We’re so excited to introduce you to Samantha Chu, the mastermind behind Papermints, and their wonderful wedding invitations. She started as most of us do with a love of crafting from a young age. Her creativity eventually lead to a degree in Fine Arts from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and a career as a book and magazine designer until she ventured out to do what she really loves: designing stationery.

When asked what Samantha’s favorite part about designing wedding stationery is, she said, “Personalizing our invitation designs to showcase the couple’s unique style and creativity.  I remember as I was creating my own wedding invitation what a thrill is was to see our names (written as future husband & wife) beautifully printed on a formal invitation.”

Samantha is inspired by clean minimalist design. She loves to peruse architecture and design magazines. This clean design inspiration is very evident in her beautiful, classic stationery seen below.

Here is one of Samantha’s awesome Nearlyweds designs also:

Samantha says the typical Papermints customer is a “budget-savvy bride with a taste for modern simplicity.” She also offers a Real Wedding portion on Papermints for brides to get inspiration from other couples.

Papermints offers three different invitation types:

-For the more classic, traditional bride, their original handmade wedding invitations are created with exquisite textured papers, ribbons and delicate handcrafted materials.

-Papermints’ signature line, the Contempo Collection, is for the modern bride. The contemporary designs are minimalist, bold and stylish, and can be customized with an endless palette of vibrant and soft hues printed on heavyweight smooth or eggshell cotton papers.

-The newest Moda Collection combines clean lines and modern graphics for the trend-conscious urban bride. She’ll love these fresh, original and budget-friendly designs, which can be created on 100% recycled paper for an eco-friendly wedding.

Papermints’ designs are beautiful, modern and classic. We hope you all will welcome Papermints with open arms!

{Rachael}

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This is a tough post to write concisely because there is an entire industry built around consultants and professionals who sell expensive services to help get your website ranked at the top of a Google result.  Of course this is much more difficult for someone trying to be #1 selling a very general product like auto insurance, simply because there is more competition.  But even wedding websites can be hard to get to the top of Google result pages, or any other search engine for that matter.

No one can guarantee top rankings, if they could, Google would change their secret algorithm on how they rank sites.  So what are you to do?

There are two simple answers:

1. Create a wedding website with us, Nearlyweds.  Yeah yeah, shameless self promotion it seems – but no – hear us out…there are lots things we do know about how to rank well with Google (we work with those expensive consultants .  One of the most important things you can do to get found is to be linked to, affiliated with, and endorsed by very trusted sites.  Well – that’s us!  You may be thinking, aren’t there even bigger companies out there I could host my site with, so shouldn’t I go with them?  Well, those bigger companies don’t really care if your website gets found in a search engine, so they never expose your site to search engines in a way that will get them ranked.  Quite frankly, most of the big companies just use wedding websites as bait to get you using their other, more profitable products, and so they don’t really spend time thinking about, much less building the things that are important to you.  We obsess over this kind of stuff for you and employ all kinds of great techniques to help get your site ranked.  Proof: even in the past month we have seen traffic to our customer sites increase by 42% because of changes and cool things we are doing to get YOUR WEDDING WEBSITE ranked at the top of results.  It even works if you are using a custom domain name through us!
2. The other thing you can do is simple: ask 2-5 friends who write a blog or have a website to link to your wedding website.  Make an even bigger impact by having them link the words [your first and last name, your fiance's first and last name + wedding website] as the text they link.  Here is an example: Katy Perry and Russel Brand’s Wedding Website.  Because you link the names and the phrase “wedding website” – it tells the search engines that this is the right page when someone types into Google: Katy Perry Wedding Website, for example.

That’s it.  Use us and get a few links to your site from some friends.  It may take a little time, but we have been pretty good at this so far.

Note: We also know that some of you don’t want your wedding website to appear in Google.  That’s totally cool with us.  We think we are the only ones who actually have a whole feature for this.  Simply check a box in your control panel and we drop special software code on your wedding website that blocks all search engines, including Google, from crawling and indexing your site.

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According to this Wikipedia entry, historically bridesmaids were a status symbol. The more money you had, the more bridesmaids you had. They have always typically consisted of sisters or good friends. The bride’s family used to always pay for every expense a bridesmaid had, it just recently changed to bridesmaid paying for most (if not all) of their own expenses and the bride giving them a gift of gratitude. Katherine Heigl’s character in 27 Dresses is obviously overboard, so what do you need to do to be a great bridesmaid?

Bottom line is that a bridesmaid is an essential helper before, during and after a wedding. There are the obvious things like helping the bride go to the bathroom at the wedding, attending all the showers and bachelorette parties, making sure she eats the day of the wedding, but here are some overlooked pointers that in my mind are ABSOLUTE MUSTS:

1. Opinions: Before you get into the knitty-gritty of wedding details take a minute to ask the bride how she wants your opinions. Here are some possible ways to approach this: Does she want you to tell her every thought that comes to your mind when she shows you her dream wedding dress? Does she want you to read her expressions and generally agree with whatever she seems to be liking (this was what I wanted, basically just a confidence boost)? Does she want honest opinions no matter what? This step can really help avoid pre-wedding fights or extra stress on the bride.
2. Money: Before you accept the bride’s request to be one of her bridesmaids ask her how much she thinks you’ll be spending. If she’s not sure about the bridesmaid budget, and you don’t have $500 to spend on everything, let her know from the beginning. With the economy as terrible as it is right now you need to approach this gracefully and efficiently. If you are in serious money trouble, you need to tell the bride. If you accept and don’t tell her it can seriously cause unnecessary stress later on when you can’t afford the dress she loves or the Vegas weekend she has her eye on for the bachelorette party. No matter how much you love this bride, it’s not fair to you to spend money you don’t have and it’s not fair to the bride to commit to spending money you don’t have.
3. Speak up: When there is something you aren’t comfortable with. I recently ran into this issue with my good friend Meggan (shout out to double G getting married on 7/16/2010). She picked out a really cute dress from David’s Bridal that I’m excited to wear, but then she chose the shoes. They are beautiful gold heels, but they are 4 inch heels. I don’t do heels, I just can’t. I’ve tried, I have terrible balance, and if I fall at her wedding I will die! I felt terrible about this. Meggan is super cute and such a great friend that I was just afraid to bring it up because I didn’t want to upset her. Unfortunately I waited too long and all the other bridesmaids bought the shoes. Once I talked to her she couldn’t change the shoes obviously, so she decided I could just wear the heels in pictures and really similar flat sandals for the ceremony and the rest of the day. Thanks Megg!
4. Don’t talk about yourself too much: This is the brides one and only wedding (hopefully). She wants your opinions on HER wedding, not what you want for your own wedding. I don’t care if you’re getting married two days after her. Here’s a perfect example of what NOT to do. Bride: “I really want a dress that is ivory and covered in lace.” Bridesmaid: “Oh me too, I love lace, I can’t wait to get married.” Here’s an example of what you SHOULD do: Bride: “I really want a dress that is ivory and covered in lace.” Bridesmaid: “Oh that is so you, it will be perfect!”
5. Go to the maid of honor whenever possible: If you have questions that you think the MOH can answer, go to her if possible. It is awesome if the bride keeps everyone up to the minute with information, but if not ask the MOH because most likely if you have a question the other Bridesmaids do too.

So in general you really need to communicate with the bride in the beginning, ask her how you can help, what she needs from you and be honest about what you can do up front. I hope this helps bridesmaids and brides as they prepare for the big day! Don’t worry all you amazing bridesmaids out there who are thinking “Yeah I would totally love to help if my friend weren’t such a crazy bridezilla!” I’m going to start working on a “How to Be a Good Bride” post soon so keep checking back for that.

{Rachael}

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There is a lot of writing that goes on about this “digital generation” of engaged couples. So being a (not so secret) bunch of geeks and in the business of selling gorgeous wedding websites (precisely to these lovely, beautiful, wonderful, we love you, choose us!, couples), we decided to collect some mad filthy DATA! (filthy is used by high school kids to mean “awesome”, for those of you not in the know).

This is just the first post in a series from thousands of tweets and facebook posts (Rowfeeder Rocks) related to weddings. Lots of fun information to come on things like cakes, dresses, and WIC.  Taking requests too…

Let’s dig in to our first data set: Peeps tweeting #wedding 12,616 times over the course of a month (mid May-mid June 2010). Data first, funny videos at the end of the post

So who is tweeting about #weddings?

Turns out, it’s us, vendors and blogs for the most part.

What are people talking about?

Mostly themselves…but that’s really true of all of twitter, so I can’t be harsh. Plus, I don’t know anything more interesting in the whole world than what I am thinking about right now; I’m guessing you can relate.

• 77.2% of posts had a URL in them, so they were tweeting about content on the web
• Over 65% of theses urls were content that was their own
• Of these urls, the 5 most retweeted were spammy Etsy or Zazzle stores trying to promote their wedding related jewelry.
• Most legitimate retweeted URLs:
  • Video production company that produces “pre-wedding videos” for couples. This url, combined with three others was tweeted over 60 times. The video isn’t like the amazing Jeff and Erin’s Epic Wedding Trailer (which if you haven’t seen, you must), but seriously, what is?!? But it shows you that people are really interested in the story of the couple.
  • SLR Lounge, a digital photography blog (presumably that wedding photographers fancy)
  • OfcourseIdo.com – Like an ezine articles for weddings

Again, you can see it’s mostly self promotion within the wedding industry.

Now, Let’s check out some smexy word density (articles removed, #wedding removed):

Sorry Love, our wedding is about our albums albums albums and vintage jewelry we found on etsy from great designers designers related to my family.

And what about the “Top Tweeters”?

Schnikes! Over 10% of tweets with #wedding came from 3 ADHD tweeters.

• @Yourweddinglive is a UK website that will stream your wedding live on the internet.  Their site doesn’t tell you they do live tweet transcription, but their tweet volume would indicate this much.  Who knows if this business will survive long term, but there is at least one company devoted wholly to live streaming weddings – super interesting.
• @EventSavvy seems like a lovely Colorado event planner named Daisy Grau that tweets a lot about celebrity weddings.
• @MyWeddingNews: well they just retweet wedding related news, who woulda thunk ?!?

Again – all vendor/media folks.

Most Followed people tweeting about #weddings?

• Jeanette Joy Fisher, a TLC personality that does house flipping.
• Swissmiss – a fabulous Swiss designer living and blogging from NYC
• MSNBC – reporting on why you should have a prenuptial agreement
• Penguin Group – plugging a new novel of theirs about a bride
• Calvin Lee – a self proclaimed “media ho” with tons of followers that tweeted about his dinner from a wedding. It might have been delicious, but looks an awful lot like different colored squid.
• Pye – A very popular wedding photographer from LA who loves to rock out the HDR and has slightly creepy avatar (portfolio looks great though)

What’s the moral of this story?

Us, wedding professionals, combined with spammers dominate the volume of tweets related to weddings. But that’s ok, as long people are eyes wide open about it. We [Nearlyweds] use twitter primarily to engage with fabulous stationery designers and lure them into our super awesome system where they can create matching wedding websites for brides. We also use Twitter in some novel ways to engage with and acquire new customers (that we are keeping to ourselves for the moment) that has been very successful. But primarily, Twitter seems to be a B2B exercise in the wedding industry…which is great. If you are a new wedding vendor to the biz, just don’t wet your pants or bet your business on finding all your customers via Twitter. But you can find lots of vendors and bloggers on twitter.

Now for the funny videos:

Best wedding videos that were tweeted (imho):

• Wedding Party Falling into a Lake
• Robot Presiding over Japanese Wedding (Oh dear)
• Proposal in Washington Square Park (Fun, but long)

And a special thanks to our boyz at Rowfeeder who helped us track tweets and facebook posts we then analyzed.

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