This post comes from an amazing woman who has ingeniously turned her destination wedding invitation idea into a business. When I saw one of my bride’s invitations I was floored and got a hold of the original bride who came up with it. This is in her own words.
It all started when Dave and I decided to have our wedding in Mexico. A destination wedding just made sense; we met at the airlines (he’s a pilot and I was a flight attendant) and we travelled the world together. It was this passion for travel and excitement that bonded us so quickly. We knew we wanted our special day to be warm, relaxing, and for us to be able to share it with our closest loved ones. So it was little surprise to our friends and family when we told them we wanted to have our wedding in Mexico!
Now for anyone who’s planned or is planning a destination wedding, you know it can take some convincing to get everyone onboard with the idea. Not everyone is excited to drop $1,000 on your wedding, and call it their vacation. We knew that the more excited we could get our guests about treating it like a vacation -and not just a wedding- the more likely they would come. We needed something to “WOW!” our guests!
And so it began…
We searched high and low for examples of passport/boarding pass wedding invitations, but couldn’t find what we were looking for. We wanted our passport to be more like a detailed brochure, that including EVERYTHING our guests needed about their vacation and our wedding celebration, and lots of fun pictures!
..And so we decided to make our own!
…And we started a DIY blog on WeddingBee!
… And now we’ve helped over 500 brides with their destination wedding invitations!
We started the blog about two years ago when we began designing and creating our very own wedding invitations for our wedding in August 2012. It is currently the best place to go for anyone interested in creating these stunning invitations! Our original goal was to help others create professional-looking (but fun!) invitations that contained more than just a couple pages, but everything your guests needed to get excited about the resort, the local activities, what to pack, and the booking information for the wedding/vacation. The blog was merely intended as a guide for the adventurous DIY-er’s, as we were the first to incorporate the idea of making the Passport Invitation a full travel brochure, and (more importantly) know how to make it look professional, using the professional Adobe software suite.
What started out as selling a few templates for other brides (also getting married at the Now Jade Riviera Cancun) turned into us making templates for several other ‘sister’ AM Resorts (Dreams, Secrets, etc.). Now we have over 25 resort templates all over the Caribbean (Riviera Maya, Jamaica, Dominican Republic) as well as Cabo and Puerto Vallarta and new ones are being added each month! Selling templates was fun and easy, and soon many brides were emailing us their finished designs to have us print and assemble for them, to avoid the potential disaster of doing something wrong! Others simply did not have the time/patience to want to design their own invitations and had us take all their info and design it for them.
Today, our brides have the freedom to do as little or as much as they want with their invitations. Some purchase our generic template, watch our videos, and do everything on their own (we love seeing photos of their finished invites!) Others have us do it all from “Start to Finish” and some even have us print and cut the invitations and ship to them un-assembled, just so they can do the finishing touches themselves! We are the only ones in the industry that offer this level of service. And we love what we do!!! (And we’re cheaper than our competition too!) As of March 2013 Dave and I officially own and operate all of our printing and cutting equipment, thus allowing for unmatched turn-around time for our customers! From the time a bride’s files are ready, we can print, cut and assemble any size order usually same-day or next-day. We have now helped over 500 brides from all around the world with their wedding invitations! Our little side-hobby has turned into a full-fledged business (which is really nice, now that I’m a stay-at-home mommy with our 8-week old baby boy! 🙂 A dream come true for us!
Our original WeddingBee blog can be found here! It’s full of pictures and info and customer reviews!
Join our facebook group! And feel free to ask any questions! Other brides love to help too!
Email: Vanessa@weddingpassports.com We love helping others, it’s what we do! And we hope this inspires you all!
