She Says: Banish Cookie Cutter Carbon Copy Wedding Ideas

One of the biggest wedding worries that brides and grooms come to me with is, “we don’t want our wedding to mesh into all our other friend’s weddings and to be completely indistinguishable from the next.”

Sound familiar?

Every bride and groom wants their wedding to be unique but when all the brides out there are reading the same bridal magazines, watching the same wedding shows and following the same wedding traditions it’s not surprising that most weddings are not much different from one to the next.

How To Avoid Planning a Cookie Cutter Wedding

If you want a wedding that people walk away from saying, “that was the best wedding,” then you’ve got to step up your game. Here are 3 strategies to make your wedding stand out:

1. Identify the “It” Color and Run – Every wedding season there is an “it” color or and “it” color combination. One year it’ll seem that all the weddings you go to are tiffany blue and chocolate brown or black, white and red or purple. If you want to stand out, one way is to get away from the “it” colors and create a color combo that is more reflective of the colors you gravitate to, not what the magazines and blogs are telling you to like.
2. Get Really Creative With A Theme – So maybe, the “it” color just HAS to be your color too because you’ve loved it forever. That’s okay, but take the focus away from color and put it on your theme instead. To come up with a really great unique theme I suggest looking at literature, foreign locations, and classic movies (especially musicals). You could decide that you’re going to have a Mediterranean inspired wedding and use a Grecian blue and a crisp white, but then take a cue from Mama Mia (the movie) and use an assortment of china. And when it comes to literature there’s of course Shakespeare, but what about basing your entire wedding theme around a poem by Robert Frost and choosing items that evoke the same feeling for you that the poem does.
3. Mix It Up – Wedding traditions are just that, they are traditions because it’s traditional for everyone to do them. But you can mix it up. We had one couple where we surprised the guests with a reversed itinerary wedding (dinner first, ceremony at sunset). You could serve dessert first during the cocktail hour. Speeches could happen in between dances with everyone crowded on the dance floor. Switching up the wedding traditions really throws your guests for a loop and they love it!

Ciara’s Bridal Advice

If you want your wedding to stand out then you’re going to need to figure out exactly why it would stand out in anyone’s mind. Yes, your friends and family love you and because it’s your wedding day that in itself makes it unique. But I’m sorry to say, that in a long summer of weddings where they love (or at least like) all the couples who’s weddings they’re attending, there has to be something different about the structure of your wedding to really make it stand out and be noticed.

Make a list of out of the box ideas that you could incorporate into your wedding. Don’t worry about the cost right now, just make the list and inspiration will jump off the page and you’ll realize just how you want to add a twist to your wedding celebration.

front page thumbnail image by Rhett Sutphin

blog comments powered by Disqus