Offbeat Hochzeit

If you're a reader of Offbeat Bride, I bet you've already heard of one of our favorite and longtime sponsors, Dustin Cantrell. He's been a mainstay destination photographer for offbeat couples for years and with good reason. He's consistently balancing light, shadows, color, and darkness for all the drama and intimacy you can imagine.

Between Offbeat Bride readers, our archive of real weddings, and our Vendor Guide, we've seen a LOT of vendor recommendations. So we decided to start rounding up these nuggets of info sourced directly from our readers for a series of reader recommended vendor list posts.

We trawled through our archives to find romantic wedding readings (and some with some real talk) that we hadn't yet featured in our pretty substantial archive of wedding readings. Boy did we find some. From vacuum cleaners and mashed potatoes to onions and Bob Marley, love means a lot of things to a lot of people.

Gemini and the Bear are a husband and wife photography and videography team from Atlanta. They've been an Offbeat Bride sponsor for the last year, working closely with our readers to shoot a ton of offbeat weddings, and MAN do they have some amazing images to show for it.

There's no doubt that the magic of Moria and Vlad's wedding lies in all the small details and the creativity that is present in each and every frame. Moria and Vlad met through a mutual friend who insisted they should get to know each other although they were not very cooperative at first.

One of the major issues I've had with wedding websites and magazines (and really, why Offbeat Bride has been such a relief) is this feeling that I should have considered all of this before.

Hey y'all: we've got some new branding ( history of that here!) and new swagalicious Offbeat Bride shirts to go with it. If you're down with rocking your own offbeat-ness, these are up for grabs over at our Spreadshirt store. We find these are particularly useful when meeting with new vendors so they know you're down for more off-the-beaten-aisle ideas.

Before we get any further, let's get a truth out of the way: a wedding dress that costs under $120 is not going to be the same caliber of quality as a custom-made dress. If you're looking for fit and quality, you probably want one of the amazing dressmakers from the Offbeat Bride Vendor Guide.

My mom and dad would like to do the old-fashioned thing of announcing our engagement in the local newspaper of my hometown (My parents still live there. I haven't for about 16 years, but still know tons of family friends back home.)

Our kinship with SoKind Registry makes total sense when you know that they focus on gifts of experience, charitable causes, and non-stuff gifts. Not acquiring a bunch of stuff makes total sense for most couples. We decided to work with SoKind to find some of the most interesting, most "why didn't I think of that" offbeat gift registry ideas from REAL SoKind registries.

I work at a bridal salon. As an Offbeat Bride myself, I'd like to say that I work in one of the cool, mom-and-pop boutiques that specifically cater to offbeat weddings, but no. I work in a bastion of Wedding Industrial Complex influence.

These are the registry truths we hold self-evident: No one needs a registry and you don't need a registry full of physical objects. But for those of us who DO want to do a wedding registry, you might be stumped for ideas about what to add. Never fear!

I trawled our statistics to find the 15 most viral, most read, most shared real offbeat weddings of all time to end 2015. If there's one thing I've learned from this exercise, it's that Offbeat Bride readers definitely share my passion for Harry Potter (and I couldn't be more psyched!).

A midweek wedding and weekday wedding isn't so unusual in some parts of the world, but among the weddings we see, weekend weddings still reign supreme. So weddings that fall on a weekday can sometimes throw guests for a loop.

One type of wedding that we feature heavily is a THEMED WEDDING. We love our theme-less weddings just as much, but sometimes a killer theme just feels so right. Is there a theme that hasn't been done? Surely. Are we game to see it? Absolutely.

New England wedding photographers Novella Photography hooked us right away with their cool-as-hell personalities and of course, their unicorn-riding photo. I mean, who gets us more than a couple of photographers riding in on a unicorn? And that's exactly it - they get offbeat couples because they ARE an offbeat couple!

January 1st, 2016 was Offbeat Bride's ninth anniversary! That is a hell of a long time to be doing anything, and it's especially a long time to be publishing a website. I mean, how many sites that you were reading in early 2007 are still around? How many of them are still active?

There's tons of advice out there about what to wear to a black tie wedding, but I was wondering if Offbeat Bride had its own take on the subject? I recently received an invitation to a black tie Nuptial Mass, and I am simultaneously excited and intimidated.

As a lifelong Renaissance Faire goer, I always have a soft spot for Ren Faire and fantasy weddings, as evidenced by the abundance of them (13 pages!) in this archive. We love to jam about wedding trends, so when Houston's Public Radio and NPR's Here & Now wanted to talk shop about geeky fantasy weddings and weddings at Ren Faires, we were so down.

Oh hi there, it's me. Ariel. You know, the publisher of offbeatbride.com. The author with three names who wrote that book, Offbeat Bride: Creative Alternatives for Independent Brides, a decade ago? The founder of a publishing business built on the back of her 2004 wedding? Yeah, that's me.

We got married on May 16th, 2015 in Orlando, Florida (depending on time of year and location is clearly part of one's budget as well). I figured that I'd break down our budget and share with others who may be feeling that they can't do an awesome wedding within their budget.

Is it just me, or is it difficult being an Offbeat Bride on more traditional websites? While I love to talk about planning weddings, why are the communities on these websites as a whole so judgmental?

In my work with Offbeat Bride, I've been around people planning their weddings for a decade. The best part of touring around with the Lovesick Expo this winter was getting to talk to all the amazing Offbeat Bride readers who in some cases had traveled remarkably long distances to come say hello.

Carrie Swails is a kick-ass wedding photographer with a career-load of wedding knowledge. (Trust me, photographers pick up on ALL KINDS of industry insider tips.) So here's her advice for getting a more traditional vendor to understand your offbeat wedding plans... One of the biggest ways the wedding industry has changed in modern years is offbeat weddings.