Photo Credit: Dimitri P.

Although not a pleasant thought … your wedding photographer can get sick, get in a car accident, drop their camera, get their camera stolen, or have their camera malfunction and not capture the photos to the memory card (as it did at my wedding last September).  For these reasons and heaps more, we recommend having several secondary photographers on hand to fill the gaps and even cover for your primary photographer in the case of catastrophic circumstances.

Most can’t afford to have multiple professional photographers, but recruit your aspiring friend or uncle to give their new SLR a crash course, and you won’t be sorry when looking back over your wedding photo memories.  It’s always good to have a backup plan! … Best case scenario: everything goes perfectly well with your photographer and you have some extra wedding pictures taken by your designated friend and family photographers to add to your collection.

Not until groomsmen everywhere realize they are spending nearly $200 to wear a rented tuxedo for 8 hours will suits replace the ubiquitous and timeless tuxedo. But in these thrifty economic times, bridal parties are increasingly outfitting their groomsmen in matching suits rather than the standard tuxedo. The benefits of doing so are worth outlining here:

Photo Credit: Do-DaDoggieApparel

1) Get a suit for life! Spend the same amount or slightly more ($200+) and the groomsmen get a suit they can keep, as opposed to a tuxedo for a few hours.

2) Deals for buying in bulk! Cash is king for retailers right now and the potential to sell multiple suits in one transaction is enough leverage to work some killer deals on your groomsmen’s suits. If your Dads, uncles, or little brothers need some new threads as well, get them in on the action too. It’s not unusual for a single wedding to be purchasing as much as a dozen new suits… collaborate and save big!

Photo Credit: Robert Garey

3) Mixing it up! Add variety to your bridal party lineup by selecting unconventional suit styles and colors. The diversity of suits available concurrently allows for more matching variety with bridesmaids as well.

4) Accessorize! Different shirt/tie/cufflink/shoe combinations allow for greater customization as well!

The obvious challenges to arranging group suit purchasing include getting everyone sized properly and in consistent color, especially if the men are coming from out-of-town. However, opting for suits for your groomsmen can provide an affordable and creative alternative to the conventional tuxedo that can leave an impression long after your wedding day.

Photo Credit: HouseOfDuke

A Unique Garage Sale Wedding Shower

In this installment, I would like to interview my lovely bride on a concept she pioneered known as the “garage sale shower.” Only in a recession would a bride think of this, but enjoy the interview below to learn how you too can earn money while enjoying your wedding shower(s):

My love, tell us about what your idea was to help fund our wedding?
Of course, Pumpkin… I decided I would use one of my five wedding showers (!) to sell my used and unwanted clothes and shoes to my friends who were attending.

What was involved with setting up for this event?
Simply advertise the shower as a clothing sale and advise your girlfriends on what items you might consider selling. Price all of the items. Setup tables to display clothing and even decorate around a shopping theme. Have a non-threatening bucket or container for friends to deposit the appropriate amount of money into. It’s that easy!

How much money did you (we) earn?!
$400 that promptly went into the wedding dress budget!

What advice would you have for other brides considering this thrifty idea?
Have fun with it! Especially if this shower is with close friends, there should be no awkwardness or embarrassment over selling your older clothes– rather, it’s an opportunity for your friends to get some fresh items in their wardrobe at a discounted cost while supporting you, the bride!

Photo Credit: Robert Garey (Me in the Dominican Republic)

Your wedding is perhaps the foremost opportunity to express your uniqueness to the world, and for many, this uniqueness includes a passion for justice, sustainability, and humanitarianism.  Defying much of the culturally-accepted self-indulgence that saturates most weddings, increasingly couples are choosing to use their wedding to change the world; after all, anytime you get a large group of people together, there is inherently an opportunity to bring increased awareness, fundraising potential, and a moment to demonstrate sustainability.  Consider your wedding as an opportunity to change the world!

Photo Credit: Natalie Maynor

Food

Accessibility to local, organic, and even vegan or kosher menus for your wedding is practically universal today regardless of where you might be having your wedding.  In fact, the degree at which you want to bring organic anything into your wedding often depends simply upon how deep your pocketbook is.  Currently, the ability to have virtually everything in your wedding as local and organic is fully possible– everything from food, to makeup, to fabrics.

Invitations

WeddingWindow’s RSVP feature makes it easy to send eco-friendly, electronic wedding invitations via email to your wedding attendees, thus eliminating the need for elaborate paper invitations as well as return RSVP notes and postage.  It’s a simple, affordable, and efficient way to save some trees and still have a reliable invitation list from which to plan from.

Reduce, Recycle, & Reuse

New doesn’t necessarily mean better!    Resist the temptation to buy that new designer dress and liven up your grandma’s classic gown or purchase a (slightly) used dress from sites such as smartbride.com and oncewed.com.  Search Craigslist or Ebay for used wedding decor rather than purchasing new.  Also, place recycle bins adjacent to the garbage cans at your reception and get your wedding guests in on making your wedding green.

Photo Credit: NeatoRama.com

Diamonds & Rings

Purchasing a diamond and other jewelry and knowing that some poor soul wasn’t exploited for the sake of it’s discovery is increasingly becoming of the utmost importance to socially-aware brides and grooms.  Awareness of such injustices has been made mainstream by Hollywood (see Blood Diamond), but manufacturers and vendors are taking action to ensure that diamonds and precious metals are being brought to market in ethical and humane ways.  Some of these committed jewelers include:

• Green Karat
• Aid Through Trade
• Fair Trade Gems
• Costello International
• Global Handcrafters
• Junk to Jewels
• Kazuri America
• Leber Jeweler
• Make Piece/Peace Inc.
• Peter Stone Co.
• WorldFinds

Favors & Gifts

This is where you can get as creative as your humanitarian ambitions lies.  For example, my bride and I decided that instead of giving out party favors to our guests, we invited everyone to “Help Us Start Our Family” by helping us sponsor four orphans in India.  Other ideas that we considered were building a well through Charity:Water and funding International Justice Mission’s ongoing work to fight human trafficking.  The opportunities for creative awareness and fundraising are endless!

How will your wedding change the world?

Twitter can make your wedding more than just an event, for truly, is not your engagement already a festival of celebrations and showers spanning months that finally crescendo to the climactic extravaganza that is your wedding?! Throughout the months leading up to your wedding, there are countless opportunities to reach out and connect with your community, and Twitter proves to be unlike any other tool for just this purpose. With only 140 characters to get your message across, Twitter serves as a megaphone to communicate with your targeted community– as if you were text messaging each of your followers personally. Twitter is also interactive, allowing your community to respond directly to your inquiries, announcements, and instructions. Here is a simple guide to how my fiancee and I have used Twitter to promote, inform, get informed, and inspire our community of supporters throughout our engagement.

Link Your Twitter account to your Facebook profile
With 45 million users, even Twitter can’t touch the networking capacity of Facebook, so as soon as you’ve opened your Twitter account, we recommend linking it to your Facebook profile for maximum coverage of your Twitter messages, or tweets. There are several ways to do this, but perhaps the simplest way is to add the Twitter app to your Facebook profile; this will automatically post your tweets to your Facebook Status Update. I actually receive more responses from my Facebook community through this means than I do from my Twitter followers.

Ask Questions to your Followers
The Twitterverse is legendary for its responsiveness and precision in offering answers to even such heavy questions as “Does anyone have any recommendations for great live jazz/latin bands in the Seattle area?” or “What books should we be reading before getting married?” After tweeting such a survey, our followers, even distant ones not invited to the wedding, often reply within moments with their ideas.

Reminders
Before you start picking up the phone demanding that your procrastinating college friends RSVP to your reception, simply tweet a reminder that they have five days to RSVP before they lose their eating privileges at your wedding, or something like that. Then, in your tweet include a link to your site at Wedding Window where your attendees can promptly respond through the RSVP feature.

Countdown to the BIG DAY
Engagement is gone faster than you can say, “Will you marry me?”, and so to keep your wedding fresh in your followers’ minds, we recommend scheduling periodic tweets counting down to the big day.

Follow Wedding-Related Tweeple
The beauty of Twitter is that it lets you micro-target specific areas of interest (in our case, weddings), and there is certainly no shortage of tweeple tweeting about weddings these days. For example, @WeddingWindow, boasting over 3,500 followers, tweets relevant messages and links to useful resources for all things weddings.

Use a Twitter App(lication)
If you’re really ambitious and want to take full control over your Twitter communication, consider utilizing a Twitter app to take you beyond the basic web interface at www.twitter.com. Twitter’s API is legendary in it’s accessibility among programmers, and thus heaps of free open source applications have been created to help you take control and customize your Twitter account. We recommend using HootSuite or Tweetdeck as your primary platform to manage your Twitter account. These programs enable you to manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule tweets, and track other followers more intuitively.

If you don’t have an account already, sign up for Twitter and reach out to your community to share your wedding like never before, but we recommend putting up boundaries before you begin living through Twitter more than in real life– tweeting your engagement and wedding is one thing, but tweeting your wedding night and honeymoon is a sure sign of tweetaholism.