Welcome to the latest episode of Behind The Print, where we bring you the creative stories of industry leaders shaping the world of professional printing. In this episode of Behind The Print, we’re joined Mary Grace and Mathew Wooten, organizers of Simple Elegance Bridal Show. With over 10 years of bridal show experience, Mary and Mathew share how they’ve used print to spread their message before, during, and after their show.

Below, you’ll find the transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity to ensure easy reading. If you want the full, authentic experience, make sure to check out the video attached below.

Connor Shields: Welcome back to Behind the Print Podcast, where we feature industry leaders and uncover the creative minds and their businesses within the world of professional printing. Our mission is to provide you with inspiring actionable resources that elevate your business projects and accelerate your journey to excellence in profit and in print. Today’s episode is Have a Voice through Print Media, and joining me here today are the organizers of Simple Elegance Bridal Show, Mary Grace and Matthew Wooten. How you guys doing today?

Mathew & Mary: I’m doing well, thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Connor: Thank you for joining us. So if you guys are ready, let’s just dive right in. Sound good?

Mathew & Mary: That sounds fun.

Connor Shields: So who do you guys typically serve as a bridal show organizer?

Mathew & Mary: So there’s two categories. Obviously the, the vendors who we’re trying to connect, and the brides or grooms – typically brides to be who are looking for wedding vendors for their special day. Our job really is to make that connection, and allow those groups of people to meet and interact and have a place where they can get to know each other a little bit, to do some interacting and potentially the brides can discuss whether their dates available. So we’ve been doing the show for 10 years. Sometimes we forget that not everybody’s familiar with it, but our show has a reputation for being a smaller, more intimate show to where there’s there’s no cattle call feel.

“Our job really is to make that connection, and allow those groups of people to meet and interact and have a place where they can get to know each other a little bit, to do some interacting and potentially the brides can discuss whether their dates available.”

Connor Shields: It’s more of a personal approach than a business approach.

Mathew & Mary: Yes

Connor Shields: So what are some typical problems that you guys or your clientele run into when putting together a show

Mathew & Mary: There’s different things. Last minute cancellations from vendors. We’re obviously trying to print programs ahead of time and have the room layout. We take special care to make sure that when we do the vendor layout, that it makes sense. If someone cancels then we’ve got to potentially reprint programs and communicate with all the vendors to let them know that there’s going to be changes.

Another challenge is making sure that we get the magazines printed and delivered in time. Obviously, you guys print our magazines for us. And, making sure that that Mary Grace has the layout and design done and the articles completed in time to get the magazines printed and out. We give them out at the show, we use them to advertise for the show ahead of time with the exception of this special edition that we’re printing right now.

Connor Shields: Okay, so you kind of already did answer my next question, so how do you go That’s fine. How do you guys go about solving these problems?

Mathew & Mary: Oh goodness. It totally depends, we try to take that long breath, and depending on the show, we’ll have vendors that we have to tell we were full  “sorry we didn’t have room”, but then we’ll keep them on a list if we have a last minute cancellation, and it certainly has happened more than once. We’ve had to go to a vendor like one or two days before the show and say “Hey, would you still be interested in participating in the show tomorrow? Can you be ready in time?” That’s typically not a huge problem.

There’s also things that come up at the shows that we want to make sure we deal with right away. We have a DJ at each show or an M.C. that plays music continuously. If it’s so loud that the vendors nearby can’t communicate to their potential clients, we’re, dealing with that on the spot. We try to make ourselves available during the shows, and we have a vendor meeting at the beginning of the shows specifically. One of the things we talk about is, “hey, if anyone has any issues, if there’s anything that’s wrong, if you need anything, let’s deal with it today. We don’t want you to go away unhappy with the event.”

So it’s just being flexible. Being flexible and figuring out how to handle things. Since we’ve been doing the show for 10 years, we have gotten familiar with what the things are that come up and how to deal with them.

Connor Shields: So how do you guys stand out from other bridal show organizers?

Mathew & Mary: I think there’s different people that love to shop exclusively at places like Walmart or Costco at Sam’s. They, want that experience. Then there’s other people that like to shop small and local, and they like that experience. It’s not that one is better than the other, and we try to stress that. It’s not like we’re trying to say “Look at us. We’re so fantastic that our shows are small and intimate.” It just depends on what you like. We attract the vendor and the attendee who likes the smaller, more intimate feel where they have a chance to make connections.

It’s not necessarily about us as organizers so much as the show that we, or that Mary Grace really has built. Over time, we’ve built and maintained a reputation for the small local field.  Where people have that little bit of extra time and the pace is slow enough that it has a small town feel. That’s the difference and its not that one’s better than the other. It’s just one’s better than the other for a certain type of person.

Connor Shields:  Can you tell me about any major milestones or accomplishments that have defined simple, elegant bridal show?

“Over time, we’ve built and maintained a reputation for the small local field.  Where people have that little bit of extra time and the pace is slow enough that it has a small town feel. That’s the difference and its not that one’s better than the other. It’s just one’s better than the other for a certain type of person.”

Mathew & Mary: Oh yeah. In fact I’ve got a magazine sitting right here so I can reference exactly what it is. So this corner of Tennessee is, is known as the Tri-Cities. Its Johnson City, Kingsport and Bristol. We’ve been voted Tri-C City’s Best Small bridal show by the Johnson City Press. So that was a special monument, it was so special to receive that nomination.

Connor Shields: You’ve been doing it for 10 years now.

Mathew & Mary: Sure. Mary Grace is saying it’s a good sign obviously, when you have vendors that come back. If you only have vendors one time and then your next show is a completely new set of vendors, then that might be a bad sign. But probably most of our, wedding vendors are return vendors. We started the show here in Jonesboro, Tennessee, and we’ve done shows in Knoxville, Tennessee, Morristown, and Bristol. These are cities that are an hour, an hour and a half apart. And vendors will travel, vendors from Jonesboro. So that makes us feel like we’re doing something right.

Mary Grace is bringing up the fact that one thing that we do from the very beginning, we do prize giveaways at the show. And after the show prize drawings and people get prize drawing entry forms to enter to win. And they can enter to win whatever they want. It’s not  like they’re drawn out of one big hat. They enter to win each different prize, whatever ones they choose. But the thing that she’s referring to is we give extra prize drawing entries away for getting the initials of the vendors at the show. We have a list in the program of all the vendors. Depending on how many vendors we have we’ll give one extra prize drawing entry for every three sets of initials or, so they’ll have so many extra chances to win by getting initials and what, and what that is.

The reason that’s good is because it gives the vendors a chance to see more people. Then by giving the attendees incentive to get initials from everyone at the show, that puts the attendees in front of their booth and gives them a chance to make a good impression. Maybe give their elevator speech or, qualify a lead, give them a handout or whatever.

Connor Shields: How have you used the magazines to elevate or promote your message?

Mathew & Mary: We print our magazines with you guys and have been doing that for years now. I guess it’s been about 10 years now.

We use the magazines to promote the show. We give them out ahead of the show. We distribute them to local businesses so people can pick them up, look through, and then we also hand them out at the, at the shows. We have advertisements for local businesses and wedding vendors and styled shoots that Mary Grace organizes throughout the year. She brings together local wedding professionals to do the photo shoots and then those photos  get used in social media to promote all the vendors involved and then go in the magazines to do the same.

There’s articles written by local wedding professionals. You guys have always done a fantastic job printing the magazines. We had the one that that you guys are working on right now. The centerfold needed to be all one image and connected and look good.

Your staff contacted us. Mary Grace had uploaded as two separate images. They said, “Hey  put a note in asking to make sure that it looked good in the centerfold of the magazine” and someone contacted us and said “Hey it probably would be better to go ahead and upload that as one image so that we can figure it out.” And that was really helpful. Mary Grace is saying that she’s excited about the current special issue that’s being printed right now. It’s a beauty and diversity theme. We really want to celebrate multiculturalism and show that diversity is one thing that, that makes our country great and that we see the value in all people that live here. For people around my age who went to Sunday school when they were little, probably remember this phrase: “red, yellow, black and white, we’re all precious in his sight”. Does that sound familiar?

Connor Shields: That sounds familiar, yes.

“We really want to celebrate multiculturalism and show that diversity is one thing that, that makes our country great and that we see the value in all people that live here. For people around my age who went to Sunday school when they were little, probably remember this phrase: “red, yellow, black and white, we’re all precious in his sight”. Does that sound familiar?”

Mathew & Mary: Maybe you don’t have to be a certain age. But I definitely took that to heart. People of all different colors and back grounds, we see the value in featuring that.

Connor Shields: Can you tell me about any major challenges or obstacles you’ve encountered?

Mathew & Mary: Oh boy. COVID.

Connor Shields: I can imagine. I think that’s been an obstacle for a lot of people.

Mathew & Mary: COVID was a pretty big obstacle for in-person events. Our last show before the COVID shutdown was March of 2020.

Connor Shields: That’s when it all went down.

Mathew & Mary: Right? It was toward the beginning of March and I think that like back when things were getting bad in Washington State and we were all looking around waiting for the shoe to drop. Then that show in March we had low attendance and everybody at the show was just kind of like “uhoh. This is real, this is gonna happen, and what’s gonna happen” I think that stopped us from doing the fall shows. And then we talked about solving problems after that. I guess it must have been the following  February and March shows we had a whole new set of… I don’t want to call it restrictions, but different policies in place. After that we started scheduling when people buy tickets, they used to just buy tickets for the show, and then we started selling tickets for people to schedule their arrival time and only selling a certain number of tickets per time block. Then they were allowed to stay as long as they wanted, but the idea was that we didn’t want to have all the attendees show up at the beginning. We only sold so many tickets for the first hour and so many tickets for the second hour, and so many tickets for the third hour.

We had face coverings to give away and we had hand sanitizer at registration.  Of course we wore face coverings at the at registration too. But probably the scheduling arrival times was the biggest to help promote social distancing back then. That was one of the biggest obstacles. We never keep anybody from coming, but it certainly encourages that if they schedule that, then we don’t typically have a problem.

Connor Shields: So sort of a different question for you guys. If you guys had a completely free day to spend however you’d like, how would you spend it?

Mathew & Mary: I guess we’re pretty old and boring. Mary Grace says just relaxing and watching TV. She’d probably watch reruns of Charmed or something like that. And that’s funny because I love being with Mary. She would spend the day relaxing and watching TV and, I would spend my day with Mary Grace.

Connor Shields: Nothing wrong with just taking a personal day to watch some tv. I’ll probably be getting into that this weekend, to be honest. One last question for you guys. How can our listeners get in touch with you to learn more or collaborate with you on a project?

Mathew & Mary:  So the simplest, easiest way to remember probably is simpleelegancebridalshow.com. And they can just contact us through the website. They can email simpleelegancetn@yahoo.com. Or find us on Facebook at Simple Elegance TN. And then we’re on YouTube at Simple Elegance Bridal Show.

Connor Shields: Okay. Very good. Did you guys have any questions for me?

Mathew & Mary: Not off the top of my head,

Connor Shields: Well thank you guys for joining us, and I’d say that’s a wrap on another episode of Behind the Print. Thank you guys for joining us, and thank you to our listeners for joining us as we explore the artistry and innovation of the printing world. Remember, having a strong vision, building the right strategy, and using the right tools like print to amplify your message will make your brand stand out from the crowd.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to get your sample pack today from printing center usa.com and share it with your fellow business enthusiasts. Until next time, keep those creative sparks flying. And remember, there’s always more behind the print.

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