Like so many others, we have spent the past week listening, learning, and coming together as a team to establish a clear action plan in order to champion change in our community we truly stand behind. Don’t get us wrong, we are very aware that SMP has a long way to go. But this is a start. And we will only continue to get better, that’s a promise.
It’s now time to take our place as a leader in this industry and stand up against racism, both in the wedding community and the world. That being said, we are beyond excited to share our 6 initiatives with you today. We say initiatives, but they are truly our promises. Please know that we wholeheartedly welcome you into the conversation, if there’s something more that we can be doing – please reach out to us! We invite you to share any and all thoughts as to how we can invoke lasting and meaningful change. We look forward to a brighter, more diverse, and most importantly – EQUAL future for all… in the wedding space and beyond.
Our team at SMP is committed to showing consistent support of Black and POC wedding professionals both publicly on our social media & site and behind the scenes. We want to celebrate the amazing work that is done by talented vendor teams in a way that feels meaningful and that drives real revenue dollars for the Black wedding community. We promise to work harder to identify these amazing individuals and give them the acknowledgement they are so worthy of.
Our second promise takes us back into the past, while helping to hold us accountable for the future. We have appointed an analyst to work through every editorial we’ve posted in 2020 and determine what percentage of the couples featured are diverse, whether that be in ethnicity or sexual orientation.
We’ll be making this information publicly available to give our community full transparency, and have also set benchmarks for ourselves to meet, based on the population of the US. Moving forward we will be measuring ourselves against these on a monthly basis.
By digging deeper into the data, we’ll create a clearer picture of just how far off we are in this area, and can more effectively task our staff to move the needle. We know that regularly featuring Black and POC couples in our content is just one small part of the solution but we are committed to making it a focus for 2020 and beyond.
Following on from our promise to audit our content and share the results, we promise to do better. Our overarching goal with this promise is to ensure that every man and woman, no matter the color of their skin, their culture, their sexual orientation, gender identity or their religion, feels comfortable, at home and inspired when they read Style Me Pretty.
As part of this, we are committed to actively searching for, and even more regularly featuring the weddings of Black, biracial, and other minority couples. We want to ensure that our readers regularly see themselves in the content of our site and on our social channels, and so realize the need for our content to be more representative of the different ethnicities that make up the population around us.
We are also calling on the wedding industry to work together in this initiative! When it comes to real weddings, our main priority moving forward is to publish more diversity on SMP, specifically Black and biracial couples. Although this is something we crave desperately, weddings featuring Black brides or grooms are rarely submitted to us.
With that being said, we know there are so many gorgeous weddings featuring BIPOC couples out there just waiting to be published, and we sincerely encourage wedding professionals and couples alike to please submit more of these weddings to SMP to help us in our goal to better represent this community.
We believe that change begins with us, not just as an organization, but also as a group of individuals who represent Style Me Pretty. We know it’s incredibly important to educate ourselves on the systemic racism faced by Black individuals, and use both our individual and collective voices to take a stand.
As part of our internal commitment, we’ve opened up the conversation within our team to discuss how we can be a true partner to the BIPOC communities, and created these 6 promises together as a pact for us to all do better. We’ve encouraged every member of our team to be part of this movement by taking time to do their research, engage directly with Black members of our community and attend diversity panels and webinars so they can make changes within their day to day processes that have previously reinforced the inequality within our industry.
Finally we have made a donation in each of our employee’s names to the Black Lives Matter cause of their choice. We believe that words without action are fleeting in the wind, so if you can we encourage you to also join us in donating to one of the following organizations:
SMP understands that we have a duty to provide a diverse offering of viewpoints and experiences within our brand. Our plan for promise number five is to actively recruit BIPOC guest writers, as well as vendors, and bring a variety of voices to our editorials.
Moving forward, it is our intention to work with Black writers and content creators on a regular basis to ensure our content not only reflects the minority communities, but that it is created by the minority communities. As a first step, we interviewed 8 influential BIPOCs in our industry for an upcoming editorial. We look forward to including these voices, celebrating them, and ensuring those that have previously felt underrepresented both by us and the wedding industry as a whole are part of the future of SMP.
In our final promise, we commit to keeping the conversation going and ensure we don’t just speak about change but actually make it happen. We’re taking steps to form a diversity panel, representing BIPOC voices and views within our industry, who can hold us accountable for the promises we’ve made.
In partnering with and representing minority business owners and makers in the wedding industry we will ensure that Style Me Pretty isn’t simply checking a box, but that we are a leader in combating racism within our bridal community.
We are actively reaching out to our LBB members and other vendor partners to ensure our commitments align with their needs and hope to build a taskforce that can continue to foster this conversation into meaningful action. We are asking for their feedback, just as we are asking for yours – we welcome your comments or criticisms and we stand before you ready to support in any way we can.
We may have shared our final promise today, but we know that we are so far from the end of this commitment. We are ready to make changes and move forward into the future, and we hope you’ll all join us in trying to do better in every way for the BIPOC community.