RIP Style Me Pretty

The popular wedding blog will go dark on April 30.

Much to the shock of wedding professionals and enthusiasts, wedding blog Style Me Pretty announced on April 10 that it's shutting down at the end of the month.

stylemepretty.com

Style Me Pretty consists of two branches — Style Me Pretty Weddings, and Style Me Pretty Living, which was launched a few years later.

If you got married or know someone who got married in the last decade, it's likely you came across SMP at some point – it's pretty much responsible for what we now think of as "the Pinterest wedding".

Winsome + Wright / winsomeandwright.com / Via instagram.com

Abby Larson founded the blog in 2007, as a way to offer wedding inspiration and advice from the world's best vendors, and act as a directory for exclusive industry professionals. It was one of the first websites to showcase "real weddings," and quickly became a hotspot for dreamy, aspirational wedding photos, and blush pink details.

"Even the most perfect of weddings must eventually come to a close. The same is true for us here at Style Me Pretty. After an incredible twelve years of sharing your beautiful weddings, we will close Style Me Pretty on April 30th," the company explained in a statement posted at the top of its website and on its social media accounts.

Elizabeth Messina / elizabethmessina.com!/images/love/gallery/1 / Via instagram.com

"While we won’t be posting any new stories after today, you’ll be able to view and save anything on the site up until the end of the month. We’re so proud to have played even a small role in sending so many brides and grooms off into their happily-ever-after. Thank you for sharing such special moments with us."

Although Style Me Pretty didn't list an official reason for its closure, a source told BuzzFeed that it was "an unexpected decision made by the parent company."

Stephanie Brazzle / stephaniebrazzle.com / Via instagram.com

Style Me Pretty is owned by Oath Inc., a subsidiary of Verizon. AOL, which Oath now owns, bought Style Me Pretty from Larson in 2012. Industry insiders suspect a change in the site's vendor listing structure helped lead to its demise.

Not only will Style Me Pretty stop posting new content as of today, all of the site's archives will apparently be inaccessible after April 30. Couples and vendors featured on Style Me Pretty were told in an email to screenshot anything they wanted to save.

Style Me Pretty

A typical Style Me Pretty wedding looked a lot like this one, with no shortage of sun-dappled photos and lots of cafe lights. The bride in these photos, Adriana Rodriguez Foy, was more than thrilled to be featured on her dream wedding website back in 2013.

Mint Phototography / mymintphotography.com / Via stylemepretty.com

"I loved Style Me Pretty when I was planning," Foy told BuzzFeed. "Every wedding on the site was beautiful and full of meaningful details. It made you want to be at this wedding and have a wedding just like it."

"I think I cried when we found out we were going to be on SMP. I spent a year planning this magical day and it was going to shown to everyone in a amazing way. It was definitely a goal to be on there, the joke in my family became, 'But is it good enough for Style Me Pretty?' when we made decisions."

For industry professionals like photographers, the loss of the website and its backlog of content is a double whammy, as Style Me Pretty has provided crucial exposure and business for more than a decade.

A Brit & A Blonde / abritandablonde.com / Via stylemepretty.com

"At the height of SMP’s popularity, almost 80% of my wedding bookings were coming directly from clients who had seen one of my weddings featured on SMP," Meagan Gilpatrick of Maine Seasons Events told BuzzFeed. "Abby [Larson] really was the creative mind behind the whole photo shoot movement that happened for wedding inspirations." Larson left Style Me Pretty last May and reflected on her former company's closure in an Instagram post.

Gilpatrick was in Style Me Pretty's "Little Black Book," an online directory of mostly exclusive, high-end wedding vendors, including photographers and florists.

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"It was a huge business tool for me," Gilpatrick said of the LBB, which costs members $1,200 a year in exchange for inclusion in editorials and prominent placement on the website, among other perks. "Their closure represents an uncertain hole for many of us in the wedding market. Much of my published work will now no longer be searchable on the internet, and links no longer available to share with potential clients of my work."

Jessica Bishop, who founded the popular website Budget Savvy Bride in 2008, counts Style Me Pretty as a major inspiration for her own site. "SMP has always been seen as the crème de la crème in terms of features and vendors — wedding professionals aspired to be published there and countless brides dreamed of having their special days featured on the site," she told BuzzFeed.

"SMP was the holy grail of wedding blogs," wedding photographer Tracy Englund told BuzzFeed. "I think, as a photographer, we all felt validated if our work was published there."

Joel Serrato / joelserrato.com / Via instagram.com

"It was a great accomplishment to share with potential brides, as nearly everyone knew who SMP was, and how they only shared all that was beautiful," Englund added.

"It seems like such a waste to not leave it online in an archive format," Bishop said. "It's very unfortunate that over a decade of beautiful, inspirational, and helpful content that will cease to exist on the web."

In the wake of Style Me Pretty shuttering, some bloggers are pitching in to help out the couples and vendors who feel blindsided by the news.

Style Me Pretty / Via Facebook: stylemepretty

Brittny Drye of Love Inc., an equality-focused wedding blog, is compiling a list of websites that'll let would-be SMP features continue to live online. For her part, Drye is letting all LGBTQ content that was meant for Style Me Pretty be posted to her website.

Style Me Pretty wasn't perfect — it was heteronormative, embodied many of the most annoying aspects of the wedding industrial complex, and overwhelmingly featured white, affluent women and their headless grooms. That said, it was iconic, hugely influential, and meant a lot to its fans and vendor community.

Sarah Ingram / sarah-ingram.com / Via Instagram: @sarah___ingram

It's the end of an era. 💛