6 Ways I Branded My Own Wedding

I've previously posted about 10 different ways of branding your own wedding (click here to view details on what wedding branding is, what it is used for, and how you can do it). Branding your wedding gives it character through you as a couple, and shares this experience with your guests, making your big day more fun and memorable for them to enjoy!

Here’s the 6 different ways I branded our own wedding:

1. Our family, religious, traditional, and country Values incorporated with our chosen Location and the Time of Year

• Ronan grew up in the countryside, I enjoy the countryside, so our venue had to reflect an outdoors open space. However, we chose to get married in Autumn which is the season of our first date, and a much cooler time of year. Our venue reflected a best of both: an indoors venue out in the countryside; we brought the outdoors inside through the décor.
  

• Setting up a “family tree” of photos from their own wedding day was a great way of incorporating our parents, grandparents, great grandparents etc into our own wedding day. It was also a nice way of remembering our loved ones.

• Emphasis on the religious ceremony is a personal preference, but personally I feel that this is something often neglected with all the focus and decoration being in the reception venue. Being traditional people, we wanted to keep the church service traditional, and we spent a lot of time emphasising it and making it incredibly special for ourselves – it is, after all, the moment you ACTUALLY (legally) become husband and wife! We chose hymns and songs that held significance to us, decided between a choir or a string quartet (I definitely would’ve opted for both had the budget permitted me to!), had my granddad, who is a retired priest, play a part, and lit the traditional Irish unity candles.

2. Polaroid, Woodland, and Alice In Wonderland Themes

• After using polaroid pictures as save the dates, I realised that this vintage and classic style reflected our old souls so well that it had to be used again throughout the wedding. I created more polaroid pictures to be used to ask my sister, sister-in-law and best friends to be my bridesmaids, as part of each table’s centrepiece, and also created my own giant polaroid frame as part of the photo booth - rest assured it will be given a blog post of its own!
  

• I wanted to create a woodland theme in the church and venue to reflect our outdoorsy personalities.
  

• Being an absolute Disney maniac of a fan, a subtle incorporation of one of my favourites, Alice In Wonderland, simply had to play a part; but more on that later!

3. The Logo reflected the woodland theme

I stamped our monogram behind everyone's log slice place name.

• I asked my extremely talented cousin to design our wedding logo which added a very personal family touch to our day and enriched our values. We simply told her a brief of our theme and she quickly created the most spectacular woodland inspired logo which later came together with our family tree and everything else about our wedding. Check out @artsandillustrationbyabigail to see more of her work.

4. Autumnal and Woodland inspired Colours and Flowers and Fabrics and Décor

• I knew mustard was my colour straight away. I wanted my bridesmaids in mustard, I wanted mustard from the flowers in my bouquet down to the confetti. It accentuates the falling autumn leaves but is also a happy, vibrant colour. Otherwise, the church flower arrangement up the aisle consisted of burnt orange and burgundy, along with other autumnal colours, to accentuate the autumnal feeling.
  

• Apart from organza to decorate the pews in church as it sits better in shape, I used chiffon to create the head table’s backdrop, the photo booth's backdrop, as the head table’s chair sashes, and as table cloths for the bar tables.

• Being a woodland theme, I wanted to focus more on the greenery, and also the wood to illustrate bare trees once the autumn leaves start falling. But flowers add an extra special décor to weddings so my mum arranged the flowers in church, keeping to a selection of autumnal colours, and also made my bouquet which consisted of predominantly greenery and also burgundy, yellow, and white lilies and roses. Lilies are my favourite flowers and also the combination of flowers that Ronan first bought for me on our very first Valentine’s day together!
  

• My signature pieces of décor were the sign boards which were all hand written calligraphy by myself on wooden boards; the arch made by my dad in the church consisting of greenery and some flowers which added a fairy-tale feel; both of these brought some of the outdoors indoors. My centrepieces on log slices with twigs covered in fairy lights also added an element of the outdoors to the venue, and the mirror seating plan, handwritten by myself, provided a subtle ‘Alice Through the Looking-glass’ implication. Finally, lots and lots of artificial garlands were used to really bring the outdoorsy feel inside. But find out more about my handmade décor later on!

5. Indian Food, Our favourite pastries and flavours of Cake

• We wanted to make our guests feel at home, so opted for a tea and coffee option at the church in the morning. Our canapes were a selection of our favourite ham, salmon, fish and chips, and the wedding breakfast was Indian catering to reflect the cultural traditions.
  

• We also chose a pastry cart with a selection of our favourite pastries including chocolate covered strawberries, tarts, doughnuts, chocolate eclairs, which really emphasised us as a couple and our sweet tooth!

• The wedding cake itself was four tiered and consisted of our favourite flavours: two layers of Victoria sponge, chocolate, and red velvet.

6. Instagram

• Finally, I created our own hashtag, #ronanandlish, for guests to share their pictures with us of our big day. I also created an Instagram page @rolish2019, which I mentioned on our save the dates, so guests could start following us early on and build the excitement with us on the 10 months leading up to our very big day!

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