by Stacey Allen

Created on: August 28, 2008   Last Updated: January 10, 2012

Over the years, wedding magazines have been a wonderful source of ideas and information for many a bride-to-be. From the moment a woman is engaged, it is second nature to go out and stock up on wedding magazines and pore through the pages, looking for dress styles, hair styles, reception ideas, and even honeymoon destinations.

Before she knows it, the pile of magazines has multiplied like bunnies and all of the publications feature numerous dog-ears marking the things she likes. As the months progress, the dog-eared publications are either toted around to the florist for ideas or missing several pages as they are ripped out and taken to the hair dresser. When an interesting table setting is spied, the marker comes out and wedding favors end up noted by Post-it notes.

However, until recently the magazines had limited applicability outside of the idea-generation category. Yes, they were helpful in providing planning timelines and questions to ask a potential photographer. But unless you lived in a major city, most of the vendors had no bearing on your wedding plans.

Within the past few years, though, there has been an influx of locally-focused wedding magazines. Thanks to editors' realization that niche is key, geographically-based wedding publications have begun popping up like spring tulips. These geographically-based publications are coming from multiple sources as well. Large national organizations such as The Knot are seeing the potential in smaller, focused publications, and several upstart publications have begun to carve out their market share (my favorite example of which, Vermont Vows, was integral as I was planning my destination wedding).

These locally-focused wedding magazines not only have the beautiful dress and hair ideas, but they have salons and boutiques that actually may be within your driving range. The reception sites they feature are ones that you may be considering for your own wedding.

While it is fun to collect wedding magazines (and when your wedding is over, you may find that you're suffering from separation anxiety as you get rid of them), it is good practice to try and purchase the ones that have the most applicability to you and your specific circumstances. Whether your research for locally-based publications is done by bookstore browsing or trying to find local publications by doing an online search, when you find one that has vendors you may actually deal with, you won't regret it!

Happy planning!

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