Man. I'm starting to understand why brides freak out so often. I mean, I have a ton of time, so I'm not even close to freaking out, but if I didn't have over a year...I could imagine getting stressed about now.
This is what I don't understand:
Imagine you are a vendor. Perhaps you make dresses or own a bit of property that you rent out or something to that effect.
I send you an email that says something to the effect of "Good day sir or madam. I would like you give you more money than I make in a month. Please respond with your rules and demands so as that I may give you this money."
You have several options:
A. Don't email me back, ever.
B. Email me back a poorly formed half-sentence with no punctuation or real useful content, and ignore whatever questions I asked. Optional: forward my email to someone else who will ignore it.
C. Send me a few emails with content, and then disappear when I try to close the deal.
D. Be a damn professional, respond to me intelligently, and take my money.
The only person to choose D so far (the photographer,
Nicole Ladonne, a good friend of a good friend) already has a juicy deposit in her pocket and I am super excited to work with her and confident that she'll do an excellent job. The rest... heave a sigh and move on. If you're not going to be easy to work with, I don't want to give you bazillions of dollars, kthxbye. But finding people who are easy to work with seems to be harder than one might think.
Meanwhile I made the mistake of putting up an etsy alchemy ad for my dress (rather than just finding and approaching designers directly) and had to craft 20-odd polite responses to people who seem to have never made a wedding dress before in their life but are really very confident that they can totally do it, because, you know, they made a tutu or some pants or something. The weirdest part is that about four of them offered to make me a dress from the same McCall's pattern which, A. didn't look anything like what I was asking for and B. Is illegal. You can't use commercial patterns for profit. It says so right on the package. And as as knitwear designer I'm a little sensitive about that sort of thing. So no I will not give you $1000 to violate copyright and dress me up in a McCall's halloween costume tyvm.
However, I WAS lucky enough to accidentally stumble upon a dres that I remember absolutely loving a year or so ago (and didn't save since I wasn't engaged yet.) And, provided the very nice people at Cocoon Silk downtown respond to my emails, I am going to have them make a similar dress. The store is run by a Cambodian family and they make some very nice stuff for quite a bit less than most of the Portland-based dress designers (I was prepared to pay a lot more for another designer I love but she seems to have disappeared :-( so...bummer.)
http://braedonsblog.com/2008/12/25/seth-and-dionna-el-capitan/Nice, eh?
