Way before I worked at APW, even before I was a wedding photographer and an advertiser on this site, I was an engaged person planning a wedding for a lot of people, with not a lot of budget.
I badly wanted to hire the kind of artistic wedding professionals I saw on the pages of my favorite blogs. But I doubted I had the budget for it. Also I was planning a wedding in Maine, which at the time was not exactly a mecca for cool wedding vendors.
So I spent hours (like, many, many, many hours) researching high and low to find wedding photographers and other creative wedding professionals who were hip, forward-thinking, and affordable—and likely just starting out (thus those affordable prices.)
I ultimately found them, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
So when I started my own creative wedding photography business a couple of years later, I wanted to make sure that my potential clients didn’t have to scour the depths of the Internet to find me. Which means that before I even had a website (or like… a client?), I emailed Meg and told her that I wanted to launch my business on APW, because I knew that the audience here was made up of the best possible clients for me and my business. AKA people like me.
And from that initial advertising boost, I was able to go from having four weddings booked to a full roster of over twenty weddings that year.
That has always been the magic of APW’s audience, for myself and many other fledgling wedding professionals. APW readers (aka you) are among the few people left on the internet who actually care. Not just about what we write, but about our community, our advertisers, and the wedding industry at large. It’s what’s allowed us to help launch the careers of some of your favorite wedding pros.
And now, we’re launching a new venture to connect you with more of those rare and wonderful rising-star vendors who have so much talent packed into their brains, but who are still building their businesses and not yet charging budget-busting sums.
Affectionately called THE L.O.V.E. CLUB (League of Vendors Extraordinaire), think of it like an incubator for wedding vendors. We are currently scouring the depths of the Internet so you don’t have to, rounding up soon-to-be-rockstar-talented vendors that you’ll want to hire for your 2020 weddings. Vendors who are gifted, and hungry, and who probably need to be yelled at to raise their rates. (But not until a bunch of y’all get to work with them. 😉)
So if you were one of the lucky ones who worked with a vendor who is just this side of being the #NextBigThing, send them our—and your fellow readers—way. We’ll be giving them marketing and business coaching, and sharing their work here for the next five months to make everyone’s vendor hunt a little easier.
And to make sure we’re not overloading you with options, this program is going to be limited and application-only. We’re looking for a handful of very specific people who we can tell are going to be the superstars of tomorrow (we have a sixth sense about these things.) So if you think you know someone who would be an awesome fit, tell them to go apply now. Enrollment closes on July 31st. 😘
