BY DAY Vanessa Barber from Denby Dale designs ranges of clothing for High Street fashion brands.
In the evenings and weekends she’s to be found at her home computer putting together bespoke stationery for weddings, birthdays and special events.
Much to her surprise the small cottage industry, Beautiful Ink, that she launched after designing her own wedding invitations didn’t just take off, it also reached the finals of a national business award.
Vanessa, 25, got married in July this year but began preparations months before.
“When we got engaged I knew I wanted to have a wedding where we did a lot of the bits and pieces ourselves,” she explained. “When I couldn’t find the sort of invites we wanted to reflect our day I decided to design them myself.”
Theirs was not a conventional church wedding.
The couple married in a civil ceremony conducted in a converted barn near Vanessa’s home town of Bolton. “It was a country wedding and quite relaxed. We had an ice cream van and my mum did all the flowers,” she said.
Traditional wedding invitations with hearts, flowers, butterflies, bells and embossing weren’t what they wanted.
“My husband Aaron is from Southampton and we had a lot of guests travelling a long way to the wedding, so the invitations had to have a lot of information on them, with details of how to get to us,” Vanessa explained. In the end she designed an invitation pack, which included a map.
“When we sent the invites out in April I got a lot of positive feedback from people. I had so many compliments and comments from friends. I’m at that age where a lot of my friends are getting married and the idea of starting a design business just sort of grew,” she added.
A graduate of Huddersfield University, where she did a degree in fashion design, Vanessa says the computer skills she uses everyday for her job as a fashion and graphics designer at Huddersfield company Focus, based in Paddock, mean that she’s been able to give her stationery a professional look.
“We use a lot of highly technical programmes at work and we do a lot of computer design,” she said. “My designs are all about the typography.”
Vanessa was also able to design her own website, www.beautiful-ink.co.uk, and is now thinking of expanding her range of products.
Earlier in the summer Beautiful Ink was chosen by the Country Homes and Interiors magazine as one of six runners up in their Country Business Awards. Vanessa was invited to a celebratory event at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London to meet business mentors.
“The advice I got was to think about branching out into other areas of stationery,” she explained. “Since then I have had enquiries from someone who wants art work for a family tree, which would be interesting to do, and someone wanting business stationery for a wedding flower business. I have also recently done the stationery for an 18th birthday.”
