Our First Wedding Show

Our first wedding show had us standing on ice. Literally. 

our booth space with our neighbours and all of our gear piled on our table

starts off pretty bare!

OUR BOOTH! tada! A little DIY magic and a blanketponcho to keep me warm.

Our winter boots look authentic next to the winter birch bark trees in our background, non? 

Our entire booth was handmade or repurposed objects straight from our home. We spent hours putting together our business cards which literally tied a knot, painting those birch trees and scrubbing our kitchen table of the baby food remnants. The bunting flags hang in our home now and the picture frames were ripped off the walls and repurposed for the show. We contemplated bringing our desktop mac like other vendors had, but were content for our first show with our trusty 7 year old mac book that I'm writing this post on now. Good old lappy! 

We set-up camp in a hockey arena. Yep! That's how we do in Ontario. We felt like we were literally standing on the ice. We were fucking freezing for hours, I'm not gonna lie. It was pretty bad. Especially at 6.5 months with hours of standing. That's ok though! Once the doors opened, we were happy campers. No complaints from us! It was amazing to chat with brides, grooms and their families about what we love to do.

We made a very conscious effort not to be all up in your face, soliciting and pushing pamphlets. Instead, we politely said hi to those who looked interested and started chatting if the moment was right. I think that approach suits us, although maybe it's not forward enough. We're still working on selling ourselves. I guess you have to do that if you own your own company, eh? 

We received many compliments on our tie-the-knot business cards and received some great feedback on our brand which is equally as important to us as booking. It's very validating to know we're on to something here and the fact that we put so much of ourselves into our work and into our booth, feels good when others get it. 

Now that we've got a show under our belt, I think there's a lot we would do differently and a lot we would do exactly the same. We're already thinking of other shows in our radius we could hit up that would have larger number of attendees (this show had less than 1000 for sure, which was hard for us as a small business owner who rented the booth space expecting more). 

Overall, we were just happy to be there and showcase our work. We put a lot into our handmade booth and even though it didn't quite fit in the booth space, and it was very DIY, and although no one took us up on our show special of booking that day and receiving $500 off, a lot of people entered our contest and a lot of people started to think about wedding video. We're new in town and although we're ready for the business and we'd love to go after it fast and hard, we know that sometimes these things take time. 

We will draw the winner on Sunday. I'm very excited for the future. We made some great connections with local photographers and others in the industry and we can't wait to see how the rest of the year pans out.