After I got engaged, I wanted a fairy-tale princess wedding. But like so many brides, I had only a peasant’s budget, and my Prince Charming didn’t have a royal treasury at his disposal. It was time to get creative.
At that point, I knew nothing about bartering. Now I’m much savvier—since then, I’ve done quite a lot of it, and I even co-wrote a book about it. But at the time, I was pretty nervous about trading. It felt an awful lot like selling, and I’d never really sold anything, if you don’t count selling fruit door-to-door for my high-school marching band. I was singularly average at that. But I realized I had to get over my fear if I wanted to have the wedding of my dreams.
Back then, roughly the Cro-Magnon era, there was no Internet, and I hadn’t heard about commercial barter exchanges, which would have really accelerated the whole process. Barter exchanges are especially good for business owners, and I wasn’t one of those. Instead, I had to barter the old-fashioned way—directly with each wedding vendor that had what I needed.
First, I had to figure out what I had to trade. I didn’t realize that my writing skills would have been excellent to swap. But my stepfather had started a small community newspaper outside my hometown of Nashville, Tenn., and I figured that was a good start. Luckily, he gave me carte blanche to trade as much advertising in his newspaper as I wanted. Little did I know that this sort of third-party trade, as barter expert Karen S. Hoffman calls it, is more complex to arrange. It helped that I was highly motivated (shall we say, desperate) and from the start, I did some things right. I also instinctively realized that I would have better luck with small, locally owned businesses than chain stores.
I called a local wedding and formalwear shop and asked to speak to the owner. I wasn’t even suave enough to get her name first from the clerk who answered the phone. As I proposed my trade, I stuttered like Mel Tillis. She agreed to talk to me about it if I came by the store, which I did like my pants were on fire. Her business was relatively young at that point—another bit of luck in my favor—and she wanted to get the area’s high-school girls to buy their prom dresses there. She agreed to let me pick any gown in the store, along with a veil, shoes, stockings, costume jewelry, and a lacy blue garter that I’ve since dubbed the “bartered garter,” in exchange for an ad.
From that success, I became more confident, and trading got easier. I traded with a florist for my bouquet (and boy, was it huge; she really wanted the advertising), as well as groom’s and groomsmen’s boutonnieres, a cake knife, silk floral decorations for the church and reception hall, and flowers for the mothers and grandmothers. I easily saved $2,000 or more on my wedding and got a much more elaborate gown and flowers than I would have been able to pay cash for. If I’d been a bit savvier (and bolder), I could have traded for even more services, such as a limousine, the cake, photos—really, all aspects of my wedding.
Joel Conner, owner of Gallery 101 and Conner Photography in Collinsville, Ill., saved $2,300 on his wedding photos last April by bartering. It seems illogical that a photographer would need to trade for photos, but since he couldn’t be the groom and shoot his big day, he needed to outsource. That’s where friend Odell Mitchell Jr., owner of Omnipix Photography of O’Fallon, Ill., came into the picture. Mitchell’s wife, Linda, had just self-published a children’s book and wanted to sell prints from the book and have a book-signing party. She was on a tight budget, though. So Conner proposed trading Mitchell’s photography for holding the signing at Gallery 101.
“I was sort of surprised when Linda came in and told me that I was shooting his wedding in exchange for using his gallery. But I didn’t mind,” Mitchell says, laughing. “It was just like shooting any other wedding, except I didn’t give him prints. I corrected the color, cropped the images, and cleaned them up, though.”
Conner and his bride, Shannon, were thrilled.
“We’re always looking for ways to trim budgets and save money. Bartering is an everyday thing for me in my photography studio,” Conner says. “It worked out well.”
Conner and Mitchell’s trade illustrates a key point about bartering: You may have to be flexible. Because making prints involves hard costs for Mitchell, he and Conner agreed to forgo them, especially given that Conner could print his own images. When cash outlays are needed from a vendor on trade, you may have to settle for less than you originally hoped for, or add some cash to the deal—known as a cash-trade blend.
In my case, I loved my wedding dress, but I was limited to what the store’s owner could acquire for me from her vendors. If I had had a specific brand name and style in mind, I might have been out of luck. I also had to work with vendors in Nashville, even though my wedding was in St. Louis. That certainly added a layer of complexity. If you are trading for catering, for example, you might be limited to certain less-expensive entrées, depending on the nature of what you are offering in return, or some other item might not be part of the deal. It’s all part of the negotiation.
Perhaps even more important in bartering is the need for patience. Barter deals don’t usually happen overnight. You’ll need more time to find a trading partner and set up a transaction than if you were paying cash alone. So it’s best to plan ahead and be prepared for delays. The good news is that because you are trading—and thus breaking each side of the transaction down into components to swap—you are going to get to know your wedding vendors far better than if you paid cash. That’s particularly appealing if any issues come up that need to be resolved.
Which brings us to another very important point: When you are trading for big-ticket items such as your reception site, catering, beverages, or even your rings (yes, you can trade for bling), get a contract and/or receipt just as you would if you were paying cash. Check with each vendor’s references before you sign any contracts, and expect to provide the same for your services or goods. While many trades are informal handshake deals that don’t really need a contract, you should be very clear about what you expect to receive and what you will be providing in return if you aren’t spelling it all out in print.
If you’re pinched for time, consider joining a commercial barter exchange. Most everything you would need for your wedding and honeymoon is available through these for-profit companies, explains Richard Harris, owner of National Commercial Exchange in Maryland Heights. The advantage of going through an exchange is that you can offer your goods or services to any member of the exchange and earn barter credits to spend with other members. Harris says most exchanges are open to a wide variety of trade possibilities, ranging from dog walking to child care or Bosnian lessons. Members of exchanges are primed for bartering, so you won’t have to search for trading partners; after all, they paid monthly membership, joining, and transaction fees to take part in the action. The key is to make sure that you can supply enough of a skill or good to earn the credits you need to spend.
“And if it doesn’t work out, we even have divorce attorneys you can trade with,” Harris jokes.
Shera Dalin is a journalist, ghostwriter, and co-author, with Karen S. Hoffman, of The Art of Barter: How to Trade for Almost Anything, as well as trading blog Barter Strategies (barterstrategies.com).
