Offbeat Bride is now Offbeat Wed

Hi, everyone. Ariel here, author of three editions of the Offbeat Bride book and owner of Offbeat Empire LLC. And as of today, I’m the publisher of Offbeat Wed, the new name of this here website!

That’s right: Offbeat Bride is finally ditching the gendering and relaunching as Offbeat Wed.

We’ve been talking about this change for months, but for those of you just joining us, here are a few questions that have come in the most frequently from readers:

Why did you change the name from Offbeat Bride?

I’ve fielded questions for over a decade about why the name of the website was gendered. My initial answer was “the website is named after the book, and the book was published by a women’s press, and they picked the name.”

As the website became bigger than the book, I shifted my answer to “We believe bride is a state of mind… not a set of genitals!” That was a cute quip, and it bought me a few more years.

Honestly, I was terrified to rebrand. As anyone who’s changed their name knows, it’s a grueling process… and with a brand as well established as Offbeat Bride, it was a change involving a team of lawyers, web devs, sysadmins, graphic designers, and more.

But when I produced our inclusive marketing guide for wedding vendors earlier this year, I realized that it was time. I could no longer justify keeping the old name.

I’m not the first wedding publisher strip the word “bride” from their name, and hopefully I won’t be the last. Being inclusive is an ongoing process, and we’re ALL still learning… and that includes us.

Why did you pick Offbeat Wed as the new name?

The most obvious new name would have been Offbeat Wedding or Offbeat Weddings. While I own the trademark for both these names, the sad truth is that domain squatters snapped up both URLs years ago, so it was easier to just for Offbeat Wed, which has the added bonus of being shorter.

We’re using the word “wed” in the verb sense, as in “get married to.” So whereas it old branding was a noun (“I’m an offbeat bride!”) the new branding is a verb (“Casey and Taylor were offbeat wed”).

Is this name the perfect solution? Nope. Will some folks hate it? Sure. Is it short and sweet and does it work? HELL YES!

What’s changing as part of the Offbeat Wed rebrand?

As of yesterday, you’ll see that our branding has changed… but just barely. Our logo has a new font and flag shape, but that’s about it. Other than that, the branding isn’t changing much — same colors, same shapes. Absolutely nothing is changing with our website design. The

Our URL changed today, which is honestly the most terrifying part of this whole process. (Fingers crossed that all our redirects work out, and that the search gods shine on us!)

This month we’ll be going through the tangled process of changing our social media handles on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Pinterest. Especially with Insta and FB, it’s a fiddly process that takes weeks so things might be a bit messy over there. It’ll probably take me most of the fall to get all the lingering things cleaned up… newsletter drip series need to be updated, downloadable need to be rebranded, offbeathome.com and offbeatempire.com need to be updated, etc.

Thanks for your patience with the process!

What does this mean for readers?

Ideally, this change has very little impact our readers. Nothing is changing about the kind of content we’re producing, or how we produce it. We have redirects in place so that hopefully all your bookmarked links will still work.

That said, if you want to help us out with this shift, there are a couple things you can do:

• If you have a website where you’ve ever linked Offbeat Bride, we’d be deeply grateful if you could update your links to be Offbeat Wed and offbeatwed.com. Of course links to our website are always great, but they’re extra helpful during this scary time when we’re trying to help search engines understand this change.
• Tell engaged folks about us! Again, this is something that’s always helpful, but extra helpful now. If you know engaged folks, tell ’em about your old pals at Offbeat Bride who are now even more inclusive with their name change to Offeat Wed.
• If you’re a member of our Wedding Vendor Directory, we’ve updated our vendor badges! You can grab yours over here (email [email protected] if you need any help with your badge, or anything else with your vendor listing). Not yet a vendor member? Now’s a great time to get listed! Show the world that you stand with and for inclusive wedding planning!

Whew, ok that’s a lot. If you have a question that I didn’t cover, or if you found something on the site that’s broken… first clear your browser cache, and then leave a comment below.