The last twelve months have been HUGE for Rock n Roll Bride. We saw the magazine in physical stores, we worked with (and then ditched!) a external publishing company, and then we started our own! It also saw the last in-person class of The Blogcademy, and we signed up for massively exciting collaboration with the National Wedding Show! PHEW.

My highlight of 2015 was taking Rock n Roll Bride magazine from a small, self-published mag, to one sold in shops up and down the UK. Seeing it in WH Smiths for the first time (when I was on the cover no less!) was a feeling I can’t even describe. I went in with my mum on the first day it came out and she bought, like, 5 copies!

There have been ups and downs on the magazine journey. Most of you will know that in June, after producing three issues with another publishing company at the helm, we decided to break out on our own and start our own limited company to produce the entire thing ourselves again. Going from a team of around nine people to just three was obviously going to take some adjustment, and would mean that my work load tripled, but it was one billion percent the right decision.

Not only did we have complete control again (something I value very much, Rock n Roll Bride is my baby after all!) but having a much smaller team means there would be less overheads, which is super important if you actually want to make money!

In retrospect, the match with the publishing company was not a good one, but it’s not something I regret doing. If we hadn’t worked with them the magazine would have never, ever got into stores. In fact before we signed with them I was ready to pack it all in because I had no idea how to take it to the next level. Although the partnership didn’t work out how we expected, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity they gave us. Its helped our business develop in a direction that we probably would have never got to on our own.

Things have been moving on in leaps and bounds since then. Sales are increasing, the companies who are advertising with us are more in-line with the brand, and we were asked to partner up with the biggest wedding show in the country for next spring! Pretty amazing, considering we still work from home (which I love, #dailysweatpantparty for the win!) and our third team member, design wizard Shauna of We are Branch, is based 5000 miles away in Portland, meaning we do everything via email! 

Bigger and better, onwards and upwards! I am so excited to see what happens with the magazine in 2016. I didn’t start this blog to eventually turn it into a print edition, but now that its happened, it just feels SO RIGHT.

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You might remember that in July I went to Marrakech with Gala and Shauna. Well, I loved it so much that I convinced my sister Rachel (who’s getting married next July) that we totally needed to do a winter sun vacation for “wedding décor research”.

It might sound like a ridiculous indulgence, but when we actually looked into it properly it wasn’t such a mental idea. She wants to buy or hire lots of Morrocan-style throws, rugs and lamps for the wedding but we were quite frankly astounded at the cost. Even the hire places we looked into had a minimum spend that was over what she wanted to shell out on décor and this way she gets to keep it all afterwards!

Our flights were only £120 and we’re staying in a much less fancy Riad than I did last time meaning that the whole trip is costing us less than £300 each. Plus it’s going to be a really fun pre-wedding adventure.

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I just wanted to pop by quickly today to say HAPPY WEDDING DAY to my bestie Carly (and, I guess, her fiancé Tom – ha!) The photo in this post was taken twelve years ago. My goodness, when did we get so old!?

Carly was the very first person I met at university. We were put in the same house and our rooms were right opposite each other. We bonded over our mutual love of tea (true story) and the fact that we both liked to party just a little too hard – oh the stories I could tell!

I don’t have a whole heap of friends, but even after all this time she is still one of my favourite people on the planet. We always joke that our lives couldn’t be more different. She’s a police officer in London (!) and I’m well, me, but it doesn’t matter one little bit. Whenever we do see each other it’s like nothing has changed, we chat at a million miles an hour and laugh about the most ridiculous things! She saw me at my worst and we even have matching tattoos that we got when we left uni, aww.

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Last year, my beautiful friend Jo lost her battle with depression. I miss her so much and not a day goes past when I don’t think about her. Once the dust settled after her death, her boyfriend Chris and I had long chats about him doing an project in her memory, with proceeds going to charity. On Thursday, what would have been Jo’s 31st birthday, he launched The Salvage Project.

Chris explains the project better than I ever could. The ‘About Jo’ section of the website reads, “I refuse to dwell on her illness as it simply didn’t define who she was to anyone. Jo struggled with a variety of mental health issues throughout my time with her. She hid it from everyone with the exception her closest family and I.

For the purpose of narrative and facts, only: Jo took her own life in February 2014.

I saw this project develop whilst she was alive and, for Jo, ‘The Salvage Project’ was an escape. It was a ‘place’ she felt like she had a real purpose and somewhere that she saw a future. I’ll always remember her face when we’d finish a certain part of a logo or website. She’d bounce and clap and squeal with excitement. I remember, she used to uncontrollably waddle around like a penguin when she was excited.”

“It was ‘her’ project. The Salvage Project gave her a sense of independence and a feeling of self worth. She’d learned to use side effects of her illness, such as attention to detail and perfectionism to create one of the few things she was genuinely proud of. This project contributed to moments where she was truly herself and I’m so grateful I was around to see how it made her feel.

From the start, we always referred to this as ‘The Salvage Project’. The word ‘Salvage’ took a much deeper interpretation when I started revisiting the project, after she passed away. Jo left behind mountains of her work including chests of beautiful jewellery and notes on the direction she wanted to take with business ideas and branding. Stepping into her office at our home was like stepping into a time capsule of her ‘happiest’ times.

To me, ‘Salvage’ refers to the act of scrambling through the aftermath of devastation to find, develop and launch a project she’d worked so hard towards. I wanted to ‘salvage’ my positive memories of her instead of ‘moving on’. I told myself that ‘If I can’t say goodbye to Jo, I want my memories of her to be from when she was at her happiest’.”

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