On Saturday me and Adele (Adele Louise Smith) hosted our first ever event, the West Midlands Blogger Meet. Although I had hosted an event before, this one was a lot bigger and required A LOT more planning than before so I was much more nervous.

After four months of planning the big day finally arrived and me and Adele heading off to the venue, the Rainbow in Birmingham, nice and early ready to set up.  As we live so far away from each other we still had goody bags to fill so we made a human conveyor belt with my parents, filling a section of the bag each.

We’d set up the room so that the mini stage was free for speakers, the brands that attended had the surrounding tables, the raffle was at the end of the tables and the bloggers could chat and walk around.  We had Get You Seen PR, Skinsinscere, Earlybird and Coppafeel attend on the day, all of which had a little something different for the bloggers to see.

We also used every surface possible (including the bar) and set up loads of different food and drink options from our generous brands including Say Yes to No, Zeo, Life Tonics, Tasty Little Numbers, Nugget and Mallow, Little Miracles and Virtue.

We also had a table with a selection of products to try including Skindinavia, Crystal Spring, Lyonsleaf and our Pretty Lovely Bloggers leaflets from StressFreePrint.

We held a raffle that raised money for the amazing charity Mind and overall we were able to raise £93 – amazing! Thank you so much to everyone who bought a ticket and congratulations to all of the winners!

There were also two speakers on the day Elizabeth (Rosalilium) and Chelsea (Loving Life in Wellies). First Elizabeth spoke about optimising your Pinterest for your blog, something I really need to do. Chelsea gave a talk about bloggers and brands, which was also really interesting. Thank you so much to both speakers at the West Midlands Blogger meet; it was such a lovely touch to the event.

After the speakers both brands and bloggers had the chance to interact, giving me a chance to speak to everyone, including all of the lovely bloggers I hadn’t met before. Just before the meet was about to end Adele and I drew the raffle tickets and I was lucky enough to win the thing I wanted most – a selection of goodies from Tasty Little Numbers.

Before everyone left we handed out the two goody bags, a rather heavy one from a range of different brands and a smaller one from LUSH Birmingham.  I’ll be doing a post on the fabulous brands involved in them tomorrow, so keep an eye out!

I just want to say a huge thank you to the venue, the brands and to the speakers for making the event such a success. Also, a huge thank you to everyone who came, it was so lovely meeting the faces behind the twitter profiles I have been stalking in the run up to the day. I’d also like to thank my parents for driving me and my thousands of boxes to the event and for sticking around to help on the day, I couldn’t have done it without you.

Finally, thank you to Adele and her Mum for driving all the way from Salisbury to Birmingham and thank you to Adele for hosting the event with me. It started as one of our many ideas and grew to something amazing, the start of Pretty Lovely Bloggers and I am so happy I get to do it all with my best friend.

Kirsty Leanne

xoxo

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