National Stationery Show Gets Married: Why?
I was somewhat taken aback but hardly surprised that the National Stationery Show will partner with Get Married to produce a series of bridal theme displays. The National Stationery Show is scheduled for May 17 through May 20 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City.
I must admit that I am not familiar with Get Married’s pedigree, but a cursory review of their website suggests that it offers little more than the myriad of online wedding sites that populate cyberspace. What does Get Married have to offer that The Knot or the Wedding Channel or indeed a boatload of other wedding portals don’t have? These hyped-up wedding portals are designed to sell, not inform. Their value is largely determined by the all-powerful advertising dollar, not relevance to the consumer or the craftspeople and designers who make fine stationery products.
While I applaud The National Stationery Show planners for enlisting the help of a “wedding planner” to help showcase bridal theme displays, why did they select an online wedding website? I view this as a sell-out to online resellers and online printers who are rapidly undermining the craftsmanship of fine stationery and custom invitations. The National Stationery Show organizers should be chastised for promoting distribution channels rather than the artisans who make fine stationery and invitations and the experienced stationers who sell them.
Online wedding websites should be judged by their advertising sponsors, the products they promote and the distribution channels found on their website. Specifically, I judge the integrity of wedding portals by the number of “true” local businesses that are listed under local resources. For instance, Get Married, today listed six sources for local invitations and calligraphy in Connecticut on their website. Four and probably five of these “stationers” are national resellers or printers. Get Married is no different than The Knot or Martha Stewart Weddings who promote national resellers and printers as local resources. How sad it is that these website owners have so little regard for the online buyer who may be looking for an experienced stationer in their neighborhood and invitation designers and fine paper lines who would never consider selling invitations online.
In an era when our public leaders quibble over the definition of “is”, how can we expect website owners and search engines to agree that “local” refers to a business at a fixed location. An 800 or 888 prefix is not a local business. It is most unfortunate that online buyers searching for genuine local resources now have to sort through irrelevant, yes dishonest, search results that have been compromised by advertising fees paid to these wedding portals.
As a long-time visitor the National Stationery Show, I can’t wait to see the Eco-Chic wedding theme table promised by the organizers. I suspect that the “Eco-chic wedding” is just another questionable marketing ploy by the organizers to make us feel good about buying invitations that are produced from recycled paper and post-consumer waste. Like the marketing spin on local resources, I suspect that this is simply Greenwash spin that only serves to discourage leading craftspeople where concern for the environment is simply an integral part of their everyday life.