One Year on...

Next week, on Oct 24th, it will be our first wedding anniversary. I can't believe how much we have done in one year!  Here is a quick rundown:

An amazing Wedding!!!

Honeymoon in Portugal (all organised by Jim, I had no idea where I was going all week and it was brilliant!)

Packed up our flat said goodbye to our cat, friends and family and set off for Thailand for a month.
Few days in Malaysia and Singapore and Brisbane.
South Island for 3 weeks

Arrive in Auckland to start our new lives as Mr and Mrs Taylor!
Move into cool flat in Remuera
I start my day job at Adstream in Auckland

www.adstream.co.nz

Jim starts work on Paperless Wedding

I fall and break bone in foot and have to have a operation.
We launch at the wedding show

First paying customer
Forced to leave our lovely flat due to landlady moving back in. Rubbish!
Found new flat, yay and its near the sea.
1000 visitors to our site in a month!!!
Wedding Anniversary!

Phew, I am exhausted just reading that. Well I deviate slightly from what I was going to write about and that was our invite. The first 'Paperless Wedding' before it knew what it was. We got the idea for the invite from a poster that is framed in my parents kitchen.  It is a Victorian style ad for a theatrical play.  I loved the layout the look and feel of it. I wanted our wedding to have a theatrical feel as it was where both Jim and I met.  He was on stage performing in Jekyll and Hyde and I was backstage running the projector for the special effects.

We took this design and translated it onto the computer and Jim built our own Paperless Wedding. We filled the site with pictures of us and our wedding party, so that people could see who was involved.

We put history on the area and the venue for people to get a feel for the place and why we had chosen to get married there. We put a blog on there for people to read how we were getting on with the planning and really become part of the day.  The feedback we got from everyone was fantastic.

It was the first time many people had been invited in this manner and out of 100+ invites we only had a couple of people unable to RSVP online.   My Nanna, who is 86 and Jim's grandparents even got into the spirit of things and replied online.  For those who emailed us or called, we could still reply online for them on their behalf.  It meant we could keep track of numbers in one place.  We did plan to send a few paper invites to those unable to logon, but we found we did not need to.   We saved so much money on postage and paper. It was great! However, Jim did lose a lot of his life to programming, but it was all worth it. It did take a lot longer to do than I expected, but then I did keep adding to what I wanted. I am surprised Jim still wanted to marry me at the end of it!!

So here is what it looked liked at the end of it all.....

We have tried to capture a lot of this in Paperless Wedding. We will be adding templates in the future to allow for the Biographies and also the gift list will be added at the end of the month. To make it even more personal for couples we are working on a customisable template where you will be able to upload your photo or logo and choose the exact colours you want. This should be done by the end of the year at the latest.

I wonder where we will be at our next anniversary and what the site will look like?!

David and Rose

We have a lot to thank David and Rose for, as they trusted us with their special day, when Paperless Wedding was still in its infancy. David Henderson works for Adstream, which is the company I work for in the week. He is based in the Melbourne office and while I was there back in April I told him about Paperless Wedding.  He loved the idea and was happy for Jim and I to test it out on him, brave man!

The functionality was there, but no branding and easy help tools.  David and Rose navigated their way through it giving us invaluable feedback. They successfully sent out their invites to all their guests.  One of the reasons they wanted to use Paperless Wedding was because they were getting married abroad and had several friends living overseas.  Paperless Wedding was able to help communicate all the details about the big day to everyone at the same time and at no extra cost for those guests living abroad.

They filled out the website giving details of the big day and also adding in their own personal touches.  They also uploaded photos into the photo album allowing people to get to know who was going to be there before the big day.

So on October 2nd 2009, with all their family and friends gathered around them, David and Rose exchanged vows and became husband and wife.

Congratulations and we hope you have a wonderful fun filled life together and thank you so much for your help and support!

Choose your colour to match your theme!

You are getting married and the colour theme is all sorted. All you need now is a matching invite. Well Paperless Wedding has been working hard to give more colour choices. Some of our designs can not be altered as they have been specifically designed for that theme like:

However we have several designs that lend them selves to colour changes. So Jim has done some great programming and now you can change the colour themes by a click of a button! It means that we now have increased the choice of themes on our website which we hope mean more couples can find that perfect invite.

We have a choice of Rose colour with matching invite.

Also we have given options on the retro bows.

The last two of these designs have been done by the talented Claire Hammon.

http://www.clairehammon.com

We will be offering a few more colour choices on some of the designs already on the site over the next week or so.  Also we will have another roses related theme to  upload next week.

We hope you like them!

Check out the new web address!

We have moved our blog domain from .com to .co.nz so that with luck we get on more google searches.  If this is the case and this is the first time you have come across Paperless Wedding, do look around, sign up for a free trial at:

http://www.paperlesswedding.co.nz

or maybe join our Facebook group:

http://www.facebook.com/paperlesswedding

or do you Tweet?  Follow us on Twitter:

PaperlessNZ

Thanks for visiting and do come back as we will have some interviews on here, new features and maybe even a competition or two!

Etch Magazine

A few weeks ago Jim and I went to meet a group of young entrepreneurs, under 35, at Etch's networking event http://www.etchmagazine.co.nz. We set off in the rain and the wrong direction, but finally arrived and we were greeted with a nice glass of the new sparkling Lindaur Sauvingon Blanc  (great choice as we used this at the wedding show!).  There was a good mix of people there and so we took our seats and got chatting.

The idea is that we all share our experience, inspire and help one another as our ventures take shape.  We spoke to James the CTO of eventfinder (www.eventfinder.co.nz).  He had interesting stories of expanding into multiple markets and how he liked being in something new and exciting. We also spoke to a lady who was involved with donating unwanted items and re-homing them with someone who wants them, (http://www.donatenz.com). There were also 2 ladies who tried to promote a pyramid selling concept called AgeLoc, I was not convinced by this at all, but it was interesting to hear how they hoped to take over the world and become millionaires. The main thing we all had in common was we were passionate about our company and what we were working towards.

We found this group through Facebook groups and thought it would be good to meet like minded people.  It was through this we met Claire Hammon our now designer for numerous invite and themes. www.clairehammon.com It shows that this kind of networking online actually works.

Abby the organiser coordinated the evening really well and we even won a bottle of wine during the evening!  She encouraged us to write a bit about ourselves to be published on the Etch website. Despite me writing the blog, Jim is the more eloquent one of us (if he wrote this it would take him all day to find the perfect words!) and he penned a rather lovely summary of who Paperless Wedding are.

We hope you enjoy the read, click on the link below!

http://tinyurl.com/ybbggpx

Save the Date

Another mile stone has been reached.  We now have another product up and running.  Save the Date options were always on the cards, but after the wedding show we realised the need was a lot greater than we thought.  Jim cracked on and with a few tweaks of the database, some more designing and the payment all set up,  we were in business.

We recently got a Save the Date card sent from the UK in the post, for a wedding that is next year.  Our Save the Date product would have been perfect to annonce the big date both locally, but especially to reach international family friends in a cheap and environmentally friendly way.  Papereless Wedding invites and save the dates make the world a smaller place in the fact that they reach all guests at the same time regardless of location.

We have taken the themes invite design and modified it so you can write a more personal and informal note to your guests. The guest list that you upload will be transfered over to your invite if you choose to upgrade when it comes time to send your invites.

Our first client has actually turned out to be very good friends of ours in the UK. It was a lovely surprise to wake up one morning this week to see our friends supporting us in our new business. So a big thanks to Martin and Laura!  It will be a year today that they will be exchanging vows.  Time will fly by with all the planning and fingers crossed we will be able to make it. Who knows where Paperless Wedding will be by then!