Being inclusive isn't just about intention. It's about perception. And that is the number one thing that I wish I'd known going in even with his day. But even I didn't know how to show that we were inclusive. I'm Becca Poutney, wedding business marketing expert, speaker and blogger, and you're listening to the Wedding Pros who Are Ready to Grow podcast. I'm here to share with you actionable tips, strategies and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level.
If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants want to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you're in the right place. Let's get going with today's episode. Today I'm chatting with Anna Langley, owner of his day and author of the Inclusive Wedding Toolkit. With a decade of experience as an event planner and working in diversity, equity and inclusion, she realized the wedding industry had some catching up to do in this area.
Anna is now on a mission to educate all wedding pros and venues on how to continue to become more inclusive to everyone. Anna, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Becca. It's. That was a very lovely introduction, but anytime that number of 10 years increases, it really just freaks me out more than getting older. I know.
Well, I feel like I've only been in the wedding industry not very long, and then when I say to people since I've been doing what I do since 2016, they're like, that's actually a really long time back, but I feel like we're still living in like 2016, 19 or something like that. So, you know. Yeah, I'm pre pandemic in my mind. Exactly. Well, I'm really pleased to finally have you on the podcast because I've been meaning to have you on my podcast forever and a day.
And I saw you recently and I said, I promise I do want you to come on. I'm just really disorganized. So I'm thrilled we finally managed to find a time that works for both of us to get you on. I do think this is a really important topic and I think you have a really interesting take on it and background, so we'll get into that. First. First, let's give people your background.
So take me back through a quick potted history of your career and how you ended up even working in the world of weddings in the first place. So I have been an event manager, as you mentioned, for over 10 years. I started out in corporate Very varied events, from huge, huge events like working on the Champions League final. But then the most kind of important work I think I've done is in big tech, and that was in diversity and inclusion events. So it was very, very varied.
But throughout that time, I took on kind of ad hoc weddings, and I just love them. They are my absolute favorite events. I think, because I'm a romantic at heart, I just fall in love with people. And guaranteed every client I've ever worked, I'm there crying when they're saying their vows, because I do get so emotional. But I think that's why I love it so much, because I think when you people, it makes that transition easier, and it's so much more personal than the corporate space.
So that led me into the wedding industry. And although I still do planning, I have a business with my best friend and she predominantly runs that, but I support her with it. That is wedding planning, event planning. I. When I then got engaged and my husband really wanted to be included in that process, we found that there was nothing for him. And that was quite disheartening when it was 2022, the beginning of 2022, so we decided, well, we'll do it.
Then. We then found out we're the only people globally that are doing anything specific for the groom, which is such a shame. But it does mean that we had a really good kind of starting point for our business. We then took that originally it was going to be just a wedding fair, became much bigger than that based on feedback that our first ever local fair, it was this tiny fair with no marketing, no budget. It was just put on eventbrite, I think, had 160 people come.
So you can imagine kind of, you know, initially what we thought was going to be something really small ended up being a lot bigger, and. And it's just grown from there. But from that starting point, a lot of suppliers will ask me and have asked me over the last few years, what can I do to include the groom more or show that I'm inclusive to the groom? But that conversation often ran with, but am I then including the LGBTQ community? Am I including other cultures, other religions?
And so it became a much broader thing, which led me to write the Inclusive Wedding Toolkit. It's been a busy few years because, as you said, you already got married in 2022. And then all of this kind of stuff has happened since then. And I'll always remember the first time we met, you came along to one of my events and you guys told me about your idea for his day. And you told me about the fact that you want to do something from the groom's perspective.
And even then on that first day, you told me, I said, there is something in this because you are right. Like, it is crazy that we are in 2022 and beyond and we are still not including the groom or assuming that the females make all of the decisions when that is absolutely not true anymore. And I've loved watching it go from this tiny little idea, like you said locally, to actually realizing there's a bigger problem here.
And that's why I think your whole work in the inclusion space is really interesting, because it came from a different perspective right from the start, looking at the groom not being included. And I think it really took suppliers again and pros by surprise when you started talking about it, because it was a real wake up call to people. What ways did you find that the groom weren't included when you were looking at your own wedding? It really, you know what, it's.
I think now as a wedding supplier, we talk a lot about the client journey. And if you break down your client journey, you'll actually start to realize that they're not included pretty much the whole way through. So for us, it started at wedding fairs. That was where the conception of his day started. And the. The example we always give is that my husband loves gardening. That is his favorite pastime. Absolutely loves it. I love aesthetics. So I like how it looks.
But I could not tell you before I met my husband, I could not tell you a lily from a Dalia. Now I can, but certainly at the start I couldn't. So when it came to being to florists, he was really, really invested in the types of flowers, different flowers that had meaning to him, being in season, etc. Whereas I'm there saying, we're getting married in September, can I have peonies? And he's like, no, you can't. They're not in season.
So it really was, you know, a learning curve for us that when we were at these wedding fairs, he was so excited and he really was excited to speak to people. They weren't speaking to him. And this happened at not just one fair, it was three different fairs where florists photography. The photographer we went to, we went with because she spoke to both of us as equals, not because she only spoke to me.
And at one wedding fair, it got so bad that I ended up saying to the florist, I will just take myself out of this conversation. It's his thing only. So he had A chance to speak to them directly, which is such a shame. But then what we realized beyond that is contact forms, marketing, social media, even just finding inspiration for his suit or his boutonniere or whatever it was. It was so much harder to find than for the bride.
And so realistically, yes, it only started as this one niche example of the floristry, but it very quickly became an ongoing kind of epidemic of not him not feeling included at any point. Which was a real shame. Yeah. And absolutely crazy, like when we think about it. But you can see how easily it's done. And we see it and we've been talking about it in the sense of same sex couples for a number of years where one of them doesn't feel included, always saying his and hers or bride and groom.
But actually in this case in the heterosexual couple, it's also really important that both people feel included and that we're not making one person seem or feel more important than anyone else. Now this is a huge topic and I think it can be a topic that scares people quite frankly to talk about when we move away from even just one area and start to look at the bigger picture. And in my introduction I said that you worked in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Sometimes we see that written as dei and I think even just that term can feel like, well, what does that actually mean? What does that actually encompass? Are you able to break that down to us in a way that we can just go, okay, this isn't scary, I understand what that means. Yes. So I also feel overwhelmed by it. I'm scared by it all the time. To the point where sometimes, like someone asked me recently, can you come into my community and be an expert? And I was like, no, no, I can't.
Because actually we're not. No one in my opinion who works within inclusion or champions inclusion is an expert because it is so varied and it changes every day. So it can become really overwhelming. What I would say is what I try to kind of preach, I guess the word is what I try and teach people is there are some fundamentals you can change within yourself as kind of second nature that make diversity, equity and inclusion a lot more kind of digestible and not as overwhelming.
No one out there is going to expect you to know everything thing. Let's say you get an inquiry from a diverse couple and they're mixed religion, they are not going to inquire with you because they know you're going to know the nuances of their specific religions.
Because even within religions there is a so much diversity Depending on your cultural background, the influence you've had where you've grown up, there's so much complex complexity to it that it, you just need to understand that, have empathy for yourself, have empathy for other people. And if you treat people like individuals, as everybody is, you will go a lot further in being able to understand it.
But to break down the terms diversity, equity, inclusion in general, so diversity talks about, as you can expect, diverse groups of people. One of my favorite terms in the whole entire world is intersectionality. And it talks about how each individual person is their own person. So me being a female, my religion, my race, my disability, all of those things make me the individual I am, rather than I'm just classified as a woman, for example.
So it's important to remember that when it comes to diversity, equity is a really great word to distinguish between equity and equality. So my usual, my usual way of explaining this is a football analogy. But I don't know whether that will transcend for everybody. But I think I'll explain it well enough. So in football there are two different competitions. You have, well, there's more than two, but for this example there's two. There's the Premier League and there's the FA Cup.
So equity is the Premier League. So in the Premier League you have different categories. So Premier League, championship, League one, League two, etc. And what that means is you are effectively grouping very similar teams. In the, in football world, it's about budgets, it's about competitions and that sort of thing. But it means that you have the opportunity to win a competition against people that are a lot more level playing field.
The FA cup is where everybody plays each other, no matter what division you're in. That is equality. Equality is giving everybody the same opportunity to succeed at the same thing. But equality doesn't always work because you are going to have those same teams that have those great budgets and those great players who are always going to win and monopolize. So equality doesn't always work.
Equity, where you split it and you let people be able to win their competitions with their peers, makes it more equal, believe it or not. And that's the best analogy I can give for equality versus equity. As weird as it sounds, it, it does make it a bit more digestible. And then inclusivity for me, I think is important to remember that inclusivity does mean different things to different people.
But inclusivity for me is going back to that principle of just treating everybody like an individual and not making any bold assumptions. Yeah, that's really helpful and actually I think the football analogy is also really helpful for understanding that, because actually, equality and equity, you kind of feel like they're interchangeable and they're the same thing. But that makes a whole lot of sense. Okay, so we understand what it means.
And I think at the heart of it, all of us want to be doing this, because I think most of us in the wedding industry are good people, and we want people to feel included. We want to feel like we're for everyone, but we don't necessarily know how to go about it. And why do you think that really embracing this is a smart business decision? Such a great question. I think to really go back to basics on what that means.
The biggest mistake that we all make, including myself when we start our businesses, is knowing that we're inclusive in ourselves, but not giving other people the perception that we're inclusive. So the one thing I always say to people when they ask me about what I do is if you know you're inclusive, you would work with anyone, you wouldn't judge anybody. Do they know that? Because that's a huge step forward.
And so when it comes to running your business day to day, it's all about how to maintain. And it's not overwhelming. It's not huge changes every single day. It's just tiny micro changes that can build to that inclusivity. And what that is going to result in at the end is better referrals, better testimonials. You are going to have people who want to use you time and time again.
Photographers are the best example of this, actually, because there's so much repeat business you can get from photographers for other events or life milestones, that the more you can show that inclusivity journey, the bigger and better your business is going to get. So for me, inclusivity is not. It's not just the right thing to do, which it is. It is the right thing to do, especially in this year that we're in. It is also about how that can make you a better, stronger business.
Increase your supplier relationships with other people in the industry. It can make you work better with everybody around you. And in my opinion, certainly from writing the book, this is actually my experience. I learned so much writing the toolkit that it actually made the way I approach conversations with even my parents better because I had a lot more empathy and understanding. So I think holistically, across the board, it can just help massively.
And of course, from a business perspective, it makes you more profitable the more you can book. So it's great. Absolutely. And I Think one of the mistakes I see people making is that they want to say they're inclusive, but maybe their inclusivity only touches on maybe one or two of the protected characteristics or the different areas we've talked about and not the wider picture. So I'm going to give you a real life example from myself.
So I once went along to a kind of community group and they were very much like, we're very inclusive. It doesn't matter what gender you are, you can come. Like, we want everyone to feel welcome. And I was like, great. This is like a really safe space to be in. Now, I'm a practicing Christian and within a couple of weeks I noticed that the leaders of the group were making loads of, like, offensive jokes about Christianity.
And so I'm like, well, you've said to me, this is a really inclusive group, this is a really inclusive space. But actually your kind of version of what inclusivity means means you're, yes, you're inclusive of one subsection, but actually what you're doing is alienating a different subsection. So I think it's really important that we see that. Actually, it does cover all of these different areas. I don't know if you've seen anything like that yourself. Yeah, and what an.
Well, firstly, what an amazing question. Secondly, what an awful situation that you had to go. We see that a lot, not even just in the wedding industry. It is systemic. I think a lot of communities, let's say if you are more left leaning, you can often, you know, shun more right leaning. We have to be accepting of everybody's views and everybody's inclusive demographics.
And that's something that I found, which is why I started writing the toolkit, was there are a lot of community groups out there, whether it's disability, lgbtq, race, religion, etc, there's so many. But who is actually championing them all to work, you know, cohesively together? Who is helping people who find this very overwhelming? Because even one community group to the next can be different, by the way. So what I teach isn't, you know, about the nuances of each group.
It's about how to work with anyone that comes through your door. And yes, there is an element of understanding the fundamentals of certain religions, the fundamentals, fundamentals of pronoun usage, etc. But actually, if you just treat people with empathy, kindness and avoiding assumption, you're actually going to become a lot more inclusive than you actually ever realized. And that is what we should be approaching it as. It should be holistic across every diverse group. Across every individual.
Not like you say, we're an inclusive group, but only to this group. It's only to this group of people that doesn't work, that's not inclusive. Yeah. And I think it's an easy pitfall to fall in. And I think actually we need to, like you said, embrace going back to the human, to the individual. Because even within each of those communities and those different types of people, even within Christianity, for example, there's very different scales of what that looks like.
And every individual then has something different to offer. And I think we need to go back to realizing we need to look at the individual. And also I think it's about being non judgmental. We don't necessarily need to agree with someone else. So you may not agree with my Christian viewpoint, for example, but that doesn't mean that we can't work together or be inclusive of each other and be respectful of that.
And I think sometimes that's where we go a bit off kilter, where we think I'm inclusive, but only to the people that I agree with as opposed to actually the huge diversity of people and public out there. But when we do get it right, it is a beautiful picture. I've just been to give you a more positive example, I've just been part of a theater, a community theater production this week. And I actually was reflecting watching it on stage. I produced it, how diverse the cast and crew were.
So we had people from the age of 18 up to people in their 60s, 70s. We had a wonderful performer in a wheelchair with a medical assistance dog. We had people from different races and religions. We had people from different sexual orientation. We had people who were both male, female and also non binary.
And I was like, wow, this is a picture of what, what can happen because these people wouldn't necessarily be friends in real life, but they've all come together to create something amazing and have worked alongside each other and been respectful of each other and have been friends with each other. And I think that was just a very tiny picture of how this can work really well. Oh, that's honestly amazing.
And I, I understand that in the wedding industry we do often struggle to kind of make those introductions to those diverse couples. And I understand it's not as simple as, you know, let's get this group of people together. But I do think that there are ways that we can embody that a little bit more. I think the best one to talk about is like your supplier relationships. Who are your supplier friends?
Who are, what are the people you're putting forward for the weddings you're working with, because the more diverse you can make that community, the more inclusive you are going to become, the more you'll learn. And that to me, learning is the most important thing to really kind of spearhead this going forward and making it intrinsic rather than it feeling overwhelming. Yeah, absolutely.
So let's bring it back to the wedding industry then, because I want to know what are some of the pitfalls or mistakes you see suppliers making in the area of inclusion, diversity? I mean, we've talked about a couple, but there are any specific things that you see regularly or you see and you think, oh, why are you doing that? And they may be the tiniest thing, they may be the biggest thing.
I'd love to hear some of them because there may be people listening who are accidentally making these mistakes and it could be a simple thing for them to change. Yeah, for sure. And look, I think one thing I always try and preface these questions with is I'm not saying this from a place of judgment because I too make these mistakes. We always do. It's. It's in our nature. And please just have empathy for yourselves and for other people when we're doing this.
A lot of the time we can be scared off when it comes to this subject because the people who work within kind of active this communities, some of them can be quite judgmental if you're getting it wrong. And I think that's the wrong precedent set because actually we all get it wrong. We're all human and we all need to have a little bit of a break because we only know what we know when we learn it, not beforehand. So my number one thing is when it comes to your marketing, avoiding tokenism.
So tokenism is where, let's say, for example, your Instagram grid, the pinned post that you have is a diverse couple. It, you know, same sex, multicultural, multi ability, whatever it might be, your pinned post shows them the rest of your posts aren't. They are cisgender white straight couples. Now, you may not have worked with a lot of diverse couples yet, which may be why you have this one post there, to say, look, but I am inclusive, but it's not actually embodying it throughout.
So when you look at your Instagram and your website, for example, are they cohesive that it's showing different, diverse couples? They don't have to be your own imagery. Especially, you know, for wedding planners, we don't take our images a lot of the time, or we might not use couples that we always work with. As long as you're clear that these aren't your images or you credit the original photographer, you ask permission, etc, there's no reason why you can't.
Especially if you are going back to that supplier relationship where you're working with diverse suppliers who work with diverse couples. You might be able to approach that relationship and say, I haven't worked with diverse couples yet, but I really want to. Is there any chance I can use some of your imagery and credit you or credit any of the suppliers that are included to be able to show that the more you can disperse through, the better.
And the next mistake, which again is following the client journey a little bit. Your contact forms. Contact forms are the number one thing that are not inclusive in our industry. Whether it's because it's not inclusive for accessibility. So screen readers, for example, if they're digital, not offering an email separate, I know that seems crazy because you might want all of your things to go through one contact form.
But for people who use screen readers or can't use the interactive features on your form, they might just need that email to just send an email straight away. In which case you can say when you automatically click on an email, you can actually bring it up now with an automatic email body. And that body can have the questions that they need to answer for you. But it does make it easier. Pronouns. Who is, who are you in the wedding?
And I know this sounds really crazy right now, but instead of just bride and groom, which we're still seeing the majority of the time, not even just partner one and partner two, what about mother of the bride? Because they're often still involved. Like it opening it up as a more open ended question than trying to force people into an answer that they might not not be really helps.
So I would definitely say between your marketing and perception is what I call it, like the perception of who you are out into the world. And your contact forms, they are your initial points of contact. And yes, there's work to do when you go beyond and through the client journey. But actually those initial points, they're the things I see the most because they're the things that, you know, when people follow me on social media, I'll be like, oh, who's this? And I'll go see?
And I'll go, okay, well you're probably following me because you are inclusive and you want to be more inclusive, but can I tell that, you know. Yeah, absolutely. And I, I think one of the challenges that people have is, is that all chicken and egg kind of situation where they're saying Well, I want to be born diverse, but my current clients are diverse. So it's hard for me to show diversity when I haven't got it. But I do want to have more of it.
And we kind of go around in this circle and I think you've got some good ideas in there. But sometimes we have to be careful as well about what images we share of other people and how we credit them if they're not our work. Because what we also don't want to do is make it look like we've done something that we haven't. What are your thoughts on style shoots?
Because I know this is also a controversial one, but it is also a way that people can get that imagery into their marketing and it be their own work. Is there a way that we can do style shoots which are more diverse without them appearing tokenistic? 100. Also, I would say on style cheeks, my opinion of them is probably not as positive, only because I've. I've only ever come across styled shoot being advertised.
I mean, bearing in mind this is very generalized to where I live, so I'm not looking at, you know, the northwest or the south east, for example. I'm looking at where I live. I do not see a huge amount of calls for diverse couples within those style shoots. I don't particularly see that. So a lot of the with styled shoots and when they are styled shoots, they are still that same demographic of people, which is not helping anyway, for the most part.
I think styled shoots are a great way to be able to do that if you do it well. So I would say with style shoots, try and get a couple of models, not just one. And you know, style shoes are weird. They are weird. And I appreciate that you might have have 10, 15 photographers who are all getting the same imagery, but we need them as people who are new in the industry. That's when it's even harder to create that client base, that testimonial base, etc. So how can we do that and work together?
I would say if you do them right, if you make sure that the ones you're doing are diverse couples from the offset as well, that's going to set that in motion way beyond. And you're going to start to see that being inclusive isn't just about showing it and about that tokenism and about, you know, their perception. It is also about how to work with the couples.
So if you, for example, put a rainbow on your website, which is the biggest token you can probably get, if you put a rainbow on your website and say I can work with diverse couples in the LGBTQ space. Have you actually worked with or know people? Are you friends with? Are your supplier friends and relationships? Are they part of that community? Because they will probably have told you not to just put a rainbow on it anyway. And beyond that, what language are you using?
If you work with people of different skin tones, do you know how to photograph them or do you know how to ask the right questions? There is a lot of kind of dimension to it that styled shoots will be able to give you. So if you work with diverse couples within your styled shoot, you will have the actual experience of working with that couple, even if it is just for a styled shoe.
So, yeah, there's good and bad, but I think if they're done well and done intentionally, not just kind of thrown together and hope for the best, then I really think there's a good place for them, especially when it comes to diversifying your portfolio. But there are. I mean, it's going to be way too much to go into now, but certainly in the toolkit, there's a lot of ways that you can avoid tokenism without having to have the direct imagery or even using other imagery.
It's just obviously a huge list of. Things, a huge, huge topic. But it's interesting because even when we're talking about style shoots, I think it actually comes back to something you were saying earlier about just looking at the supplier friends that you have and the venues that you work in and actually diversifying that.
Because actually, if you start putting yourself in different rooms and start working with photographers who maybe specialize in Asian weddings, for example, and you're a cake maker and you become friends with them and then you get involved in a shoot that they're doing, that's a much more natural way to do it than just going, well, I'll just get a couple who are look Indian, and we'll put it together in a style shoot.
So I think actually it comes back to us diversifying our own networks and putting ourselves in different rooms and reaching out and working with different people and a diverse range of people, so that we start to have a diverse range of contacts, not only that we can call on for advice and making sure we're doing things right, but also to embrace those relationships and work with them.
So my call to action, to people listening is look at the community you surround yourself with, and are there ways that you can. Can, you know, be in some different rooms and reach out and be in some different places rather than just sticking to what you know? I think the other thing that people are fearful of, which kind of goes beyond the marketing, is making mistakes when it comes to working with the couple.
So we talked earlier about maybe some of the, the different complications of, for example, people from different religious backgrounds getting married to each other. And if we take on a client like that, I think one of the fears people have is not knowing enough or getting it wrong or, you know, putting their foot in it. It. Do you have any advice around how we can kind of have those open conversations with our couples and not have the fear of getting it wrong, but do it in a better way?
That is probably the number one question I get asked by suppliers on a daily basis is, but I'm so afraid to get it wrong. There are a few things to that I would say that one, it is better to try than it is to avoid. Because if we avoid, we are not being inclusive ever. If we try, we are learning all the time. The way to do that with couples is to be honest.
If you have never worked with someone who, let's say it's a multi faith couple, if you've never worked with either of those religions, that's okay. How many, you know, how many religions have you worked with? Are you going to be able to work with all of them? Absolutely not. How nuanced are their practices when it comes to their religion? You know, you were saying before you're a practicing Christian, well, at what level? What elements, what, what did you want incorporated into your day?
Was it important to your husband that you had a non Christian wedding? But did you want to still honor some parts of your. You know, there's so many questions that goes back to who are those people as individuals if you've not worked with people? The number one question I actually get this for is pronouns because of forgetting pronouns and how to kind of combat that that I would always say to my couples, I will be very honest with you.
I have never worked with someone with your pronouns or of your religion before. So what I do is treat you as an individual. If I make a mistake at any point, please know that is absolutely no reflection on who I want to be as a person and you as a person. It is about me working on autopilot when I'm busy not giving enough thought. I will try my very hardest, but if at any point I make a mistake, please tell me. Please do not be afraid. This is a safe space between us.
I am here to work for you as my couple, not the other way around. I promise that goes a lot. A long, long way to not worrying so much and so many people. Most people I believe probably because I'm naive and like to think everyone's intrinsically a great person. But I believe that by just saying that one simple sentence of please just know if there's a. This is a safe space. If you need to tell me something, please tell me.
Their automatic reaction to you getting something wrong or making an assumption that you shouldn't have assumed will go from being, I don't want to work with this person because they don't understand me or they're rude to. They're still learning. I now have a chance to help them work better with my demographic in the future. And it really breaks that down into that empathy. We are all human and the one thing I will champion above anything else every single day in my life is authenticity.
And we've spoken about this recently, Becca, because we should not be classified as robots just because we're providing a service. So if we can have empathy with our couples and if we can almost teach our couples to have empathy with us and other suppliers, etc, then to be honest, I think the world would just be a better place if we all treated each other that way. But certainly in the wedding industry.
But please, just to go back to that first point, yes, it can be overwhelming, yes, it can be daunting and you don't want to offend anyone, you don't want to risk a bad review. But by being honest about it to start with and having that little bit more authenticity behind what you do, as well as trying, actively trying, then it's worth it. It's better than not trying at all. Yeah, absolutely. Such helpful advice. I think it all comes back to that word assumption, actually.
We need to stop trying to be perfect and say that we know everything, because there's absolutely no way we can know everything about any individual. Like you said at the beginning, it's impossible to be an expert in every human on the planet because everyone's got a different nuance. And we can't assume that because they're a Christian or a Hindu, Hindu or a Muslim or whatever it is that they have certain practices.
We have to just understand that instead of having those assumptions, let's just ask the questions and say, I want to understand you as an individual better. Please explain to me what's helpful to you rather than us going in and going, I'm an expert, I've read the book and therefore I know that this is what you want. Because actually, that's also probably more offensive than just being honest and vulnerable. And open. So take that pressure off yourselves.
If you're listening to this and feeling that pressure to know everything thing before you do it, I would say take that pressure off and actually just come from a place of honesty, authenticity and being a good human and it will get you a lot further and people will respect you for that. And of course, who knows themselves better than them, right? They know all the nuances of themselves and they'll be able to speak and share that openly with you.
I mean, we could have a whole 30 minute conversation just about the nuances of my faith and what that would look like in a wedding, but that could be totally different to the person down the road. And so, so I think we just have to have the time to listen and be respectful of each other. Now, Anna, I would love to talk to you for longer, but time is against us.
But you do have your toolkit, so just tell us a little bit about your toolkit, what it is, where people can get it and why they might be interested in knowing more about it. So my toolkit is a, an interesting take on. I, I say it's about inclusion, I don't say it's about diversity particularly, but it does have 10 chapters on 10 different diverse groups. I probably could have written 20 more chapters and they will probably come out in the future.
But for now it's 10 different main diverse groups that are relevant to the UK. It's quite important that we know it's about the UK and, and the nuances there. But it starts by taking you through unconscious bias, how to avoid assumptions and what diversity and inclusion means for us in the wedding industry. It is totally, totally written for the wedding industry alone. There are tangible examples for different suppliers.
Those questions we've been talking about all the way through, about the open ended questions and asking people every single chapter and every diverse group has a whole set of questions that you can ask to find that relevant information out without offending, without assuming, and just to kind of give people that leg up. But the main thing about the toolkit is that I designed it as someone who gets very overwhelmed by a lot of things.
So when I started my wedding business, I knew nothing about finance, probably definitely still don't. I knew nothing about sustainability. I knew my basic understanding of diversity and inclusion. And you go into the wedding industry and the majority of your listeners will be small business owners, not knowing and not being given the tools to help you guide through that. So the way I designed the toolkit was a way to learn how to become more inclusive, how to Ask right. The right questions.
But you don't have to sit and read the book as one whole book. You can pick it up and you can put it down whenever you need. If you get an inquiry from a diverse couple and you need to refresh yourself on the nuances that they may bring to that initial call, you can do that. So I think that's why I designed it in the way I did, because I want it to be something that people can just use to take the pressure off themselves more than anything else.
And yes, it will talk you through branding and tokenism and all these tangible things that we've spoken about today, but in a way that doesn't judge them and doesn't overwhelm them. And in itself, it's also accessible. So if you're neurodivergent, it is accessible to the neurodivergent community and how you read it. So it's a. It was a labor of love, but I think something that. That really could help people going forward, which is my ultimate goal, really. And I have seen it in actual real life.
It is a chunky book. There is a lot of information in there. We were making jokes about the size of Anna's book next to the size of my book. Made my book look tiny, even though it took me ages to write. However, I have looked through it. It's a great reference guide. And that's what it's designed to be, isn't it? It's a reference guide. It's not like you read the book and then it goes on your shelf forever in a day and gets dusty. The idea is that you can go back to it.
And so it's a. It's available as a digital copy. Where do people get it from? Is it available on a website? And I'll make sure I put the link in the show notes. Yes. So the wedding. So the web. The book is available currently as a digital download on wedding industry inclusivity.com it will be coming out as a hard copy very shortly.
And also, maybe this is a bit of insider information for your podcast, but we are launching a monthly membership for people where you'd get the book included, the hard copy for you to have at home. But what it will do is take you down in more of a classroom style, which at the end means you can actually show people that you've done all the work. Because I think sometimes when you do all of this, you want people to know.
You want people to know you're part of a community that's championing these things. And that's something that a lot of, a lot of people have fed back to me, that they want to be able to showcase that they're doing all this work and that's what that will come. So hopefully by Q2, that will be up and running and it will make things even more easy for people.
But the number one thing I would say to people is if you head to the website, even if you're not in a position yet to buy the book, or you're not in a position to really start the journey, but you want to and you're thinking about it, sign up for the monthly newsletter, because within that newsletter you get topical information that's kind of coming out as and when it's coming out, also what's coming up a month ahead and things like that.
So it's a really great way to kind of keep a touch point before taking the plunge and actually kind of, you know, auditing your inclusivity practices. Basically. Amazing. I will make sure I put the link to that. And I think the email marketing is perfect as well, because actually it does change all of the time and it's hard for everyone to keep up with it.
But actually, if we can come to you as a source where we know you will tell us when you see things, then we can at least know that we're across it without having to do the work to go and find it for ourselves. So I highly recommend doing that. And I think I may even sign up to it myself once we finish recording, too. Anna, it's been so lovely to talk to you. I'm sure we're going to talk to you again in the future. You've got so much more to share and to give. I know.
But for now, we need to bring this podcast to a close. So I always end with the same question, which is, what's one thing you wish you'd known sooner in your own wedding business? I started my business exactly the same as everybody else. I came from a place, yes, I'd worked in diversity and inclusion, but like I said, I am not someone who knows everything. None of us are. For me, and especially having started his day when we started his day, being inclusive isn't just about intention.
It's about perception. And that is the number one thing that I wish I'd known going in, even with his day, that we started as a business including men and grooms in an industry where they are vastly underrepresented. But even I didn't know how to show that we were inclusive in that moment. So that's my biggest learning, really. And that's exactly why my career over the last couple of years has taken me to the place. It's been fantastic. Well, we don't know what we don't know.
And all we can do is to try and get better and educate ourselves and make sure that we're constantly learning. And I'm so thankful that you are doing that for the wedding industry and I'm sure will be for a long time to come. Anna, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. What a fascinating conversation. I know it can feel like a minefield.
I know it can feel overwhelming, but actually we just need to look at some of the small changes and some of the small mindset things that we can look at to make a difference. So don't try and change everything overnight. Just listen to one piece of advice that Anna's given today and go put it into practice and then tomorrow do a different one. And I do recommend going and signing up to that newsletter, taking a look at the toolkit and following Anna to see what else she has coming up.
I'll see you all next time.