The Wedding Day! You spend months and thousands of dollars planning it: choosing the perfect theme and colors, the perfect wedding dress and shoes, the perfect venue, the perfect menu… the list goes on, not mentioning the preselected perfect groom who must at least look perfect for the day. His best men are the lost cause and you just hope for the best.

With all the gargantuan efforts that you put into this production that will fly by like one moment, what do you still have years after? I mean besides your husband?

You have your great memories of that perfect day and your photos. Especially today, when wedding photography has gone journalistic style and you can relive that perfect day in all its excitement. That, of course, if the photos turn out well.

This rarely happens and you can’t always blame your wedding photographer because things like unfavorable angle shots, smudged makeup, bunched up clothing, squinting eyes, ominous shadows, glare on eyeglasses can and do occur.

The truth is that all photos need some correction. And luckily these days photo retouching is quite affordable and easily accessable through a number of online services that will charge you about $5 or less per photo. Skilled professionals will do complete cosmetic retouching that includes fixing your hair and makeup, removing the appearance of any skin imperfections or double chins, or swipe the perspiration from the groom’s forehead. For a little bit extra they’ll slim you down, adjust your wedding dress or “open” squinting eyes. They can even remove any annoying objects or your sister’s ex-boyfriend from the picture.

They’ll keep your memories of that day perfect. After all, this is how you remember it.

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Authored by PhotoHand.

PhotoHand will retouch your wedding photos at the starting fee of $3.50/photo for complete cosmetic retouching. Also, on offer there are custom-designed save-the-date cards and wedding invitations and wedding photo books from your photo material. With professional photo retouching, skillful cropping and art effects, your book becomes an outstanding memorable piece.

A quiet revolution has started in the bridal wear industry.  More and more brides are realizing that not only is a custom-made wedding gown affordable now, that it can be more affordable than its pret-a-porter counterpart. What? Custom couture bridal gowns for the masses? You can practically see the eyebrows rising in Paris from across the Atlantic!

So what changed?  Why now?  It’s a question of increased competition, and small nimble companies seizing the opportunity to compete: especially on the Internet.  Wedding dress manufacturing is a very labor-intensive process no matter whether a gown is a standard size or custom made.  It is of course more labor intensive to go the custom-made route, but our customers appreciate the customization so much that it has become a competitive advantage.  The customization doesn’t end with the sizing, however.  Brides can choose between different fabrics, back closures and the length of the train.

This is particularly good news for all brides who dread trying to decide on the right dress by trying on a sample gown that does not fit.  One size does not fit all, especially when it comes to the most significant garment many women will wear in their lifetime.

The Nested Doll Analogy

Remember the nested dolls you played with as a child?  They all fit neatly one inside the other, each one smaller than the last.  This is the same principle used to size all apparel, wedding dresses included.  A good concept in theory, but when it comes to real people, it breaks down.  Here’s why: This concept assumes that alldimensions shrink or grow proportionally.  If you try to imagine a size 18 version of Twiggy you start to understand!  She would be taller than any living woman and have odd proportions indeed at that size!

So how has the apparel industry gotten away with this so long, you ask?  Well, they have and they haven’t.  Ever wonder why retailers and clothing labels tend to target a certain size of consumer?  One of the reasons is because of fit.  The more homogeneous the target consumer pool is, the more likely they are to fit the offerings of brand X.  And fit is big.  Huge, in fact in the apparel business.

Returning to the topic of bridal gowns, the fit needs to be perfect.  We find there is an amazing synergy in being an online retailer and being specialized in made-to-measure gowns.  This way, the bride-to-be is assured of a perfect fit.  In addition, brides have so many more options to choose from now.  If a bride fell in love with a certain designer gown and it’s out of reach because of a fit limitation that is hard to fix via alteration, we can reproduce the gown and customize certain aspects for her.  It’s really a win-win.

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Authored By Christianne Brunelle of Custom Bridal Couture

Christianne Brunelle has an MBA from McGill University and is the founder of Custom Couture Bridal.  http://www.customcouturebridal.com/

We are VERY excited with our newest feature: the ability to create your own custom theme for your wedding website.  We’ve had so many requests for particular themes that we weren’t able to keep up.  To fix that, we’ve created a theme builder which will allow you to build exactly the theme you want for your wedding website.  You can use your own images or choose from our library of images. You can also select the fonts and colors so that you can create exactly the look and feel you want.

Most of our current themes can be built with theme builder, so that gives you some idea about what is possible.  That is only the beginning though.

So how do you start?

Check out our how-to article to see how to build your own custom theme.

How do I use it?

Anyone can build a custom theme as described in the link above.  Applying it to your website will require that you have a premium website.  This lets you test it out so that you can build the theme you want, and see exactly how it will look before making the decision to upgrade.

We have some custom options for free sites too!

You can already change the font style and color of ‘Text’ and ‘Photo and Text’ elements on your wedding website.  Along side the new custom theme feature we’re making it easier for you to set the font and color for your whole website in one place.  At the top of the Theme Tab you will now see a link that says ‘Edit Font For… ‘ which will let you set the font, color, and bold/italic for all the elements (including the element titles) on your website!  You can still overwrite the colors of individual Text elements as well.  You can learn more about it here.

Since this feature is new, we definitely want to hear your feedback on it!