Choosing our bridal studio

We haven't been updating this blog as often as we would like. He is too busy maintaining his other automotive industry site, while she is working on the house and invitation cards. More on those in another post.

In this post we would like to share a bit about our experience with our bridal studio.

Prior to this we have visited many other bridal studios in bridal fair expos. We weren't really happy with most of them. A large majority of those studios were heavily influenced by Taiwanese style aesthetics. They took great pride in their "Taiwanese connection" and very often their first sales pitch to us is "we are not a local company, we are a Taiwanese company," in Mandarin of course, to which he would flatly tell them sorry we want a local company and we are not interested in having a Taiwanese photographer. We are proud of our own identity as Malaysians of ethnic Chinese descent, plus we both come from a very Westernized education and family background. Thus, we find the photography work and gown selection of many of these studios as being a bit "overly bling" for our taste. Obviously she doesn't fancy having her pre-wedding shots with an A-Mei inspired hairdo and neither does he fancy looking like any F4 groupie.

Out of the many studios that we visited, we shortlisted two studios - Lasposa in Bangsar (has since shifted to SS2) and Vogue Collection.

In choosing a bridal studio (as well as photographer and videographer), it is very important to have a supplier who understands your style. It's not just about the language issue, she has not much problem communicating in Mandarin. But it's about the coming together of the makeup artist, photographer and having the right gown selection in re-creating the highly subjective photographic result that you are looking for.

When we first stepped in to Vogue, we spoke to Lily, their make-up artist. Almost immediately we could tell that this is a team that we could click with. Plus, we don't need to worry of anything being "lost in translation." We looked through their sample photo albums and their gown selection and knew this was the one we want to work with. They were very helpful and unlike many sales staff in other studios, they were not very pushy in pressuring us to sign up with them.

We had similarly good experience with Lasposa, but for us the deal breaker was the availability of digital soft copies of our photos for our keeping. Being a typical Gen-Y couple who relies heavily on the Internet, we don't really see the point of paying so much to have a physical hard cover photo album. With a digital soft copy, we can do anything we want with the photos in the future. And unlike the physical hard copy photo album, the photos won't degrade over time. Also, do you really think the photo album will be of great use many decades later? If you really need to have a hard copy photo album, there are online services like Photobook Malaysia. With this service you don't even need to rely on the photography / bridal studio to create the photo album for you. So what we did was to negotiate with the studio to reduce the number of photo albums / photo count in the albums in exchange for the option to allow us to retain the digital softcopies of all our photos. From our many studio hunting trips, only Vogue Gallery and Lasposa are willing to give us all the raw high resolution image files. Of course, we will have to pay an additional charge for each photo taken. There are also some other studios that will claim to offer similar services, but probe further you will find out that the photos are not the high resolution files and are locked for editing. In the end, Vogue provided the most favourable price and we signed up with them.

We are really thankful and appreciative of the work being done by the team at Vogue Collection. From what we see, the bridal studio business involves very long working hours. They work up to 10pm everyday with only 1 day off per week. And customers are not always understanding or are easy to work with.

There are some few simple things you can do to make their life easier. Just because you are the paying customer does not mean you have a moral right to lord over others / disrespect them.
1. Punctuality. Always make an appointment before seeing your supplier and arrive on time. Delays on your part will cause further delays to the next customer. If you have to postpone / cancel your appointment please do inform them in the soonest possible.

2. Bring magazines / photos from the Internet of your ideal gown. It will greatly help them to visualize the kind of shots or style that you are looking for.

3. Be nice and polite to others. Some women, by virtue of them being the bride, love all the attention given to them and enjoy pushing little minions around to do their bidding. But remember that karma (or whatever you choose to call it) has a funny way of getting even. Be nice and make friends with everybody in the team. In one of our gown fitting sessions, there was a delay in our appointment caused by another couple from an earlier time slot (read our earlier point on punctuality...), thus our usual contact person were not able to attend to us. However Vogue's in-house tailor, Sze Phing was kind enough to step in and assist us (this was beyond her job requirements) as we have gotten to know most of the nice people in Vogue. Thus we were able to proceed with our gown fitting right away.

4. Find a team that you are able to communicate easily with. Do not assume that the studio understands what you want. Take initiative to communicate your requirements throughout the different stages of your wedding preparation.

Below is a promo video for Vogue Collection. The photographer shown here is the same photographer who took our pre-wedding shots. His name is Ah Weng, great funny guy who tries his best to help you relax to bring out that million dollar smile. He had a really hard time getting Gim to smile properly. Gim has this unexplained inability to smile in front of a camera. He can't differentiate between smiling and breathing with his mouth.