… and we’re not talking air sickness.
Let me tell you about my 15 minutes of fame because of my custom barf bag created for Tracy and Ken’s Delta flight 6275 wedding. Yes… wedding.
My bride and friend, Tracy isn’t conventional. She’s not high-maintenance and she’s very go-with-the-flow. If you’re from Cincinnati, you may have eaten a piece of her cake at a wedding or popped into her shop, Tres Belle Cakes, to grab a coffee and one of the best cupcakes you’ll ever have in life. With being a wedding vendor, she’s seen it all and, well, she’s a wedding vendor so any slow time just means exhaustion from busy season. So when she announced she was engaged, the biggest question was – what are you planning?
This. An in-flight wedding from Cincinnati to DC and back in the same day.
When Tracy and Ken told all of us their ideas and their plans for the wedding, you could just tell it was going to be amazing. After some texts and some emails, Delta and GoJet were 100% on board. Tracy and Ken were getting married in the sky.
For the paper pieces, we wanted to make sure the pieces were all a little cheeky, as close to Delta’s branding as I could get and still very “Tracy and Ken.” We talked through the best way to let passengers know what was going on, what elements of a more traditional wedding can we include and what opportunities for creativity do we have with this being pretty unconventional
Our first piece was the VIP badge. Simple, but necessary, given we had about 16 of us on one flight and only two were dressed like they were participating in a wedding, we needed a way to identify ourselves as with the wedding. It was also fun to just flash them around… because er’body knows when you have a lanyard, you mean business.
Next up was some way to let the other passengers know this wasn’t going to be a typical flight and the intent was not to disrupt their traveling plans in any way… except maybe we might. I decided on paper airplanes with a fun note printed on the inside. We hoping the fun factor of a paper airplane would supersede any grumbling.
Once we had these two pieces settled upon, it was time for some finishing touches. The program was our more traditional wedding piece. For this, I took my design direction from Delta’s simplistic branding. Airlines know they have people from all corners of the earth on their flights, so any information they want to communicate to their passengers has to be simple and, in most cases, it has to be done in as few illustrations as possible. So… what’s more effective than infographics?
After these more “practical” pieces, we needed some quirk. We thought about a SkyMall magazine, but that was pretty intense. Maybe napkins, but nah. How about… a barf bag. It’s one of the single most recognizable items from the airlines and it was both practical and comical all at the same time. Tracy and Ken managed to snag one for me from their “test flight” and again, the design was clean and simple. And thus… the custom wedding barf bag was created.
We knew it would be a big deal, but you can never really predict to what extent. Stories started popping up in the usual spots – the local news, Delta, GoJet. One on The Knot. And then one on The Points Guy. And then… Bravo. Lisa freakin’ Vanderpump has seen my custom barf bag! (Okay, maybe she hasn’t, but give me this, mkay?) But wait… it gets better. Come to find out, Ken and Tracy were contacted by a guy that has a MUSEUM of barf bags.
And I’m in it.
And get this.
There’s ANOTHER guys with a barf bag museum requesting one.
This is nuts, ya’ll. Artist usually have to wait until they’re dead for their pieces to be placed in a museum… it only took me 36 years. I’d say that’s pretty impressive. Or at least my parents are super proud.
That, my friends, is how I had my 15 minutes of fame because of a barf bag.
Want to work together? Yeah, me, too. Let’s talk invitations
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