For Heather Reier, getting just the right shade of browny pink for her wedding invitations meant more work than flipping through pages of creamy sample invites at William Ashley.
After deciding that none of the hundreds of standard Pantone colours would do, she stood over a printer in the back room of his shop as he mixed her up a custom hue.
"Everything [else] was too purple, too pink or too brown," says Reier, who is the founder of ultracute Canadian beauty line Cake. Using her method of choosing a lipstick, she took samples of the ink and pearlized card stock outside to look at it in daylight.
"I say it's my Cake brain coming on," she says. "I treat my wedding the way I would treat a product launch. My mind works a little differently -- it's not a red or blue choice for me. I have a clear vision, so it's hard for me to waver."
No, Reier isn't one the now-archetypal "bridezillas" who alienates her family and screeches at the DJ. She's one of a new breed of bride who, whether because they work in an aesthetic industry or because they are avid design amateurs, see a wedding as the ultimate exercise in visual branding.
Diana Shin, an associate at Bliss Events, says her party-planning firm has found a niche catering to the aesthetics-obsessed.
"Brides in general are getting more interested in those details," Shin says. "Especially for women who work in the design industries, it's about the look, the colours, the themes, the paper -- the really tactile things."
Indeed, the branded bride is usually slightly older and often well established in her work life. She sees the typical cornerstones of a wedding as a mere template in which to imprint her very well-defined tastes.
For Report on Business magazine photo editor Clare VanderMeersch, who took her married name Jordan last weekend, the paint-by-numbers wedding of an ingenue was not an option. Where Reier sees a product launch, she saw it as an issue of her own personal magazine.
"A wedding should be reflective of you. It shouldn't be generic. It does take a certain kind of person to art-direct a wedding," she said before her big day. "I do get obsessed with details -- I'm trying to create a day to remember."
And just like creating a magazine or a beauty line, these brides thrive on deadline pressure. "I haven't changed my personality -- I'm used to working under stress."
Jordan's vision started with the absolute opposite of the solitaire engagement ring. She designed it with her now-husband Gerry Jordan and her design friend Paul McLure. The result is a very modern seven-diamond design in which the two-banded engagement ring and the single-band wedding ring will be welded together after the big day.
"I love the idea that the design is not complete until we're married," she said.
By the time Jordan walked into Catherine Cooper's Urban Bride dress salon in Toronto, the clotheshorse and shoe fanatic had three accessories around which the rest of the wedding would fit. After the ring, there was a long double-stranded pearl pendant bought in Britain, the location of the wedding, and a pair of killer purple Manolo Blahnik heels. The iridescence of the heels inspired Jordan's peacock theme, which showed up everywhere from the invites to the wallpaper table runners.
After a few designs and redesigns and innumerable fittings -- off-the-shoulder was ditched because it didn't suit the gems -- Cooper and Jordan created a ruched-bodice gown with a low V-neck to show off the jewellery and a flowy not-too-long hem to show off the heels.
On the day of her last fitting, no ruche was left unmonitored.
