Guide to Setting Up a Bridal Accessories Business in the UK
7 TOOLS WE USE TO HELP BB RUN SMOOTHLY
If you’ve ever wondered how things run around here or perhaps you’ve been thinking about starting up your own blog, or maybe you already have a blog and want to know what tools you can use to improve how you run it then today’s post is for you! After our reader survey we had quite a lot of questions about how we manage the blog and we’ll be talking more on how to start a blog soon but for now we wanted to share with you our favourite tools we use to keep Bespoke Bride running smoothly, we’re talking software, apps and editing effects, so get settled in!
1.We Use wordpress to run the blog
To strip it way back to basics Bespoke Bride is ran through WordPress, we’re going to be sharing a lot more on how the blog got started around here soon plus how much it actually costs to start and run a blog but for now, if you’re thinking of starting up your own blog then we highly recommend WordPress! It’s really simple to use and has a lot of flexibility! Our site is custom built now but when we first started out we had a theme from ThemeForest which is also a great place to get a professional looking blog that you can edit and tweak to suit your style!
2.Shopify to run Bespoke Bride Shop
When we launched our shop last year we were faced with a lot of options of how to actually build the shop, should we hire developers to custom code it? Or should we take the easier (and cheaper route) and set up a shop using a service. We opted for the latter and went with Shopify, this enabled us to build a shop by choosing a theme that we liked, we could then upload our own products, choose our prices, keep stock and track our sales and statistics with them! It’s really a brilliant service and has everything we need! There’s no commission on sales either, just a monthly fee.
3. Lightroom to edit our photos
A big part of Bespoke Bride is the images and I would say that we shoot 90% of the image content ourselves, not only does this require styling, adjusting the lighting and photographing everything ourselves it also requires editing the photos too once we’ve shot them. I like to import all of the photos into Adobe Lightroom and then I use the A Beautiful Mess Lightroom actions to edit them (our favourite is Leona). It makes the whole process a lot of quicker and it means that all of our photos have a consistent ‘look’ to them, which we always aim to be light and bright!
4. A Color Story to edit our iphone photos and videos
Of course there is also a lot of times when we’re using our iphones to shoot photos and videos for behind the scenes or for instagram stories. We always like to use the A Color Story app to edit these, there are literally hundreds of filters in this app depending on the look that you’re going for with your photos and it’s fun having a play around and seeing which ones are your faves! They also have great colourful gradient effects and lens flairs if you want to give your image a little something extra!
5. Snapseed for touching up
I like the Snapseed app because it allows me to edit certain parts of a photo on my phone. For example if I’ve shot a photo and the there’s a dark shadow in the background I can lighten that shadow up so it doesn’t look as harsh, or I can increase the saturation on certain parts of the image to make the colours pop more!
6. Mosaico for planning our instagram feed
I don’t know about you but I’m very particular about the look of our instagram feed (I think most people are nowadays), for example, I would never post two pink pictures next to each other haha so with that lovely colour OCD living inside of me I decided to get an app called Mosaico that would let me plan photos for our feed and arrange what images could go where. It also lets you write the captions for your images ready so that when the time comes to share them you can just hit the little share button in the app and it copies the caption you already wrote ready for you to just paste it in! It works great for me and helps me feel more organised with our Instagram. I think A Color Story which I mentioned earlier has this feature built into it now too which is awesome! It’s also worth noting, that we switched to a business instagram account so that we could get stats on when our followers are normally active to get maximum reach with our images.
7. Tailwind for Pinterest
Emily uses this tool to help us schedule the images from our blog getting pinned onto our relevant Pinterest boards, again it lets you choose what time that they get pinned so we can always ensure that our images are going out to Pinterest at the right time for maximum exposure to our followers. It’s so handy to be able to sit down at any time and schedule the pins knowing that you don’t have to sit up at like 10pm and pin them manually, it saves a lot of time and effort!
With all that said the blogging world is certainly a fast paced one and we always like to keep on our toes and try new things, there are always new apps cropping up so be sure to keep your eyes out for ways to work smarter not harder! xx
