Bride Vs Bride
Just a few days ago we partook in another wedding expo locally right next to South Bend, Indiana (where we're located) in Mishawaka, Indiana! We've been in the business of photographing weddings for over 9 years and initially did no expos. We started capturing weddings 9 years ago, then re-branded in 2015 (after combining forces in 2014), so upon doing so after another cross-country move back to Jenny's home state/ city we definitely did too many expos. That first year back we did something like 7 or 8 expos with a FULL LIVING ROOM OF FURNITURE that we moved ourselves at least 28 times that year. We would drive an hour and a half to go up and borrow a trailer from Jenny's parents in Michigan, move furniture in to it, load the furniture in to an expo every other month the day before the expos (in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois/ Chicago), and then do the expo that day for 6 to 8 to 10 hours (including the set-up and driving times), and then have to load the trailer all up again, unload it all again into our studio, and then return the trailer during the hour and a half return process. The whole process is exhausting, so we resolved after that to never again do expos every couple months and instead narrow down our scope to 1 to 2 a year and be VERY picky with which expos we did.
Wedding expos generally run a wedding vendor anywhere from $400 to $2,000 to $4,000 apiece. Since we're mid-range in price, but definitely not cheap, we found that smaller, more curated wedding expos were more our speed since we are not for those who are Walmart price shopping. We are not for the cheap quantity, rather since we do go above and beyond hand creating physical products for ALL of our weddings (and many at that), we require fewer clients, but quality clients who are looking for beautiful work who appreciate physical photos and physical photo products (as well as a luxury service from those with actual HIGH degrees in Professional Photography, nearly 10 years of wedding photography experience, AND a real couple who has a studio, offices, and everything in-between together in their 5th year together!). We get excited if ANY wedding expo is under $400 and do not splurge on these since we are looking for just a small amount of quality clients instead of a ton of cheaper clients.
Bride vs Bride is a brand new wedding event that event planner Krista Griffey put together and reached out to us to join. A family member and another friend had suggested we do it, so after contemplating we decided to give this new style of fun expo a try! Her family helped her set up and tear down the event which we appreciate since we're a family-run 2-person business. The attendees for this not overly huge event were phenomenal and it had the biggest crowd we've experienced at a wedding expo since an oversized Wedding Expo that we did years ago in Michigan (BUT with a smaller event fee)! Bride vs Bride takes the idea of a regular bridal show and adds an additional element of competition. By taking part in various games, teams of brides, bridesmaids, & their families win tickets that they are then able to put toward items being raffled off by the vendors in attendance. Duos of vendors acted as referees for each game and awarded tickets to the winning teams.
Our game was called "A Bug's Life" and had teams strap foam noodles topped with socks to their back. The game was a little like flag football with teams looking to pull the socks from atop the antennae of the opposing team (without actually grabbing the pool noodle "antennae" or stepping out of bounds)! The first team to pull all the socks from their opponents was announced the winner and awarded 5 tickets that could later be used in the raffles.
Other games at Bride vs Bride included an inflatable chicken ring toss, a butt smashing balloon game, an Angry Birds type ball launching game, alphabet fishing, oversized ball pong, zorb ball suit sumo wrestling, pool diving for wedding rings, and one game with a truly gigantic ball. The teams of bridal athletes were able to take part in all of these games in hopes of allowing all the teams a fair chance of being able to take part in some of the raffled off prizes. All of the prizes given away to the lucky winners helped to move the brides toward completion of their wedding day needs. Prizes included such items as suit rentals, floral arrangement credits, an Engagement Session with us, percentages off of wedding videography, various gift cards, and hotel stays. Some brides put literally 20 tickets in our raffle jar and we're so flattered that the women liked our work so much since we do put our all into it. We're extremely excited to be working with the happy couple that won our raffle and we just booked them for our last free date in October (making October one crazy month of photographing 7 couples in two states)-!
We took a few photos around the event, so if you were in attendance and at all interested in taking a look for a photo or two you might be in, check out this link for more images from the day: https://jennyandjasonphoto.pixieset.com/bridevsbride/
Thank you so much to Krista, all of the really fun attendees, Krista's family, the other sweet vendors, and especially you awesome brides who attended! We had the most fun we've ever had at a wedding expo and it was awesome seeing two entire gym floors worth of badass women competing! Congrats to the winners of prizes and we hope the rest of you had a blast. If you have any further questions or want to meet with us in our office in South Bend, shoot us an email at: info@jennyandjasonphoto.com
In other news: We just ordered two new awesome backdrops for our studio, so get excited! Next week on this Weekly Wednesday blog we'll be sharing photos of the process of making the fine art big glass sculptures we just made at a museum in Ohio (that we are going to go pick up sometime this week)! Each time we make a new fine art piece it's so exciting and we feel like we're honing more artistic talents. Photography-wise we're currently printing engagement photos for clients that we'll be sending out likely this weekend and we have a wedding consultation coming up this week. Next week we'll be capturing an On Location Family Portrait Session at the University of Notre Dame and in-studio Infant Session! We're then off to Washington & Alaska for a week and a half before we return to September weddings & Engagement Sessions and October weddings, Engagement Sessions, and Fall Family Portrait Sessions-! We're waiting on many couples' wedding photo choices for 600 printed photographs as well as 4 couples' photo choices for 4 physical wedding albums, so those may end up being September projects if not chosen in the next couple weeks, but that's totally fine. It's going to be a hectic and busy fall this year and we're very excited to capture all of these upcoming amazing couples and families! We have 4.5 more packed months of photography and photo physical products this year and then it's on to our amazing 2019 wedding couples. Working with real people who love each other is an honor and we're so excited for everything coming up so soon! We're starting to book 2020 weddings as well, so hit us up for a consultation or any information! Catch ya next week with some awesome artwork and chats about fine art-!