Well, it’s all been a crazy experience these last 12 months, hasn’t it?

This time last year, we were preparing for our Doncaster wedding exhibition at the Racecourse, with tonnes of tickets downloaded and just off the back of a successful Leeds show, it looked to be our best wedding exhibition yet. And despite the impending first Lockdown, we still safely welcomed hundreds of brides and grooms through the doors and our Doncaster show was a great success. Soon after that show, as you know, the world stopped and everything came to a halt. We all had to get used to a ‘new normal’ and life hasn’t quite been the same since. Our Autumn shows were postponed, but we remained hopeful that we would get a show in 2021, and we still are! Vaccines are being rolled out thick and fast and things are looking a little brighter for the wedding industry, especially now we have a roadmap. So what have we been doing all this time, with no wedding exhibitions to plan or suppliers to book in? Well, as you know, planning and preparation never stop when you run your own business and it’s important to be positive and overcome new hurdles as they arise. Our first hurdle was hosting the I Do Wedding Awards; which should have gone ahead last May. Through lots of trial and error, research and planning, we managed to successfully pull off the virtual awards for the very first time in November 2020 and it couldn’t have gone better! We even managed to raise money for NHS Charities Together to support frontline staff and volunteers in the good fight against Covid. We’re still waiting for venues to open so we can arrange dates for winners to collect their awards and also have their very important photo taken in front of our gorgeous I Do backdrop to go in the 2021/22 edition of I Do Magazine. We will keep you posted on that one. As well as that, we’ve also been beavering away on a brand new shiny I Do Wedding Directory, launching very soon. We can’t wait for you to see it; it’s going to be very swish and easy to navigate. The online shop is being revamped and we’re refreshing our exhibitions website to make these work better for you. And of course, now Boris has laid out his roadmap to things opening up again, we can finally starting booking suppliers into our shows and promoting them to couples! We will continue to keep a close eye on what Mr Johnson says regarding mass events as the year goes on, but with a pencilled in date of 21st June for restrictions to be totally eased, we’re confident that Autumn shows will go ahead as planned. Plus, we are ALREADY seeing couples download tickets for both Sheffield and Derby, which are 7 months away! It’s crazy!