Archive for the ‘Deals and Steals’ Category

Anti-Brides, I’m handing the mic over to my girl friend Tracy DeNunzio of Recycled Bride, who has a stellar “proposal” that you will say “I Do” to: Free wedding bands. Take a whack out of your bridal budget with this sparkling possibility! Read on!

Free Love at RecycledBride.com!

Win custom his-and-hers wedding bands in our biggest giveaway ever!

We’ve teamed up with premier wedding jeweler Whiteflash.com to give one lucky couple their own custom-designed his-and-hers wedding rings! Show us your most creative, beautiful, unique wedding ring design, and you might win your very own dream wedding bands!

Here’s how to enter to win:

1. Design a pair of wedding bands to be made of any combination of white or yellow gold, titanium, diamonds, precious and semi-precious gemstones. Be creative! You can visit Whiteflash.com and check out their collection of his and hers wedding bands to get inspired, and you can create and submit up to three (3) designs (Added for clarification: That’s three sets of his-and-hers rings!).

2. Show us your design and tell us all about it! In the comments section below, you can upload text, images, and/or video. So post your sketches and drawings, written ideas, or a video recording that shows us how you envision your ring. (*Note – If two entries are very similar, we’ll only consider the one that was posted first.)

3. You must be a Recycled Bride member to win. If you’re not already, sign up now – it’s free and takes less than one minute.

4. The contest ends on July 20th, 2010. (*EXTENDED UNTIL JULY 29th!*) A team of jewelry experts will then choose a winner based on overall beauty, creativity, and originality of design.

5. The winner will get both of their custom rings from Whiteflash.com, and the chosen designs will be added to the Whiteflash catalog and named after the winner!

See the Official Rules for more details. Questions? Email us at info {at} recycledbride.com.

We can’t wait to see your designs! Upload your entries in the comments below, and good luck to all!

Welcome Elizabeth Yin, CEO of Shiny Orb, a time saving, savvy, social shopping network for you and the ladies in your life…

For my wedding, I knew I wanted my best friends to be my bridesmaids.  Unfortunately, everyone was scattered across the globe, but I was determined not to let distance get in the way of shopping for bridesmaid dresses together.  A plan was quickly established over email: we’d each surf the web for potential dresses for the group.  Then, we’d discuss all the dresses and pick the best one to order.

Simple enough, right?  However, we soon found ourselves buried in our email inboxes.  Everyone in my bridal party spent hours writing countless emails about cute dresses they found and wasted even more time piecing the mish-mash of communications together.  As a busy professional, I was very quickly getting overwhelmed and simply could not afford to spend so much time deciding on dresses!  So, in the midst of all the confusion, I scrapped the plan. I quickly went to a bridesmaid dress retailer website and bought everyone the first nice dress I found.  (It was an Alfred Angelo bridesmaid dress, because the website was sorted alphabetically by designer).  Luckily, it was a cute dress, and my bridesmaids looked fabulous.

After my wedding, I kept thinking there had to be a better way for bridal parties to browse and shop together for wedding apparel.  Furthermore, I knew I was not the only bride out there with a scattered bridal party.  So, last year, one of my bridesmaids and I left our jobs to build a website called Shiny Orb, a comparison shopping website for bridesmaid dresses and other wedding apparel.  With over ten thousand dresses from more than three hundred designers, Shiny Orb has a huge selection that covers all styles, including many non-traditional and trendy wear-again bridesmaid dresses.

I’m excited to announce that today we’re opening up Shiny Orb Dressing Rooms, a social shopping platform to make it easy and enjoyable for brides and bridesmaids to browse and shop together.  With a Shiny Orb Dressing Room, a bridal party can add any of the thousands of dresses on the site to the room, and everyone in the party can comment and chat about these dresses at their convenience. We’ve already heard some great things about this feature from our group of beta testers, so we really think it’s going to be something brides will love!

About

Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder of Shiny Orb, a comparison social shopping site for bridesmaid dresses and wedding apparel.  She previously worked at Google as a product marketing manager and has been building websites since high school.  Elizabeth hails from the San Francisco Bay Area, where her friend and bestselling 3-book Anti-Bride co-author Carolyn started this all.