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It took an hour for my lightbulb moment to come to fruition…

It’s taken a little longer for The Wedding Reporter to flourish and now here I am, with a year of being in business tucked under my belt.

Every single one of the last 368 days has been a learning curve that I have thoroughly relished. I’ve met some amazing people, collaborated on some staggering projects and been afforded the most spectacular opportunities. I’ve written about eight beautiful weddings as I watched eight gorgeous couples embark on the journey of marriage.

I’d estimate that in the last year I’ve penned over 60,000 words on weddings alone. If you take into account the boutique openings, launch events, and other extracurricular activities that I’ve documented, that number is probably enough for quite a hefty novel.

In the early days, I was indebted to the generosity of others to help guide me through the turbulent waters of the wedding industry. The list of people I probably owe at least a cupcake to is inexhaustible, but there are a select few without whom I wouldn’t have managed to come as far as I have in such a short amount of time. Please excuse me whilst I have my Gwyneth Paltrow moment…

Rachel Southwood, founder of Wedding Ideas magazine, was an absolutely invaluable champion of my hair-brained scheme and incredibly patient with my naivety. The encouragement of Ali Lovegrove during our first photo shoot together reassured me I wasn’t entirely nuts. My good friend Anna has been unrelenting in her praise and support since day one. Abi and Lisa from Marry Me in Somerset provided much needed encouragement, particularly when it came time to leave my job. Annabel from Love My Dress feels like some sort of Georgian-style benefactor of my little literary service and the days when I am featured on her blog continue to be the best for site stats. The absolute conviction that Laura Caudery has in The Wedding Reporter has been phenomenal and my life would be poorer without her (and her sage business advice) in it.

And then there’s Leah ‘Spicy’ Spicer.

I’m not joking when I stand on my stall at wedding fairs and tell people that I’m just the nerd that writes the words and she’s the genius that makes them look so glorious. The Wedding Reporter would be meaningless without a tangible product at the end of it; people want to invest in something they can keep. This was paramount in my mind when I started to think about how to present wedding reports but nobody really “got” what I wanted until I came across Leah.

It is her creative ingenuity that designed my beautiful flyers, my glossy brochures, my blog and of course the stunning wedding report books in every version there has ever been. It is also Leah that has been working away on my behalf to give The Wedding Reporter a much-needed virtual facelift, more of which you will be seeing very soon indeed.

I can’t tell you what the next 12 months will bring, as the previous year is testament to the fact that you never know what will fall into your lap. I do know that The Wedding Reporter will continue to scour the country for the most exquisite weddings, reporting back from the matrimonial frontline. I do know that I will be in need of more notebooks as I scribble thousands more words down to capture the moment perfectly. I do know that I will be writing about at least 16 couples as they vow to spend the rest of their lives loving each other and that, quite frankly, is all that this has ever been about.