The biggest UK wedding magazine, Brides came joint second in my review and comparison of the best UK wedding magazines. With a whopping (love that word!) 394 pages it’s also one of the most expensive, but has some good content.
Brides magazine: a review
Issue compared: March / April 2011
Cover price: £4.99
- 394 pages
- 12 pages of real weddings
- 24 pages of advice and feature articles
- 13 other non-selling pages (contents etc)
- 93 pages of product ideas
- 252 pages of advertisements
- 64% of the magazine pages are ads
The articles inside are very good, in depth and compelling to read. Advice where it’s given is comprehensive and genuinely useful - it goes further than many other wedding magazines.
A Vera Wang interview which ran across six full pages makes this a very memorable wedding magazine. The quality of the interview and feature was really high, and for this reason Brides stood out as one of the best UK wedding magazines.
An article about choosing wedding music was similarly impressive: full of ideas, really nicely written and properly helpful, again it stood out as one of the best articles I’d read in the wedding magazine review. This one gets the boys’ vote as well – the article on music didn’t have a drop of pink and wasn’t girly in the slightest. I’m not so sure about some of the song recommendations… Bachelor Boy and When The Going Gets Tough made me smile though!
At 64% of the whole magazine that’s not the highest as a percentage, but it’s worth considering, especially if you’re buying every issue.
The wedding planning section at the back of the magazine gives a good general introduction to legal wedding stuff, it’s comprehensive and sensibly written with a good checklist. The average wedding budget according to Brides magazine is £23,877 – higher than any other UK wedding magazine tells us, but it is on target for an upmarket magazine like Brides.
I do wonder… could this be because Brides readers are buying what they see in those 252 pages of adverts?
Brides magazine is a classy wedding magazine, worth buying early in your wedding planning (when you’ve yet to find your dress) or for a particular article advertised on the cover when you’re looking for specific advice.
