Season 1 Trailer

LOVEMYDRESS.NET    //    Love My Dress is a popular Wedding Blog, Wedding Directory, Shop and now, Podcast. Every week, we share real weddings and beautiful editorial content with a focus on bridal fashion, suppliers and venues. We also share some great thought provoking insights and opinion pieces and I'm passionate about shining a spotlight on the many small creative businesses who work within the wedding industry.

The Love My Dress podcast has been created for anyone planning their wedding, for all wedding business owners and everyone interested in the world of creative business entrepreneurship, whether you're deeply involved in the wedding industry, on its periphery, or are just generally curious.

This Podcast will offer a fresh perspective; instead of covering a different aspect of wedding planning each week, I'll be engaging in conversation with inspiring business owners, creative visionaries, and talented entrepreneurs.  Together, we'll explore topics ranging from weddings and business to personal life experiences that have influenced the careers and professional lives of my guests.

I feel really driven to raise this industry and the many wonderful businesses and people who work within it. To me, these individuals are truly remarkable and epitomise the joy of life when a creative career path is embarked upon.  I also want to fill that void that I believe mainstream and legacy media often neglect.  I'm dissatisfied with how the press often relegates weddings to mere fillers for their columns, and I'm weary with newspaper articles that undermine the value of weddings, solely promoting budget and high street options. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with these choices—I feature many such weddings on Love My Dress. However, budget and high street are not the only options.  There is a vast community of creative talent who are worth the money they charge and I want to help my audience understand the reasons why.

I want to lift the lid and take a deep dive into what it’s like to be a wedding business owner and entrepreneur. I want to honour the community of incredibly talented British designers and dressmakers who are preserving time honoured craftsmanship. I want to champion the photographers, videographers, planners, stylists, flowers growers and florists, stationers, cake makers, beauty specialists, celebrants, entertainers and many more, for creating magic and memories. 

I also want to remove stigma around issues dealt with every day by creative business owners, like mental health, business burnout and financial difficulty. And, on the the end of the spectrum - I want to make it cool to talk about and celebrate business successes.

BOOKMARK & FOLLOW
Visit lovemydress.net
Follow @lovemydress on Instagram
Follow @annabelbeeforth on Instagram

DEAF?
You will find a full transcript of this episode here (tap the transcript tab):
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2248154/episodes/13598563-season-1-trailer

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Transcript

Welcome to the Love My Dress Podcast. I'm your host and the founder of Love My Dress, Annabel Beeforth, and I'm absolutely thrilled to have you here.

This podcast has been created for anyone planning their wedding, for all wedding business owners and everyone interested in the world of creative business entrepreneurship, whether you're deeply involved in the wedding industry, on its periphery, or are just generally curious.

In each episode, I'll be engaging in conversations with inspiring business owners, creative visionaries, and talented entrepreneurs.  Together, we'll explore topics ranging from weddings and business to personal life experiences that have influenced the careers and professional lives of my guests. 

In this trailer, I want to share with you a little about what Love My Dress is for those of you who are just discovering the brand. I’ll also introduce myself very briefly - and share some insights as to why I’ve decided to launch a podcast. 

As I sit in my office recording this audio, everything feels  pretty surreal. 

I have wanted to produce a podcast for so long and to be on the cusp of launching my first season is absolutely wild.

First of all, for those of you not familiar with Love My Dress, it is for most people a ‘wedding blog’ - though I tend to avoid that term myself - it’s never truly resonated with me if I’m honest - I find it difficult to find a single word or phrase that succinctly and honestly captures what we do. I think of us more as an online resource and community, but, wedding blog is fine for now. 

Love My Dress was founded back in 2009 at a time when there were big changes taking place in how people consume media. There was an almighty shift occurring away from traditional print and over towards digital media. The term ‘social media didn’t even exist back then but it wouldn’t take long for multiple apps to be born and fundamentally change the way we communicate in all aspects of our lives.

I founded Love My Dress initially as a place to share beautiful and inspiring things that I discovered whilst planning my own wedding and essentially that core purpose and essence of the site remains today.

Every week we share real weddings and beautifully produced editorials to inspire our audience. We also share some great thought provoking insights and opinion pieces and I love to shine a spotlight on beautiful venues and supplier talent. I’m deeply passionate about supporting small creative businesses, so we have a great directory and more recently, we’ve introduced a shop to our collection of offerings too - with every item listed chosen by me personally. 

I have never been interested in or driven by trends. I simply want to share beautiful things and to encourage my audience to see weddings as an opportunity in our lives to connect, to experience  joy, love and celebration. 

Now, a lot has happened over the past 3 years that have spurred me on to produce this podcast. Firstly, I lost my father very unexpectedly in January 2020. Losing someone that you love certainly pushes you to evaluate your own life and consider what you want to achieve from it, but just a month after my dad’s funeral, I witnessed the wedding industry face overnight decimation as a result of covid. I’m not going to dwell on that period, but the experience of living through those times altered me profoundly. 

Once the chaos of that period had subsided, despite feeling exhausted and burnt out, I felt this absolute clarity and desire to steer my business in a fresh direction. I was eager to embark on a new chapter in evolution of my business and of Love My Dress - one that resonated more authentically with me. A Podcast felt absolutely perfect. 

One of my most poignant realisations that also emerged from that period, was the vital need for human connection and creativity in all of our lives. For a while, back in 2020 and 2021, we couldn’t gather, or touch or hug one another. We couldn’t party or dance or celebrate. It’s hard to believe that weddings were actually banned for many weeks. Throughout that time, it became evident to many of us, just how deeply important weddings are, not just as a milestone event in our lives, but as a reason for celebrating life itself. Life lost its luster without the ability to congregate and enjoy some merriment. But for me, it goes beyond that—this industry represents a vast creative ecosystem that contributes billions to the economy annually. It sustains diverse employment opportunities, fosters flexible self-employment (which is great for working parents), and enriches our lives immeasurably.

My love of weddings and all the incredible suppliers and venues who create wedding magic,  strengthened deeply throughout that time and so part of why I’m producing this podcast is so that I can write a love letter to this industry. I feel really driven to raise this industry and the many wonderful businesses and people who work within it. To me, these individuals are truly remarkable.

I want to fill that void that I believe mainstream and legacy media often neglect. 
I'm dissatisfied with how the press often relegates weddings to mere fillers for their columns, and I'm weary with newspaper articles that undermine the value of weddings, solely promoting budget and high street options. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with these choices—I feature many such weddings on Love My Dress. However, budget and high street are not the only options.  There is a vast community of creative talent who are worth the money they charge and I want to help my audience understand the reasons why. 

I want to lift the lid and take a deep dive into what it’s like to be a wedding business owner and entrepreneur. I want to honour the community of incredibly talented British designers and dressmakers who are preserving time honoured craftsmanship. I want to champion the photographers, videographers, planners, stylists, flowers growers and florists, stationers, cake makers, beauty specialists, celebrants, entertainers and many more, for creating magic and memories.  

I also want to remove stigma around issues dealt with every day by creative business owners, like mental health, business burnout and financial difficulty. And, on the the end of the spectrum - I want to make it cool to talk about and celebrate business successes.

The Love My Dress podcast will offer a fresh perspective. Instead of covering a different aspect of wedding planning each week, I’ll instead be sharing the stories of some remarkable individuals - stories of how they discovered their creativity, of what drives them personally and professionally, stories of success and failure, of celebration and adversity and everything in between. 

Now, In this fast-paced, social media dominated era we are living in, it often feels as though we're in a constant race against time. But I’m on a mission to slow things down. Because of this, conversations with my guests will be long and explorative. EPISODES will typically run around an hour and 45 minutes long as this allows my guests and I to immerse ourselves fully in the moment, to explore nuances and uncover those hidden gems that might otherwise slip away when things feel more rushed. 

I  believe in the beauty of uninterrupted, meaningful conversations, and I’m driven by a passion for creating warm and welcoming spaces where individuals can share their stories freely and authentically. Stories will serve as the backbone of  this podcast.  For me,  stories are  the universal currency of our communication - they connect people across time, cultures, and experiences. They serve as a vital conduit for sharing knowledge and wisdom, they inspire us to do new things and take our own leaps of faith. Stories also foster empathy by allowing us to understand the joys and challenges of others so it has been important to me from the off that this Podcast adopt a storytelling format.  I mean, who doesn’t love a good story?

As for how the podcast will benefit you, I want more than anything, for you to be inspired, uplifted, and encouraged.  I want to foster a strong sense of pride and belonging within our wedding industry community. Additionally, I hope to motivate couples planning weddings to actively explore and engage with new suppliers, to support small businesses through online purchases, and, most importantly, to embrace the joy of planning and celebrating their weddings.

My hope is to ignite your curiosity and passion and maybe even take your own entrepreneurial leap of faith within the world of weddings.

This Podcast is very much set to become a much large part of what we do here at Love My Dress and I’m excited for what the future holds. 

I invite you to join me in savouring these episodes together. 

Please subscribe to the Love My Dress Podcast after listening to this trailer - and take a moment to set notifications so that you’re in the loop whenever we launch a new episode. . 

Episode 1 will be available from 8am on Tuesday 26th September. 

Thank you so much for listening - and I’ll see soon.