Alternative to Guest Book
Lesley Mattos, Founder of Adesso Albums, and local Bay Area entrepreneur is our current featured vendor. Here, we detail her product, Adesso Albums, and we'll highlight the many great ways Brides and Grooms can utilize these fun and instantly gratifying Guest Books. Adesso Albums have been featured in InStyle, Elegant Bride, Metropolitan Home and other prominent publications.
What Is An Instant Photo Guest Album?
It's exciting to find these albums right before your wedding as a replacement for the traditional(boring)guest book! They are a unique "marriage" of a photo album and a guest book. These photo guest books and photo albums capture your event INSTANTLY in pictures and words and are ready to be enjoyed as soon as the event is over. The books combine instant Polaroid photos and hand written personalized sentiments from your guests to make the unique Adesso Albums Photo Guest Book.
How Can I Use Adesso Albums at My Wedding?
1. Ask someone close to the bride and groom to collect photos of the happy couple during their courtship. Fill the album with these photos and at the reception pass the album around and have the guests write best wishes. At the end of the wedding present the album to the couple and they’ll be so touched by the personal sentiments. They’ll also love re-living their dating days through photos!
2. Assign someone at the reception the job of amateur photographer. Arm them with a Polaroid camera, an album and a pen and have them collect photos and signatures of all the guests. Give the completed album / guestbook to the couple at the end of the reception and they will love having a memento they can enjoy right away.
3. Gift the “Begin Now Kit” to the bride and groom. This kit contains a Polaroid camera, film, and an album. They can bring the kit with them on their honeymoon and they’ll have a blast filling it up with photos and notes from their trip. When they arrive back home they can share it with their friends and family immediately instead of having to wait until the photos are developed.
New Technology Makes It Even Easier!
Instant digital photography – the new ZINK (zero ink) technology that was developed by ZINK Imaging brings instant photography into the digital age with inkless paper. The first product to market was the Polaroid PoGo instant mobile printer (July 2008) and Tomy (Japan) announced that its combination camera/printer which utilizes this technology will be available at the end of November 2008 – now THAT product is clearly the Polaroid for the digital age! Polaroid is slated to come out with a similar product in 2009, and Dell has a version of the standalone printer at the FCC.
Satisfied Customers
Hundreds of satisfied brides and celebrity clients have used and loved Adesso Albums Adesso Albums. One example is Sharon Naylor, Published Author of over 35 Wedding Related Books, and herself a Wedding Planner.
Sharon Naylor's Testimonial
"We used our red Adesso Album at our rehearsal dinner! My ten year-old nephew took charge of the camera, and he captured all of our guests enjoying the food and the company. This was our *first* big family event held at our new home, so it added an extra measure of excitement to every photo shown in the album...and we have our guests' good wishes in print. Our Adesso Album got our guests smiling and laughing, posing and joking around, which set the perfect mood for our laid-back, at-home rehearsal dinner! A plain guest book would never have set the same tone."
Leaving The Rat Race
Here is Lesley's story: "It was early 2001. I’d been working for high profile technology companies in Silicon Valley since 1973, and a single mother of four for the preceding 10 years. The last of the kids got squared away in college and I felt like I’d crossed the finish line of a marathon. I walked into my boss’s office at Cisco the very next day and quit! I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew it wasn’t going to be that anymore!
Emancipated for the first time in almost three decades, I traveled to Florence to attend a friend’s wedding. The bride asked me to take Polaroid photos of the guests at the wedding, scotch tape them into a gorgeous Italian leather bound scrapbook and have the guests write something to she and her groom. As a single guest, it was a great way to mingle with a purpose, was a fun activity for the guests, and a wonderful instant memento of the celebration for Clare and Michael.
A few days later, on a train from Florence to Rome, I reflected on the wedding and the whole experience of putting together this instant memento for my friends. The only problem was that it was time consuming (and ugly) to scotch tape the pictures and when it was finished, it was lumpy and homemade looking. I thought, “There has to be a better way to simplify the process and make the final product more elegant”. Then right there in my Italian travel journal, right alongside all the things I’d never want my kids to read, I sketched what would soon become the Adesso Album.
When I got home, I called a business associate whose creativity I’d admired over the years and asked him to help me get the ball rolling. In the meantime, I headed back to Italy to write my business plan in the country that inspired me. That’s where the name Adesso came from, it means “now” in Italian.
I knew absolutely NOTHING about manufacturing an album, but did know a lot of people – designers, printers, other business associates – and I talked to anyone that anyone referred me to. Contacts led to more contacts and before I knew it I had a prototype and a manufacturer. Also, thanks to these generous contacts I had enough funding to launch, I was ready to go!
Now, almost seven years after that wedding in Italy, Adesso Albums is an international company with over a million dollars in revenue last year (50% sequential growth over 2006) and are on track to repeat that in 2008. Of course, we LOVE that, but the best part has been surprising... We get cards, letters, emails, pictures, even videos from our customers everyday telling us how Adesso Albums have touched their lives – and in so many ways – both personally and from a business perspective. From the couple who just got married and looked at the album every day of their honeymoon to the military family who used an album to chronicle what happened while the dad was on tour for a year, to our international distributors who each used the albums at their weddings and have since quit their day jobs to sell Adesso Albums in their part of the world – its’ all very humbling. So, that’s my story and I’m hoping it in some small way inspires other women to take that first leap and try something new, something that they really love. There is nothing like it!"
Watch Lesley on CNBC's What's The Big Idea
Lesley will also be featured in two upcoming books on women entrepreneurs – “Never Underestimate the Power of Women” by Joyce Steinert, and “Scrappy Start-Ups” by Melanie Keveles.
Besides her job, what Lesley loves most is her boyfriend Bill, and her four grown kids: Derek, Adrienne, Grant and Zack. Recently, Lesley started taking art classes and is loving it. She wants to start sewing again, and is "...always writing something – have a couple of books started – it’s the finishing that’s the tough part – I have a relatively short attention span!" A really super cool fact: Her great, great Uncle was Wyatt Earp, and her mom flew airplanes in WWII as a WASP. Any wonder she turned into an independent woman?!
Retail pricing through the end of November has been reduced by up to $25 per album.
Adesso Albums, Inc.
Lesley Mattos, Founder
Adesso Albums Website
300 Beale Street STE 100
San Francisco
415.957.9901
Office Hours: 9-5 M-F
Lesley's Question to Our readers: What Makes You LAUGH the hardest? For me, (Liz) that would be my 2 very amusing children (Stella who is 3 and Liam who is almost One). Boy, do they crack me up!
Love,
The Soup Maven
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