A Brief History
The Wedding Stationery Gallery has been around since 2003. It started life as a custom coded site that had a couple of dozen dedicated suppliers who advertised their products under categories. Customers were able to add free samples to a wishlist and then “checkout” with their delivery address. The suppliers were automatically sent an email with a special link that enabled them to print off a covering letter and post the samples to prospective customers. The site enjoyed number 1 positions on Google for a while with ‘holy grail’ search terms such as “Wedding Invitations” and “Wedding Stationery. As a result the site enjoyed thousands of visitors every month.
Unfortunately, the site went into decline, partly due to a lack of investment on our part but mainly due to the increase in postal costs since 2003. The cost of a second class stamp was around 20p in 2003 and has more than doubled to where it is today. This meant that the free wedding invitations model that was in place by nearly every wedding stationery business at the time was becoming difficult to maintain, especially for the smaller businesses that were the mainstay of the Wedding Stationery Gallery model.
In 2008, the site was transformed into a blog about Wedding Invitations and other Wedding Stationery and a couple of us blogged daily about invitation designs we liked. The site began to increase in popularity again and the visitor levels began to increase again. But boy oh boy a blog sure is a difficult to beast to feed to keep healthy. Like so many blogs it had a lively buoyant start and then became another neglected blog that litter the web today.
So here we are today, and yet another reinvention for the Wedding Stationery Gallery (Now called Wedding Invitation Gallery). We are taking it back in time to 2003 to build a portfolio of categories and designs to feature wedding stationery designs we like. There are some big differences this time however. No free samples, just links out to the suppliers who can take care of the samples and customer service however they choose. It will take some time to rebuild the categories with the fresh designs of today but we have a small team of enthusiastic writers and are adding a least one design a day to the site and on a mission to make it as popular as it once was 10+ years ago.
Who are We?
We are wedding stationers ourselves. Back in 2003 we were called Chapter One Wedding Stationery and are now called Olivia Samuel. You will find our designs throughout the gallery but this a little pet project on the side which will hopefully benefit us and our fellow wedding designers at the same time (especially those who do not have the budget to advertise with Google or take out large feature ads in the high street bridal mags). Our overall aim is to create a gallery of wedding invitation designs which offers strong organic search engine positioning under very specific themes so that all suppliers on the site can benefit from a shared supply of quality referrals.
I am a stationer. How do I get featured?
We have a small team of writers who write up the invitation descriptions and aim to add at least one new design to the site every day. Your best chance of getting featured is to make yourselves known to us by following us on Twitter and then Tweeting us to draw our attention. We never charge to list designs. We may offer some sort of paid sponsorship model in the future but this will only be to help companies make their designs stand out; it will never be a prerequisite for listing a design. If we love a design that we find we will always list it for free.