Green Weddings

As you know, we here at Paperless Wedding, are passionate about the fact we do our bit for the environment. We have been doing lots of research on Green Weddings have come across some great webpages and articles.


"The wedding industry is big business: more than 22,000 New Zealand residents registered marriages or civil unions last year, spending an average of $32,500 per wedding, according to New Zealand Weddings. For many thrifty couples, cutting down on waste and expenditure is simply being practical. For others, it’s also an expression of who they are and how they want to live."

We recently were featured in Good Magazine in their article about Green Weddings.

The article is great as it features brides who opt for a green wedding for a number of reasons.  There are some great tips of what you could do to cut down on everything from paper to going for 'Green Gold'!

Paperless Wedding is also in ecowedding directory. It is an American based site that also has articles on there about Green weddings. They even mention going paperless themselves as a reason why they started this website in the first place:

www.ecowedding.org/planning-guide/paperless-invitations

They also have advice on  eco-honeymoons and eco-clothing.  It is definatly worth a read as they show anything is possible.

I have found a lot of Green blogs by using this link:

http://www.bestgreenblogs.com/

I have found lots of good and thought provoking articles, many of which are now in my bookmarks.  However going back to website specifically about Weddings my next pick would be Green Wedding Blog, this again is American, but there are a lot of good ideas about favours and jewellery.

We are currently advertising down at Celebration Studio in Parnell, Auckland. They have a great one-stop shop for brides.  You can attend free wedding planning workshops, view the advertising boards of lots of different suppliers for the wedding industry and also use their website that is full of great articles. Check out their Green Wedding article:

 http://www.celebrationstudio.co.nz/weddings-ecoweddings

I hope these help you find the information that you want to help create that perfect Green Wedding.  As I come across more I will add to this list for you all!

Paperless Weddings saves trees

The average person uses more than 300 kilograms of paper annually according to Zero waste.  Just think what that can rise to if you are getting married that year.  We worked out that an average wedding has around 50 invites that are sent out.  Add to that paper tally, envelopes, gift lists and information sheets and you could be looking at about 200 sheets of paper per wedding!

Saving tress is one way Paperless Wedding strives to reduce the stress on our environment but also by decreasing the carbon emissions from the planes and vans that actually deliver these precious invites.

Here in New Zealand we are supposed to be “maintaining” our Green House Gase emission levels at those of 1990, but already we have crept up at least 24% and we are still headed on a spiralling upward path.

What should we be doing? What can ‘I’ do to help resolve this problem?

If you are getting married use Paperless Wedding!!!

After the wedding don’t stop there, we believe there is a lot more that can be done. Start by actually reducing your energy use ( e.g. by reducing the number of journeys), by increasing the efficiency of our energy use ( using more efficient transport modes such as walking or public transport), and by wasting less energy (such as turning appliances off at the wall, by installing solar hot water heating).

Check out this website on what you can recycle, where you can recycle and what you can do to help our climate.

http://www.zerowaste.co.nz/index.sm

Wedding Season begins

We are adjusting to it being hot and almost Christmas (we are brits!). We are also adjusting to the fact that we are getting into the wedding season.  To us June to September are synonymous with Wedding season so it feels strange to see the sun shining down, Christmas trees and wedding invites in December.

Next weekend we are going to our first wedding of the season.  Nicky and Nicko, who I have mentioned previously in this blog, are going to be saying ‘I do” next Saturday.  We can’t wait.

They have used Paperless Wedding for their invites and have had some great feedback.  It has been really useful for them to be able to keep their guests that are coming from overseas, up to date with all the arrangements. Nicky’s sister is flying in from the UK and her best friend from South America. All have posted comments on the message board and RSVP’d online.

We launched our reminder function late last month.  It allows you to email to those people who have not yet responded and give them a prod to do so. You could also use it to inform people about changes to the location or timings. Also wet weather plans can be communicated this way as well. We have grouped all your addresses so you can batch email people according to their reply.

We hope you like it!

Engaged Magazine

We were lucky enough to get a great article in Engaged Magazine this month. This magazine is the perfect place for Paperless Wedding to advertise as the whole magazine is only available online. Think how many tress we have saved between us!

If you go to the December edition and to page 82 you will find a full 6 pages dedicated to us.

www.engaged.co.nz

Check out the rest of the Magazine as well, there are some great articles and photos in there.

This photo leads the article.  It does look like we are advertising Fly My Pretties...however if you look closely you can see Paperless Wedding homepage on the laptop!  We are in Shaky Isles in Kingsland, which is one of our favorite cafes for Paperless Wedding meeting.  We don't look to bad in the picture considering we had a cocktail night the evening before!

Here is the article:

 

 

 

 

Getting the most from your Paperless Wedding gift list

Whatever your opinion of the need for wedding lists today, the fact is that most wedding guests want to give a gift to wish you well in your marriage – so it's better to get the stuff you want.  At a wedding that a friend of mine went to in Adelaide recently, the wedding couple didn't distribute a gift list, since they didn't need any kitchen stuff, so all their friends got them toasters - literally all of them, they got about 20!  Fortunately it was all a big ruse and they'd actually all got them gift vouchers for a travel agent too, but just imagine how they were feeling while unwrapping their 20^th toaster.

With Paperless Wedding, we want the invite and site to replace what would normally be sent out in the wedding invitation envelope, so that naturally led us to adding a gift list option to the site.  We also wanted to allow complete freedom in choosing exactly what you want, rather than being restricted like a traditional department store gift registry.  The way we've done this is by letting couples create gifts themselves by tapping in a title and a description and then uploading an image (make sure it's copyright free though).

You also give the gift a value and that is the amount paid by your guest when they purchase – no fees apply to them, we then charge an 8% fee when we transfer the money over to you, this is to cover our payment fees and admin.  You can choose whether to pass this on to your guests or cover it yourself.  So that means that the only thing restricting your gift list is your imagination!

After our wedding we honeymooned in Thailand, so we asked for cool stuff to do while we were there, which we then blogged about and sent the blog entries and pictures to our guests along with a thank you note (which is also coming to Paperless soon).  This mean that we had a load of fantastic experiences like Riding Elephants, a Thai Massage at the national school, Cocktails on the roof of a spectacular Bangkok Hotel and 2 nights in an awesome resort on Koh Samui, quite a lot of which we would have been struggling to justify otherwise.  So, if you don't need a new cutlery set, you could make your honeymoon really special and have some great stories to bring back.  If you'd rather stick to those items which last a lifetime, then you can do that too.