Introducing the la boda family...

Hi there. I’m Emma, one of the owners of la boda bridal, and I’ve been given the monumental but daunting task of writing our very first blog. Pretty sure the last time I wrote anything of real substance was way back……....many years ago for my uni finals probably……so you’ll have to bear with me on this one.

We’ve been meaning to start our web blog for a good year or so now and talking about it for even longer so we thought we’d better get a move on. We’re heading off to Barcelona at the end of the week to see the Pronovias 2017 collection and know we’ll have loads of cool, exciting stuff that we want to write about after it for our first proper blog so I’ve decided to take the plunge and introduce us.

In our shop we have Carmen, Susan, Eimear and me! Carmen is our trusty manageress who mans the shop on a daily basis and most of our la boda brides will no doubt have been on the receiving end of Carmen’s bubbly personality at some stage or other. South African born Carmen got married two years ago in June so she’s recently been through the whole journey that is wedding planning and is totally clued in on all things bridal. It’s just been announced that baby number one is on the way too so she is positively glowing at the minute!

On Saturdays we are ably assisted by Eimear who, with her cool, laid back fashion style, has slotted in right at home over the last year. No doubt when uni is over she will end up in something to do with fashion and, if not, it will be a grave loss to the world of fashion as a whole!

That leaves Susan and me. We’re sisters and we started up la boda bridal 12 years ago this June. She’s the younger one - something which she likes to point out occasionally! I’m married 10 years now with two kids -Harry 5 and Anna 3 - and Susan got hitched 6 years ago and has one very cute 1 year old son called Teddy!

It seems like an age ago when I think back to our first trade show. We were two very nervous but super excited twenty something’s totally in awe of all the dresses and other stuff we discovered there that we had not even thought about in our business plan! It was an eye opener but a great time and I wouldn’t change anything about it for the world. We had lots of laughs and still do!!!

12 years on…. we are still in the same building in our home town of Banbridge, although we’ve spread ourselves across a few more rooms now than in the beginning. We still deal with lots of our original suppliers. It has been nice to grow with them along the way. Pronovias, the Spanish giant, is one of those suppliers and we are so delighted and proud to have worked with them for so many years. Not only do we stock them in our shop but Susan and I also work as their sales reps in Ireland so we totally heart them. A few months after opening la boda we had the fortune to fall into a chat with one of their top guys who was looking for a rep and, after throwing in a few sentences of disjointed Spanish into the conversation (we both did Spanish as part of our uni degrees!), the job was ours. A real case of right place, right time!

More than a decade on and we are heading off to another show in sunny Barcelona this weekend. For the first time we are bringing along our dear mum to experience it all. She’s done her fair share of babysitting whilst we’ve been off on business (in fact we couldn’t have done half of the stuff we’ve done without the support of both our parents) so we are delighted that she is coming along. Our big sister Claire is also coming. Dad wasn’t so keen! His only request was a bottle of Jameson’s from the duty free on the way home!

Ok ..…so that’s just a little snippet of who we are at la boda. I’m hoping that one of the others ladies will step up to the plate for our next blog when we come back from our trip although, truth be told, I didn’t find this too bad. It’s actually quite easy to write about something you love.

Hasta Luego
With Love
Emma xx