Indie Wed Chicago… our booth is alive!

Last summer I said yes to a project that I had no idea how much work would be required to make it a success… our first ever bridal show!  Indie Wed is Chicago’s newest and most unique bridal show and the second annual event went off without a hitch last weekend at the Ravenswood Event Center.  Several months before the show Matt took charge of the concept and design of the booth.  Not only was our booth going to represent Avery House, but also Smilebooth and our studio partners, I Do Films. The 8×16 space needed to be a show stopper while also accurately showing off each of our individual brands at the same time.

One day while browsing some of my favorite blogs, I came across this post from one of our very favorite photography companies out in Southern California who had just built a booth for a bridal show they participated in.  I knew then that I had found our inspiration. Nate and Jaclyn Kaiser of The Image is Found are awesome photographers that we look up to and admire and are absolutely brilliant when it comes branding, design, innovation and so many other things.  They also represent the Smilebooth in San Diego.   Simply put, we love following their work and hope to cross paths soon at the WPPI conference in Las Vegas coming up later this month.

Before design can begin you need a concept.  Ours happened to be natural wood with white and natural wood tones for the base colors.  We could then treat this as our canvas and use other colors coming from our prints, albums and the Smilebooth backdrop to make it pop.  Matt came up with several designs using google sketch-up. (He was engrossed in the program for several days and came out with not only our booth design but a design for our future home… if it ever gets built we will definitely post these ; ).  Because of time and space constraints, after finalizing the design, we called on a good friend of ours to head up the actual construction of the booth. Matt popped in over a span of two days to make slight adjustments and marvel at how quickly Dan turned the design into a reality.  This seriously would have easily taken Matt a week to build.

Because we were building the booth off site we needed it to be easily movable and able to assemble and disassemble in under an hour.  Dan came to the rescue again with modular construction and all we needed was a few extra hands, clamps and a screw gun. We were so excited with the final product. It was a proud moment when we finally took a step back when it was completely finished to take the pictures below. Also, enjoy the fun video made by our pals at I Do Films!

credit for photo above goes to Jaclyn Simpson

So a huge thank you to The Image is Found for raising the bar for bridal show booths and showing us all how it’s supposed to be done! We also want to give a shout out to our amazing album company, Cypress, for creating all of our beautiful albums and boxes. They are the BEST! We had so much fun at the show and appreciate all of you who came out to say hi!

Here are a few pics from Matt’s concept and construction process. One of my favorite things about our booth is that we found a way to repurpose all of the pieces so none of it is going to waste.