Southern Weddings

My job title at Southern Weddings is Creative Director, which basically means I do a lot of… creative things. And I write a lot of emails. Come see what a typical day in my life is like!

9:12am I arrive at the Southern Weddings office. I am reliably 5-15 minutes late to work, but I almost always stay 15-30 minutes past closing time, so I figure it evens out in the end :)

9:15am Laptop is on, and SW email, SW blog, and Twitter tabs are open. I always check the blog first thing to make sure our first post went out on time, to approve and respond to any comments as necessary, and to double check the second post. Since, as a rule, I don’t check work email after work, I generally have between 20-30 emails in my inbox each morning, but I don’t mind!

9:20am I always start the morning by cruising through my inbox and tackling the easy ones first – forwarding real wedding interviews that came in to Nicole, downloading new real wedding images from photographers, etc. Then I go through emails from other SW ladies. Lastly, I’ll look at and respond to anything that seems urgent. Submissions, less urgent emails, and more complicated emails I usually leave until later in the day.

My pomegranate tote bag has been used almost every day since I bought it my junior year of college. Five years later, it’s still going strong! Also, I prefer to work barefoot, since I’m usually sitting in the pretzel position at my desk. On the right you can see my favorite notepad, which I keep next to my laptop to write notes throughout the day!

10:30am Staff meeting time! Lara, Nicole, and Alexia (our fall intern) gather around my desk, since I’m holding the speaker phone with Marissa and Kristin. As usual, we go around the circle with updates, cheering on M & K’s ad progress and swooning over any new editorial or graphic elements N & I are working on. Today we also started planning out some V5 launch items, such as our blog countdown posts, postcard send-outs, and — wait for it — launch party! (WHOO!)

11:05am My Mom texts me in the middle of the staff meeting to say my wedding gown has arrived in Connecticut! There is much excitement from the SW gals.

11:15am We say goodbye to Marissa and Kristin and I hop back on email. A very exciting message from Brooke at Curious & Co came in with drafts of our newest print illustrated feature, so Lara and I spend some time discussing possible edits, and then I draft a long email back. While most emails are fired off pretty quickly, a detailed email like that can take up to twenty minutes to craft! I also review and respond to submissions (I try to send a quick note to everyone), file away SBOM applications, answer submission questions, correspond with photographers sending in high-res images for print, and send lots of messages back and forth with the SW gals.

On the right, the beautiful bulletin board above my desk! Look closely, and you can even see a few sneak peeks from two of our SWV5 editorials!!

12:35pm Lunch time! I am notoriously bad about eating a late lunch (3:30, anyone?), so today is a good day! I usually check my personal email or pin things while I eat :)

1:00pm I construct most of our Blue Ribbon Vendor galleries, which is kind of tedious but I actually really love doing it. I know this sounds ridiculously cheesy, but I really do get excited about the quality of our vendors, and searching their portfolios to find the ten images that will really make them sing! Today I’m working on getting Odalys Mendez’s portfolio put together (she’s a new addition from Georgia) and making some refreshes to Haley Sheffield’s listing. (BRV members can swap out their images every six months.) Both look so beautiful!

2:00pm Time to work on a real wedding post! I’m responsible for placing the images and adding tags (to help with search engine results). I also usually get to choose the post titles :)

On the left, my narrowed down selects from one print real wedding, and on the right, the view to the right of my desk! I like to keep the three most recent issues handy for reference, and of course, my etiquette book has pride of place.

2:45pm Post is in and I move downstairs to the “Big Mac” (as we like to call it) to do some selects on our print real weddings. Nicole and Lara, who handle most of the layout, have delegated this task to me because I am ruthless, which is entirely necessary when narrowing down 600+ images to about 30 for a print feature.

4:00pm Lara wants a fresh eye on some V5 layout puzzles that are proving to be challenging, so we scroll through the InDesign doc and talk through different options. We discuss, once again, how awesomely overwhelming it would be to see all of these features for the first time at once, in print!

4:35pm Back up to my desk to close out emails for the day.

5:12pm Done and done! I’m definitely tempted to stay longer and work on some more V5 text since I didn’t get to it earlier in the day, but a few last DIY wedding projects are calling my name :)

Curious about the days of other SW ladies? Check out Marissa and Nicole’s previous posts!

Written with love by Emily