Design it! Local wedding planner expands her line
PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO
Wedding planners are generally the ones concerned with all the little details of the Big Day– the attendants, the weather, the dress– but one local planner has gone a step further: taking charge of the invitations by making them.
Jennifer Carroll, of the local planning team Jennifer Carroll Events, recently released her own line of paper products– including invites, Save The Dates, and RSVP cards.
"I've actually been doing invites for clients for a couple of years now," Carroll explains. "When I work with clients, we put so much time and effort into creating a beautiful wedding day for them, and I've consistently run into trouble finding papers that carried the theme through."
For Carroll, who has a background in graphic design, putting together paper products for a detail-oriented wedding seemed like more than a reasonable next step in her evolution as a wedding planner. By combining a love for papers, texture, and color with her experiences as a planner, Carroll released her line, Jennifer Carroll Designs, in mid-May.
"It started to grow from a desire to have papers that really continued the message and carried the theme of the wedding day," says Carroll.
The line benefits from Carroll's everyday experiences as a planner. Because she is involved in every aspect of a wedding, Carroll can determine how to define that perfect day from the very first Save The Date card. As "branding" a wedding has become more and more popular, the importance of a cohesive paper design has caused brides to think twice before ordering hundreds of invites, according to the designer. While Carroll's line includes pre-designed products– with nature-inspired bird's nests, vineyard vines, or cherry blossoms– she happily sits down with couples to plan out a custom-designed set of cards based on the personalities and interests of the brides and grooms.
"I try to find out what's special and important to them," says Carroll. "We try to find a theme that suits them and is more specific to them– to keep people from being too cookie-cutter."
According to Carroll, look for the ever-popular pocket invitation to fill your mailbox as fall weddings get underway. The usefulness of holding together maps, itineraries, and that infamous RSVP card is a huge plus for the budget-minded bride. "Bundling all these things saves money– you aren't paying for postage multiple times!" Carroll says. Vibrant summer colors, such as purple and green, will also likely carry over to the fall lines.
And while brides may be looking to cut down on their paper trail in order to be more eco-friendly, replacing a paper invitation with wedding websites and emails isn't always the way to go, according to Carroll. Wedding websites, a growing trend for brides, is useful in giving additional information to attendees, but can't serve the nostalgic or preemptive role a physical invitation can, says Carroll.
"An invitation is the first glimpse at what the wedding is going to be all about," she says. "But you can't heirloom a website, you can't put that into your memory book– from just a memory-keeping standpoint, a website won't work."
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