onslaught of expert advice.
So what do people usually end up doing? Sticking with what they know and like. So, as one who just got married, my advice to you is to take all that expert advice on colors, styles and everything else with a very large grain of salt and, as a rule of thumb, create the wedding that expresses who you are (and not some pundit or expert). If you can’t stand turquoise (which, although there certainly a place for it, was never at the top of my personal list), don’t feel obliged to use it. It’s your clam bake … pick the colors you want.
A few months ago, Groomasaurus Gal and I ventured over to one of the many bridal expos that are offered in the Denver area. Supposedly Denver has a large demographic of 20-somethings, which makes us very attractive to wedding vendors and marketers. When we signed up for the expo we provided our names and address, and since this is America, within a few days we were getting all sorts of junk mail and emails from photographers, caterers, tux rental stores and the like.
Now, I’m a marketer by trade, so I can’t well blame these vendors in their attempt to make a buck and survive this dismal economy. But because we’re having a destination wedding and really have no need for any of the vendors who are hitting us up, it seems like a huge waste of trees, fuel and effort. Which got us thinking…
We’ve been meaning to sign up for some of the stop-junk-mail lists for a very long time, and now seems like as good a time as any. So we tracked down a few online resources that allow us to minimize the amount of junk mail sent to our house, and here they are:
- DMAChoice.org – This site allows you to set preferences for what emails and direct mail you receive and control who sends commercial email and smail mail to you.
- Catalog Choice – A great resource that enables you to choose what catalogs you get in the mail. More than 900 merchants have signed up to allow you to opt in our out, so kudos to them for volunteering.
- 41Pounds.org – This organization contacts direct mail companies on your behalf to stop catalogs and junk mail like those ubiquitous pre-approved credit card solicitations. It does cost $41 for 5 years of service, but they’re a nonprofit, and that fee covers their costs (plus they donate $15 to the charity of your choice). Another fine option.
Here are also a couple Web pages with more information on stopping junk mail:
http://www.ecocycle.org/junkmail/index.cfm
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18530707/
http://environment.about.com/od/greenlivingdesign/a/junkmail.htm
Check out these great resources and, when you want to turn off the spigot of wedding junk mail, try them out.
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Thanks to Tom Santilli over at Examiner.com, who blogged about our Workbook. For all those in Michigan who need a wedding videographer, check out Tom’s site at Complete Video Solutions.
This past weekend, Groomasaurus Gal and I attended the wedding of one of her many cousins (large Catholic family) in her hometown east of St. Louis. Before we left I checked the weather on my handy iPhone weather app, and it read 98 degrees for the wedding day. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Midwestern heat, but any high temperature is also accompanied by humidity that can hover around an ungodly 50%. There’s a reason neither she nor I venture back to our childhood stomping grounds (mine were in northwestern Ohio), and that’s because we remember sweating through shirts and soaking in ice baths during the summer months.
And despite the forecast, we decided to attend a Cardinals game on Friday night, where around 45,000 other people also decided it was a fine idea to melt in the early evening steam that was St. Louis. One guy in the upper deck actually passed out due to heat exhaustion and fell to the lower deck; thank goodness he was so limp that he bounced off a few people and was relatively unhurt.
This leads me to my first piece of advice: if at all possible, avoid a wedding where there’s the potential for conditions to become physically uncomfortable/unbearable for your guests. I must admit, the church and reception hall were both air conditioned, but you have to leave those comfy confines sometime, and I think I set a U.S. record in the sweat-through-your-shirt/sprint-to-your-car event. Even drinking sucks when it’s hot, because your misery/dizziness baseline is already high, and drinking escalates it almost exponentially faster.
Okay, so I’ll stop bitching about the weather and move on to my next rant, which was my choice of shoes. Last week I ran across this great pair of very modern Steve Madden dress shoes (the pic here is close to what they look like) for cheap, and I thought they’d be great to wear to the wedding. So I pack them up with all my other clothes in my carry-on, and we’re off. Everything is fine until the wedding day arrives, and as we’re getting dressed I pull on my undershirt and it smells like someone doused it with turpentine. I mean, this thing smelled toxic to the point that I sort of got a bit of a brain rush/headache (as close to huffing as I’ll probably ever get).
My strongly scented Steve Madden shoes
Then I started sniffing around my suitcase and my dress pants and jacket also smelled like a chemical dump. So I’m thinking, there’s no way any of this stuff got near jet fuel or a gas station. And then I grab my shoes to put them on and WHAM … they smell like an ether mask. Come to find out, the plastic soles smelled like they hadn’t cured properly, or that they had just reached their half-life of biodegrading. Whatever the reason, they really, really smelled, so bad that when I was sitting down during the ceremony I could smell the fumes wafting up from below. I’m sure everyone around me smelled it, too, but it’s the Midwest, so they’re all too polite to say anything, plus they probably figured it was some idiot burning his yard (yeah, some people used to to that in the Midwest) or the wind changed and was blowing the plume that always engulfs the local fertilizer dealer into the church.
And the lesson here? Don’t travel with new clothes that you’ve never “battle-tested” or, if you decide to do this, take a backup just in case. Amazing that I never smelled these shoes before I packed them, but I’m now thinking the rubber soles somehow chemically reacted with the humidity. Yeah, I’m no chemist, but I can’t make sense of it any other way.
More about the acutal wedding tomorrow…
Groomasaurs Gal and I were again watching garbage TV on a Friday night. This is beginning to become an ugly trend, but like any addiction, it’s very hard to break. Also like any other addiction, it has its deleterious side effects, in this case loss of sleep, reduced attention span and a propensity to scream at inanimate objects (i.e., a rigid TV screen) that coincides with a false belief that you can change events that happened 1,000 miles away about 3 months ago.
This time, we were mainlining Say Yes to the Dress and another show about people who run a wedding chapel in Vegas. The latter was actually a good show, mostly because of one couple who appeared on the episode. They were a military couple who have been dating for a few years but are stationed on different bases and got married so the military would station them in the same place. But although this was much more than a wedding of convenience, the two of them had not planned a thing and showed up to the chapel wanting to get married the next day in full wedding dress (white gown and tux). You could tell how much these two people adored each other, and the fact that their wedding was spur-of-the-minute didn’t take away from how much they obviously loved each other.
I’m going to stop here so this doesn’t turn to mush and I lose my Manly Dude Club Card, but I was struck by how the spontaneous nature of their wedding actually made it so much more refreshing and poignant than weddings that have been planned to death. It’ almost like there’s so much emphasis on hammering out all the details and locking things in that once you’re finished, it runs like a military maneuver and not a romantic occasion.
I was thinking that there’s got to be a happy medium, where you have your ducks lined up in a row but you leave some room for people to freely express themselves. If you’re really adventurous, you could have a half-hour open mike during the reception where people can come up and tell fun, G-rated stories about the two of you. Or you could tell unrehearsed stories about each other. Or you could each plan something for each other that happens sometime during the day that would be a surprise to the other person (anyone who saw the musicians appear in the wedding scene in “Love Actually” knows exactly what I’m talking about). Just something to add an element of good surprise (god knows enough glitches happen during a wedding) to your wedding day.
Would love your feedback on this…
We’ve been planning on getting married for some time now, so in December 2007 we decided we were going to buy rings even though we hadn’t set a wedding date. Initially Groomasaurus Gal wanted an engagement ring with a different stone – emerald, sapphire, something that had color (she’s very untraditional, this girl). So we shopped around for a day or two and found an heirloom emerald ring at a local jeweler that was okay. But we didn’t want to settle for okay (this is her engagement ring for God’s sake), so as we walked away from that jeweler’s store we wandered into another jeweler and, whammo, there they were.
We saw displayed in one of their cases rings that bore designs that I had never laid my eyes on. They had all these intricate contours of different colors of gold, bronze and copper – it actually looked like a cross-section of rock, but that’s not doing it justice whatsoever – and some were embellished with platinum and others with diamonds. We asked to see them, and once we started to closely inspect them, we were hooked.
The designer is George Sawyer, and he is a Minneapolis-based metallurgist who many years ago started making rings by folding layers of gold over on each other in the style of Japanese samuri swordmakers. The technical process of folding the metal is called mokume, and it results in creating rings that are one of a kind. Just check them out…
Here is what Groomasaurs Gal's wedding band looks like
And this is pretty close to how our wedding bands appear ... we wanted the two platinum bands to signify the two of us united by our vows
And here's what a plain band looks like (although it's anything but plain)
That’s a loaded statement if there ever was one. I got started thinking about this topic today as I was talking to a client of mine (I run a branding/marketing business in my non-blogging life) who is in her mid-20s and has the next 3 weekends booked to attend 3 friends’ weddings. I thought back to my mid-20s and, in that fog of activity, I hazily remember weddings ticking off as regular as hours on the clock. I grew up in Ohio and then lived in DC for a fair amount of my 20s, so attended both friendly potluck receptions with amazingly decadent downhome cooking along as well as estate/country-clubby lobster-and-steak affairs thrown by some of my wealthier friends’ parents. Both types were fun and memorable in their own ways, but I digress.
How many candles will be on your wedding cake is sort of a silly question
We were talking about age and the question of what is the right time to get married. Of course the answer is different for everyone. Most of my guy friends who have daughters say that the appropriate age to wed is around 63, give or take a few decades. Most of my female friends have a very fluid stance on this, as many of them have stated to me that it was important to them to gain a sense of self-awareness before getting married. I think this is a great philosophy, as it’s an asset to the relationship if at least one individual has a dose of self-awareness. Again, I digress.
What I’m putting off here is talking about my own age. I’m 41, and I’ve never been married, which makes me at best a wild-card and at worst a freak who could never get his s**t together or who lives with his mother. I don’t consider myself either, as I’ve come close to being married once before and am not really a difficult person or frighteningly ugly, and, for the record, I stopped living with my dear parents when I graduated from college. I just hadn’t yet found the right person until I met Groomasaurus Gal. We’ve dated 9 years now and although we’ve been fully committed to each other the whole time, we haven’t felt the need to get married until the last year or two. Now just feels like the right time, so 41 is the right age for me.
As for everyone else, I think different ages feel different pressures. When I was 25, I was in a relationship that I thought was heading toward marriage, and had certain ideas in my head about being a husband and father and such. I also think if I had a biological clock beating me into a panic that definitely would have swayed my thinking, too. On the other end of the spectrum, I have friends in their late 50s who have lived together for 24 years and never gotten married but love each other dearly and are just as committed to each other if they had.
So the answer to that question is that there isn’t an answer … just find the person for you, follow your heart and pursue what makes you both happy.
I’ve mentioned a few times that we are having a destination wedding in Mexico, and I wanted to share with you all where it’s all going to happen.
After more than two months of frustration in trying to get hotels and wedding facilities in Puerto Vallarta (our favorite Mexican resort town) to even return our emails and phone calls, we finally found one that not only returns phone calls but has made planning and organizing our wedding so much easier.
They are called Adventure Weddings and they are based in Puerto Vallarta. They offer a few different types of wedding packages, but we decided to go with the full boat (which was amazingly affordable – under $10K) and have the beach wedding at a secluded location called Las Caletas. It’s only accessible by sea and is the former home of the film director John Huston (who directed Night of the Iguana right in Puerto Vallarta … a classic movie with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner). Here’s some pics of the beach location. We can’t wait … uh, well, actually we can wait, cause we don’t really want to head south of the border right now with Mexico being hit so hard by the swine flu and everything. Anyways, here’s the pics…
The setup for the ceremony
The view from the sea
It seems in my rush to tell the story that I got a few facts wrong (like Mark Twain says, why let the facts get in the way of a good story), so I’ll let Groomasaurus Gal set me straight:
First, I was not looking for a Paul Oakenfold CD. It was Sasha & Digweed’s “Communications” which a high-school friend of mine (hello Wayne) had recommended. Second, the CD he recommended I buy (which I did) was John Kelly’s “Dessert Landscapes 1″ which I didn’t like very much. Thankfully I was able to overlook that. There’s more, but it would take all night so I’m limiting myself to the 2 crucial ones.
Thanks Groomasaurus Gal for those needed corrections … I’m sure there will be more to come in the upcoming months.
by Jeff on April 13, 2009
The perfect place to start a wedding blog is at the beginning … so here goes.
Groomasaurus Gal and I met in a record store. Yep, you read that right. A record store. You see, we’re both music aficionados. Well, that’s putting it lightly. We’re unapologetic and incurable music junkies. To date, between the two of us we own a few walls worth of CDs and untold vinyl and cassette albums (the big step in moving our relationship forward was combining our music collections, but that’s another blog entry).
With that preface out of the way, here’s the story. It was a balmy afternoon in late June and I was bored and decided to browse in one of my favorite record stores in Denver. The place is called Jerry’s Record Exchange, and it’s owned by a cranky, crusty, loveable guy named John who is the consummate record snob. I’ve actually witnessed him literally laugh in the face of someone who once asked if he had any Shania Twain (all apologies to her fans) and tell them to go to Tower (back when Tower was still around).
I was over in the dance/electronica section (I have a soft spot for house music) browsing for god know what when I noticed the alluring woman next to me browsing through some really mediocre Paul Oakenfold dance mixes. She eventually settled on one, at which point I told her that she didn’t want that one. She looked at me a bit circumspectly (like “Who is this freak?”), and I told her that there were much better discs by the prince of DJs.
Of course, when a stranger tells you your choice of music is a bit off, most of us would flash the “talk to the hand” sign and make for the door. Kudos to her for sticking around and debating the ebbs and flows of Paul Oakenfold’s career as well as other and varied topics (Groomasaurus Gal is an attorney, meaning she is very good at debating). So after chatting about music for a half-hour or so, we were both finished browsing and we ready to purchase our CDs. This is where I turned into a typical, clueless male idiot.
Instead of asking for her phone number or if she wanted to meet up for a drink sometime, for some unspeakable reason I started talking baseball with the owner of the store (I know he’s a lifelong Cubs fan, and I’m an Indians fan, so we have years of futility to draw from). Although I do enjoy a day at the ballpark, there’s only one thing more dreadfully boring than watching a baseball, and that’s two guys talking about baseball. I’m sure cancer could have been cured by now or the economy righted if guys would only focus on the task at hand and stop talking about sports, but I digress.
Needless to say, when I finally pull my head out of my a**, I discover that the wonderful woman with whom I was talking was gone. This was the point where I walked outside and ran my head into a parking meter about a dozen times because I’m so stupid. Anyways, I was heading out of town that weekend to hang out with a bunch of friends for 4th of July in Chicago, and I decided I’d call up the owner of the record store when I got back to ask for that woman’s phone number.
She beat me to it, god bless her. When I got back to town, I discovered a voicemail from Groomasaurus Gal asking me if I would like to join her for a drink or “beverage of some sort.” Seems that she called the owner of the record store before I could. This will remain the only time in my life I was actually stalked, and I’m so proud of it. Of course I couldn’t dial the phone fast enough, and we had our first date a few days later, oddly at a restaurant that neither of us likes that much. (Years later I discovered that women consider this place good for a first date because the bar is right next to the front door and within feet of a transit shuttle in case they need to make a quick getaway. Good thinking.)
But the kicker was our second date. Paul Oakenfold was actually performing at Red Rocks, and it had been sold out for weeks, so I figured I’d go up with her and her friend and get a scalped ticket. Problem was that nobody was selling. I told her to go in, as it was no use for her and her friend to miss the show, and I’d hang out in the parking lot and stare at the stars or something equally ridiculous. Unfazed, she hatched up a plan in which she sweet-talked a security guard into letting me in and slipped me her friend’s ticket stub, saying it had fallen off in the parking lot. The guy actually bought it!! If I had tried this, he and his bouncer henchmen would have stuffed me in a trash barrel and spent the rest of the night pinging beer cans off my head. At this moment, I realized three things about this woman: 1) She is way smarter than me. 2) She will stop at nothing to make other people happy. 3) She is what I’ve always been looking for. The rest is history (which we will save for another day).
