It’s Wedding Wednesday and this is an extra exciting one because it is the Wednesday before our wedding! Our guests begin arriving at our villa in Florence today and the rest arrive tomorrow, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to share our wedding welcome bags with you all. Plus, I’m sharing some tips and ideas for what to put in wedding welcome bags for your guests!
First, I’ll admit that while packing I may have slightly regretted how much we decided to include in our welcome bags, because we had to fly (almost) all of it over, minus the big bottles of liquids. In hindsight I know I’ll be glad I stocked these for our guests, though. I’m going to break this down combining what you need for your bags and then a little about what we did for each of these.
BAGS WITH A SPECIAL TOUCH
The adorable burlap bags we used for our welcome bags were c/o Swoozies. I wanted something plain that we could decorate a bit with ribbon and a gift tag with calligraphy that says ‘Benvenuto’ or ‘Welcome’ in Italian to make it custom to our theme and colors. Mostly, I wanted our guests to actually be able to use the bags again. A special touch doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be monogrammed or have your names or wedding date on it. We thought about doing something fun like “best weekend ever” and our wedding date or a fun map of Florence, but I’ve had similar things at weddings and never ended up using them again. On that note (and a soon to be full blog post), don’t give your girlfriends some makeup bag or robe that says “bridesmaid” that they will never use again. You wouldn’t want that, so don’t give it. Mmmk?! If you do want something custom, do a little gift bag that you can print on that isn’t a big deal to throw out after the weekend.
DRINKS
My favorite welcome or gift bags have included things we can use in our room throughout the wedding weekend, so that’s what we wanted to do, too. Let’s start with the important stuff, like the wine. We bought some Italian wine upon our arrival and attached these amazing custom wine labels to them with a fun welcome note to our guests. You can use this adorable little shop to customize your wine label for any occasion, which I love! We also got two bottles of Pellegrino water and some Limoncello when we arrived. Water is a must for the bags. Depending on where you’re getting married, you can customize what else you include in the bag based on that. For a Mexico destination, tequila would be perfect. For a wedding in Austin, Texas include some Titos Vodka. They don’t have to be full size bottles like we did either, little travel size ones work great, too! We put these adorable little tags, which were customized for us on our Limoncello bottles.
SNACKS
Our hotel has breakfast downstairs each morning and snacks as needed, so we kinda skipped this one minus the RX Bar included in the hangover kit (more on that towards the end of the post). Plus, when in Italy, it’s allll about the pasta, pizza, and gelato so we kept our guest’s stomachs happy throughout the weekend while out and about. If we were getting married here, I would have loved to do bags of his and her favorite snacks. I love seeing cute little bags labeled with ‘his favorite’ and ‘her favorite’ and including both salty and sweet snacks for your guests to have in their rooms.
A BIT OF TRADITION OR SOMETHING UNIQUE TO YOUR LOCATION
Just like above where I recommended tailoring your included drinks to your location or theme, include any other little fun things that relate to this. If where you’re getting married is known for it’s chocolate, include some. We chose to honor an Italian wedding tradition where five sugared almonds are given to each guest to serve as a reminder that life is both bitter and sweet and to signify health, wealth, happiness, fertility, and longevity. The same shop that made our custom Limoncello labels made us some c/o for the little box of sugared almonds, to explain why we were including them. The adorable map box is c/o Graceful Events, which literally has so many cute ideas for favors and events!
UTENSILS
Ensure that your guests can open the wine or drinks you get them or that they have something to put them in. Most hotels will have corkscrews or bottle openers in the rooms or that you can call down to the front desk to get brought up. We weren’t sure that ours would, so we had the most adorable ‘Cheers’ corkscrew and ‘Love’ bottle openers sent with our bags c/o Swoozies. I did not have them all in time to include in the photos before I left, but did have them in time to bring them over to Italy with us for our guests to use over the weekend and take with them when they left. This would also be a great time to include some custom cups with your wedding date, hashtag, or a fun saying on it with your names.
We skipped the custom cups, just because we knew it would be challenging to travel with them, and instead used these adorable drink stirrers c/o of Studio Noel. She has the cutest custom little signs and drink stirrers in her shop and I just adore her. She’s a teacher by day so we totally connected over working in the schools and having a side hustle. She customized the adorable pizza and wine ones for our guests for our welcome party and then made the cute ones with our hashtag and made us cute bride and groom ones. Obsessed!
A MAP AND/OR ITINERARY
The welcome bag is a great place to include a customized map of the city or a weekend itinerary for your guests to reference as needed. There are so many fun options on Etsy that you can customize as needed to match your wedding theme/colors and to include whatever information your guests will need to know.
SOMETHING TO PAMPER THEMSELVES WITH
Traveling, no matter how far, can be stressful so make sure your guests have something to pamper themselves a bit with. We included my favorite hydrating rose mist that Herbivore was nice enough to provide us with one travel size bottle to give to each guest.
A HANGOVER KIT
I mean, you know they’ll use it. I did this for my girlfriends at my bachelorette party and knew we had to include one for our wedding guests, too. We put them in these adorable ‘In sickness and in health’ bags and stocked them full with an RX Bar, Pepto Bismal tablets, Tylenol, a Shout Wipe, and Emergen-C. You can usually find these little individual or travel sizes at gas stations or a local pharmacy to stock up on.
ANY PRACTICAL ITEMS FOR YOU LOCATION/DESTINATION
Our wedding is outdoors, part of which will be in the grass outside of our Villa, so I included these amazing heel stoppers c/o GoGoHeel. You put these little babies on the end of your high heel so you don’t sink the grass while walking around. I mean, how perfect for your guests for an outdoor wedding?! If you’re having a beach wedding, include a little travel size bottle of sunscreen, custom sunglasses, or even a beach towel. Whatever helps ensure your guests are comfortable and have what they need is great to include in your welcome bags!
I was so excited to give these to our guests and excited to share them with you all. By the time you all read this our wedding weekend will have technically started since it’s an extra long one given the destination. I can’t believe it! I am so excited to share the details with you all. Be sure you are susbcribed to my blog to get first dibs on pictures, updates, and info! And be sure to follow along on Instagram and Instastories.
Note: Most of the items in this post were given to us c/o the companies or small businesses in exchange for promotion on my blog. All opinions are of course, my own. Partnership opportunities like this help make A Lo Profile possible and help support other amazing small businesses!
