What you need to know... About booking wedding vendors.

Many of you know that prior to starting Diva Productions I was a journalist. What you might not know, was that I dedicated a lot of my reporting skills to trying to make business journalism interesting... not the easiest of assignments! In 2009 when Gulf Coast Bride enlisted me as a regular columnist for the magazine, we decided that it's readers would be well served with some straight talk from an industry insider. My articles are titled "What you need to know..." and for this issue I tackled the subject of hiring wedding vendors from a purely business aspect.

There's a lot of advice out there for what I like to refer to as the "big three" in wedding planning - product, price, and personality - but very little good information on how to ensure that your are dealing with a professional vendor. You wouldn't buy a stock without researching it's performance, so why wouldn't you perform a little due diligence on your wedding vendors? I think our couple from 2009 who were the inspiration for this subject would wholeheartedly agree!

Gulf Coast Bride will be hitting the stands in 31 states over the next two weeks. If you don't see it right away, be patient, the distributor probably just hasn't gotten to your local store yet... We also want to give a little shout out to our friend Sonja Revells of Sonja Revells Photography for snagging the cover!