Readers consider it your lucky day, our great friend and go to floral maven, Sullivan Owen is dishing on the blog today! We are happy to welcome her as a contributor to the blog, we are excited for her to share her knowledge and style with us and all of you!
Tips + Tricks
How Pinteresting …
If you’re like 70 million of your fellow human beings, you’ve got a Pinterest account. The content sharing platform has seen rapid user growth and has fast become the way brides, in particular, are able to visualize their wedding day. Here’s a few Do’s and Don’ts for using Pin boards with your creative vendors:
Do…
Do: Organize the details of your big day into separate boards (i.e., Fashion, Décor, Floral, Beauty). It’s ok to keep one master board of your favorites, but a board with 300+ images is going to be hard to sort through with your creatives.
Do: Try to pin images from the vendors you’re considering working with. When shown a pin of our own work, we can more easily speak to the specific details of that design and what appeals to you about it. Even if you’re after a new design, this will help jumpstart the creative process.
Do: Consider this: Most great designers use Pinterest as a portfolio, so pay attention to how much of the designer’s own work they feature vs. how much they pin from other people. (You’ll quickly be able to tell the trendsetters and tastemakers from the followers.) And do remember that when you work with a creative professional, they should be able to find a way to communicate with you and design for you using their own work and ideas.
Do: Add captions to identify what exactly it is you like about the image when pinning. Whether it’s a specific flower, color or texture you’re drawn to, it’s super helpful for us to refer back to your pins and notes when we’re working on your design later.
Do: If you’ve been pinning for your wedding for a LONG time, go back through your boards and clean them up. Design constantly evolves and changes. So now that you’ve settled on a wedding at an elegant old mansion, clean out those pins from when you were leaning more towards a rustic campsite. Designers look through the pins to capture the big picture; you don’t want to confuse the message.
Do: Share some of your non-wedding related pins with your designers. Let us see who you are outside of the wedding. Maybe it’s a new nail color you love or a designer you just discovered for a rehearsal dinner dress … All of these things help me get to know my couples and get a sense for their personal style, which makes me be a better designer for them.
Don’t….
Don’t: Set your wedding boards to private. Private boards make it difficult to share your inspiration with your design professionals. Keeping boards public will allow you to quickly and easily share a link with your creatives.
Don’t: Assume that every design you see on Pinterest will fit into your budget. Remember that Pinterest is a curated version of a designer’s work, a place where they feature their best images and ones that likely represent a fair amount of editorial shoots or over-the-top designs.
Don’t: Assume that because you found an image of this amazing blue succulent that it exists in reality. Photographers, including the ones who use exclusively film, often do some post-production Photoshop work on their images; this includes photos of floral designs. You’re setting yourself and your florist up for disappointment. There’s a reason all of the Instagram filters exist after all.
Don’t: Even if you find the most amazing photo of ____fill in the blank____, don’t bring it to your designer and ask them to copy it. Truly creative and talented people should be designing for you. Instead of asking us to copy our own work or, even worse, someone else’s, let’s talk about what exactly it is you love about that particular design. It’s our job to interpret that information and create something just for you. The most amazing designs usually result from clients giving us a little inspiration and a lot of trust to do our thing!
