Yesterday Love Knot Photo made its bridal show debut at the Loudoun Wedding Show.  We’d spent weeks preparing, after seeing photos of other bridal shows where vendors go as far as renting furniture to make their booth look like a living room.  Yikes.  Of course we wanted to show our style via our booth design, neither of us thought it was worth it to go crazy just to have a sweet looking setup.  Cheesy as it sounds, we’d much rather let our photos do the work.  And our $20 Ikea coffee table certainly worked perfectly well as an table additional space.  Luckily, this wedding show had other like-minded vendors who used simple props, stands, and setups to get their booths looking nice without going as far as renting a couch (seriously!).

That said, we did have some props to spice up the look of the booth.  My Yashica-44 TLR (circa 1958) seemed to catch everyone’s attention.  I told a few people about how I hacked it to make it fit the more ubiquitous 35mm film rather than less commonly found 127 roll film.  Ronnie and I decided that with our collection of working vintage cameras growing, it might be fun to shoot a roll at some weddings as an added bonus.  We’ll see!

Being our first wedding show, we didn’t really know what to expect in our area besides a table.  It took a little messing around (and a last minute trip to Pier One to get extra photo stands) to finally get it the way we wanted it.

We tried to have a little variety in the product samples we had to show people, without overwhelming them with samples of everything we offer.  A few albums, some large framed prints, and two mounted collage prints seemed to work out pretty well.

The interactive guestbook was a big hit!  Brides loved the idea instead of a traditional guestbook.

The show was a lot less crowded than we had expected: in fact, it was actually considered pretty slow according to other vendors we spoke with.  But no worries!  It probably worked out better that way considering we were first-timers and all.  It gave us a chance to walk around and network with other vendors, which is equally as important as connecting with brides.  We look forward to doing our next bridal show, and hope to hear from some of the brides from yesterday very soon!

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