Our Well-Intentioned, Expensive, Pinterest Fail Mistake

Oh friends.

This is not a happy blog. This is a “did that seriously just happen” kind of blog. It’s honest, and about a mistake we made.

This year, as many of you know, we’ve been really working on our branding and marketing to our ideal clients. And we’ve gotten some of the most amazingly kind and wonderful brides and grooms – people we not only feel honored to be working with, but the kind of people that we really, truly care about. They’ve become our friends, and part of the RAD wedding family. We weren’t able to send anything but cards to our 2014 clients due to our crazy move, so this year we wanted to step up our gift-giving game (since giving gifts is our love language!).

And we knew, this Christmas, that we wanted to not only make the brides and grooms of this year feel all our love and appreciation … but also NEXT year’s brides and grooms. Our gift for this year’s couples wouldn’t work for next year’s because we use the photos we take at their weddings, and we racked our brains to try and figure out something that could be useful, was personalized, and fit in with our brand.

Then – the inspiration lightning fairy zapped and wah-lah: the perfect idea came to us!

Coffee cups!!

With their wedding date on them!

Oh gosh, LOVE IS BREWING!

How adorable is that??!

We spent several days carefully hand-drawing on the mugs, baking them, drying them, lovingly packaging them with bubble wrap and branding colored tissue paper, and waiting in the horrendous post office lines to ship them …

We LOVED the whole process … the excitement, the creativity, just knowing our RAD brides and grooms would just love them.

So we eagerly waited for the emails, texts, posts and photos to come in … and when they did, we were absolutely heartbroken.

And at least half of them arrived chipped, broken or literally in pieces.

Pinterest fail to the MAX.

Instead of overjoyed, excited photos … we saw photos like this.

Definitely not the excited, happy, we-feel-so-loved feelings we were aiming for.

I’m not quite sure where we went wrong. Did we need more bubble wrap? Smaller boxes? Bigger boxes? Different mugs? Did we bake them too long? Should we have shipped FedEx or UPS rather than the Post Office?

< sigh >

On the bright side, our clients have all been super gracious about receiving a box of porcelain shivs from us for Christmas and Hanukkah (haha!), but we’re still a bit heartbroken about this well-intentioned, expensive mistake (even though we don’t quite know where we went wrong!).

We know it’s technically the thought that counts, but … no, just no. Haha!

Good thing we have an entire year to think of something ELSE to give our 2017 couples for Christmas, because this Pinterest Fail Project won’t be repeating next year!!!