Harmony Walton is the founder of The Bridal Bar and host of Bridal Bar Radio on iHeartRadio. In addition, Harmony has expanded the brand into her passion of destination weddings with Jet Fete, a destination wedding and honeymoon blogsite dedicated exclusively to weddings abroad and romance travel. With a vast celebrity clientele and over a decade of marketing experience in the luxury wedding industry, her company has been recognized around the world and featured in 100+ media outl ets, including The Associated Press, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Entertainment Tonight, People Magazine, Martha Stewart Weddings, and many more.
What is the fuel your creativity runs on? How do you ensure you have enough of this fuel? / What drives your visualization?
Creativity actually is the fuel that drives me. I love to come up with new and innovative ideas that I haven’t seen before and that’s what gets me excited about my work. The competitive nature in me pushes me to come up with unique ways of doing business and I don’t typically stop until I feel like I have several ways to help a client that they won’t have thought of before. It’s those “ah ha!” moments I look for to get my clients excited and give me fuel at the same time. It also helps me innovate since I know I need to raise the bar each and every time – not just for them, but for me as well.
Could you please tell three (1/2/3) biggest transformations the industry will see this year?
Over the next year I think the wedding industry will continue to become much more of a global market. Couples are not just shopping in their local towns for companies and suppliers anymore and with even more social media channels on the horizon ahead, I think that reach will continue to expand and couples will only look further outside the norm for their big day ideas, places, and professionals.
I think the industry will also become much more tech driven behind the scenes. With new apps, software and technology rolling out, event planning practices are going from offline to online and that will continue to grow as tools evolve. We will get to a point where we all need to be more digital in our day to day in order to keep up.
I think the destination wedding market will also continue to grow and expand, with even more couples choosing to wed away from home, and in farther and farther away places than ever before.
How important are institutions in imparting the trade knowledge, does India has many?
I think education in the wedding industry is incredibly important for companies to maintain and grow. It’s a very saturated market so the more institutions where business owners can learn not only about trends and specific industries but also about growing their audience and company’s scope is essential to winning the race and making money in the end.
Any opinion on the format of the Exotic Wedding Planning Conference in India
I think a good mix of networking time at events/meals/parties and main stage keynote speakers and small incubator groups is great. But I’m looking forward to seeing how this event is also new, innovative, and different.
I think if I did a talk on the main stage that related to everyone and then a small table of a group after that, those in the smaller group could ask individual questions about their businesses that might be helpful for them, based on the main stage speech they already heard.
Your core competencies which the industry demands
My areas of expertise are both consumer and business facing. I speak to couples about wedding planning tips and do’s and don’ts as well as spot trends in the market.
My areas of expertise for my B2B clients are specifically marketing and business development. That means everything from public relations and media pitching to developing brand strategies, creating alignments and event activations, social media strategy, content marketing and content creation as well as some influencer outreach.
Harmony Walton answers…
