Awesome Wedding Top-Tips for Booking your Perfect Alternative Wedding Caterers
Welcome to the wedding supplier Q&A series where every Wednesday & Sunday afternoon we’ll be speaking to a London based wedding supplier and uncovering information to make planning your wedding easier. Each supplier has been hand picked because of their awesome personality, love they have for their couples and knowledge of their industry. I’ve also tried to find suppliers that are unique to give you a taste of what’s possible.
This Sunday we’re talking to a very unique wedding supplier, Ed & Joe from The Travelling Gin Co. These guys are a great example of the range of alternative/different wedding suppliers out there that can add some additional awesome character and personality to your celebrations.
1. Tell us a bit about the story behind The Traveling Gin Co & why you do what you do?
[Joe] It started with my passion for biking and a weekend away trip to Holland which was based on….gin basically. We put the optics on the front of the bikes. A lot of people would stop us and take photos and get pretty excited about what we were doing. When we got back me and Ed talked about starting something together and came up with, what at the time seemed like a mad idea to sell gin cocktails from bikes.
Our first event was at a Sunday afternoon market at Hackney Wick and then at a private Gallery viewing organised by a friend. We thought this would be a good place to test the idea. Everyone loved it, similar to in Holland, taking loads of photos and asking where we were going to be next in London. At the time we were a bit like “errhhh that’s pretty much it for the moment….” but then a clothes shop who were having an opening asked to book us. So we said yes. And then very organically through a lot of word of mouth we got one booking after another and things really took off.
We thrived on peoples’ enthusiasm which gave us the motivation to explore it some more and now it’s turned into a business.
The first few weddings we did were very nerve racking because it’s such an important day for the couple. We very quickly fell in love with weddings because everyone is in such a good mood, full of celebration! Through weddings we also get to visit some amazing locations and meets loads of awesome people.
For London based weddings we stay authentic and will cycle to the venue. For out of town weddings we get the van out and stick the bikes in that. We’ve even been to Berlin and actually just got back from New York. The Americans seemed to absolutely love the English charm of The Travelling Gin Co.
We concentrate on making our products top quality and so only offer a small selection of drinks (usually 2-3 options) at each wedding. At wedding it’s really popular when we design the cocktail for the couple. On our website is a little form where we ask for their favourite cocktails, soft drinks, meal and even holiday. We then merge all those little things together to try and come up with the best bespoke cocktail we can offer. It adds a nice level of excitement for the couple beforehand because they get to design their own drink and then all their family and friends can enjoy them.
2. What are your Top-Tips for a couple considering an alternative wedding catering option?
- Communication. With every wedding being different (e.g. Number of attendees, venue, drinking requests) we built a form on our website to gather the information we need. If you’ve got some really unique ideas for your wedding don’t be afraid to share that with us so we provide you with a bespoke option, perfect for you. We’ve had a groom discover a cocktail he absolutely loved during his stag due and by telling us about it we were able to provide it as an option with relatively short notice.
- Less is more. Focus on quality over quantity. We find that when people turn up to a wedding they prefer a small selection of unique drinks rather than a huge range of drinks at the bar that they’re used to seeing. It also sparks more conversation and provides something that’s more unique and different for your guests to enjoy and remember.
3. I love quotes, do you have any favourites?
I’ve got one, that’s not so much a classic quote but a thing that all of our friends and family really supported us with was:
“If you’ve got an idea and you think it’s good just go for it!” – Friends & Family
I know it might sound a bit pathetic but often you can spend a lot of your life ooing and ahhhing about doing something and feel like sometimes you’ve just got to give it a go and do it.
