Bonita is the career advisor for the Arabian Academy of Wedding and event planning, based in Dubai. Before joining the Academy Bonita worked with the UAE’s leading wedding inspiration website BrideClubme.com in their advertising sales division, she has a media background and is passionate about helping both new and established wedding businesses succeed. Today Bonita shares her round up of last week’s networking luncheon with Chelsea Lavere, which she co-hosted on behalf of our Arabian Academy.
Last week I had the privilege of talking to the amazing Chelsea Lavere at a networking and education session here in Dubai.
It’s always daunting meeting one of the wedding industry’s top personalities. Chelsea’s CV reads like a dream come true for any wedding entrepreneur.
She started out as a wedding photographer specializing in styled shoots for Bit of Ivory Photography and Orchestrated Stylised Shoots before starting Tidewater and Tulle, the number 1 wedding blog in Virginia USA and is the founding co-owner of Aisle Society which features the wedding industry’s top blogs globally including Burnett’s Boards, Bridal Musings, and B Loved to name a few.
When we heard that she was coming to Dubai it was a chance to invite both established wedding planners and some of our local students to a networking luncheon and Q&A session at the Arabian Ranches Golf Club, our hosts for the morning.
Chelsea and I spoke at length about her journey as a wedding entrepreneur. What is apparent is that Chelsea is an astute marketer and business strategist for anyone who is in the wedding business and would be a great mentor to any wedding planner, stylist or photographer.
We touched on some of the more difficult topics we face as an industry, such as to why you need a blog on your website as a wedding planner and why using Instagram isn’t enough of a platform to use as a tool to show potential customers what you are all about and showing off your work. Chelsea also answered questions about doing styled shoots and how to collaborate as an industry to produce some excellent images and how important it is to ensure that those amazing photographs are properly accredited to both vendors and the photographer to ensure that everyone gets the necessary mileage of such a collaboration.
Matchology is a new tool on Aisle Society which makes it easy for both wedding photographers and stylists to submit styled shoots to the blogs listed on the website. Chelsea gave us a quick run-down of how it works and how simple it is to get published on the blog relevant to the style of the images – a really innovative piece of technology developed specifically for the wedding industry.
All in all, it was a fabulous morning and we really enjoyed hearing from an outstanding lady with some interesting insights as to how we could really grow the industry locally and it was great to catch up with fellow industry pros and students.
We’ve managed to do a Facebook live session, so you can catch up here.
Photography by Velvet Images
