Discovering fun festival designs with Wedfest

With weddings bringing some of the greatest joys and stresses in life, we at Printed.com know that finding the perfect stationer for your big day can be a tall order. Luckily, we’ve gotten to know some of the best in the business, so have taken the time to highlight these dedicated people in our new Wedding Stationer Directory.

Today we’re talking to Marty of Wedfest! Specialising in alternative festival-themed wedding stationery, we’re here to get the scoop on what inspires his funky and colourful designs.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your stationery business!

My Name is Marty and I am the founder and head designer of Wedfest Weddding Stationery or Wedfest for short.

I started Wedfest shortly after getting married myself. As a huge fan of festivals, I decided to design some festival themed wedding stationery for my own wedding day. I was working as a Graphic Designer at the time and I put these designs on my website and other couples started to see them. From there, I started getting a lot of requests to create festival themed wedding stationery. This was right around the time that festival weddings started to become really popular so I decided to start a website.

This website became popular very fast and started taking up all of my time, so I registered it as a company. Then I started to focus soley on it. I also quickly realised that it wasn’t just festival themed designs people wanted, but that couples wanted something different and unique for their weddings. We started producing all sorts of crazy themes: literature and book, rock ‘n’ roll and other music themes, destination and travel themes, sports themes, movie and cinema themes, winter and Christmas plus everything else you can imagine and more! So now Wedfest Wedding Stationery basically caters to anyone and everyone looking for some awesome fun and alternative wedding stationery.

But it’s not just weddings we cater for. We also work with a lot of corporations and festivals so we can create stationery and goods for them.

We also have a sister website called www.henpartywristbands.com which is our party accessories website. Here we provide goods, favours and accessories for hen parties, stag parties, birthdays, weddings, baby showers, bar & bat mitzvahs and many other types of events.

What is it like to work with brides/grooms on a daily basis?

For me, it’s really great because every day is totally new and different. Each bride and groom that come to us normally know exactly what they want, or have a vision that they need someone to bring to life and that’s where we come in. The best days are when we get a crazy brief from a bride and groom and then see their reaction when we bring it to life.

As getting married is one of the biggest events in a couple’s life, it’s great to have been part of so many thousands of peoples weddings over the years. It is super cool and we always love hearing the feedback from the wedding and how amazed everyone was at our wedding stationery.

What does a typical day in the studio look like to you?

The studio usually looks like it needs a good tidy!! But as for the day to day schedule, there is no ‘normal’ day. We are always extremely busy every day and never know what the next day is going to bring. I have a plan and schedule for each day but there is always something else which needs to be done first, or an urgent order coming in, so each day is totally different. It could be a full day of designing, a full day of emails or updating the website, or all of the above.

We get a lot of emails every day so getting time to answer all of those usually means working very late hours each day and starting early the next morning.  As for designing I could be working on a cinema themed wedding table plan one minute, then a festival programme lanyard the next and then designing a suite of wedding stationery for a wedding in Ibiza after that, or even going to Ibiza or a  cool location for a photoshoot. Right this second I am working on about 10 designs which are for 10 totally different client types- so it keeps it fresh each day.

Where do you find your inspiration?

Everywhere. For our festival-based designs, all my years attending music festivals has paid off so that it is in my blood now. I have always been interested in art and design my whole life and I am always looking at design, books, posters, media and collecting flyers, posters, magazines and anything and everything that could inspire me down the line. Literally everything is an inspiration and not always in the most obvious way which I really love.

Do you have any favourite pieces?

Our Wedding Table Plans are my favourite product. The reason for this is that they can be made to look up like anything: a festival line up poster, or cinema movie poster, or whatever the theme is. Also, this is the one thing that all wedding guests must look at when attending the wedding, and it’s always the thing we get the most feedback about. Our brides and grooms always tell us that everyone was so impressed at the table plan designs which is great to hear.

We have done so many awesome designs for table plans over the years with hundreds of different themes. Even this week we have come up with at least 4 new designs and themes that I cannot wait for everyone to see.

As a Wedding Stationer, what’s important to keep in mind?

For me, it’s all about quality. Quality designs and quality finished printed products. We’ve set a few design trends in wedding stationery over the years and I have to close my eyes when I see these copied badly. It is a compliment that we inspire others but rubbish designs and bad quality prints do not work for us. We spend a lot of time perfecting designs and updating them and making them better each year.

With a great design, you need a great quality print and good quality card stocks which is why we love Printed.com. We have been working with you for years now and much like we bring someone’s ideas to life in design, printed.com bring our designs to life in print. So good quality design and good quality print are the most important.

What is the most extravagant/unusual thing you’ve ever been asked to design by a client?

We get asked crazy things every day so nothing really seems that unusual any more… we did get asked once to put flip flops on a penguin which was funny!

Lots of customers ask for their pets to be featured in their wedding stationery which can get tricky. We also have a few very high-end clients who like to throw huge parties, so sometimes we make some really extravagant and flamboyant stationery.

To anyone looking at our website or designs, it might all seem unusual but, it’s normal for us

What’s next on the cards for your business?

More growth, maybe new premises in the near future and we’re always adding new products. Right now, we have at least 6 exciting new products waiting to be launched.

We are also always looking at new ideas and things we can add to our business. Who knows what’s next! But its going to be something exciting. We also don’t want to give away any of our secrets so just watch this space

Make sure to check out Wedfest’s website, Facebook and Instagram!

A wedding is so much more than just a day. It’s more than a dress, an invite or a venue. It’s the start of something special – a treasured moment that can never be forgotten.

SHOP WEDDING PRINT BOUTIQUE

With weddings bringing some of the greatest joys and stresses in life, we at Printed.com know that finding the perfect stationer for your big day can be a tall order. Luckily, we’ve gotten to know some of the best in the business, so have taken the time to highlight these dedicated people in our new Wedding Stationer Directory