Where to find ethical vendors??

For decorations, you can look at Etsy. They have a lot of homemade items

What is your budget?


You can find a lot of brides reselling their wedding decor in your local Facebook wedding groups!

Hi Alex!


You can check Etsy for an array of decorations and such for pretty good pricing. You can also check the websites Bark and Thumbtack. They offer all kinds of services. Some companies could possibly be in your price range.
Good Luck!

Here are some companies: Brilliant earth jewlery, mr ellie pooh paper( weird concept but it helps so much and looks like papyrus almost) , small farmers for meat and cheese( you can actually see how the animals live), imperfect foods produce( once cut they dont look any different), bamboo cutlery plates and bowls over paper or plastic, ethical flowers https://www.countryliving.com/uk/homes-interiors/g30777196/flower-delivery-uk-fairtrade/ , you could buy honey from a local keeper and help honeybees, anomalie dress, rainforest alliance/hu/ Justin's chocolate. how about resale items and renting(even can rent flowers) , it may be from non ethical starting, but it spread joy for others and is being reused multiple times which saves alot environmentally and financially and can be well put together and made here. Pinterest has a ton of ideas on this as well.
https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/6-tax-write-offs-for-your-wedding-5133/

This are tax write offs but also gives to good causes rather than waste it or one person getting the benefit.

Most everything at Etsy is homemade.

A lot of my stuff came from amazon, tableclothsfactory.com, https://www.orientaltrading.com/, https://www.efavormart.com/ and ETSY...

Fact is, cheap stuff is almost always made with cheap labor. Etsy is a great site where you can get handmade things directly from the creator, and since there are vendors all over the world, you can often find something from a vendor in a less affluent country that becomes relatively inexpensive just because of the value the US dollar carries. So for example, I can buy something made by an artisan in Russia or China for maybe half of what I would pay here, but the middle man is cut out and the price I am paying seems inexpensive to me but is a good earnings to them. Most of the super inexpensive stuff on Amazon is cheaply made and likely in places where working standards and wages aren't what we would consider acceptable.

We got a mix of our wedding stuff from traditional shops, resale sites (like Poshmark and StillWhite), Etsy, and Amazon. All of our vendors are local small businesses though (no big corporate hotels, caterers, etc).

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Thanks, this is really helpful!

How did you know which stuff was safe to buy from Amazon and do you know if ALL vendors on Etsy are artisan-made, or can unethical companies pose as such?

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Unless you want to beat yourself up doing research about every product, you kind of have to just
go with your gut and also prioritize what matters to you most. I got my veil for $13 on Amazon. It's a piece of plain tulle attached to a small comb. The fact that a skilled artisan didn't make it isn't super important to me, and I didn't feel the need to spend $100 on something I'd never wear again. A lot of times the stuff that is expensive and marked up is the same stuff - an expensive price tag doesn't guarantee that whoever made the item was paid fairly and had great working conditions, but you can pretty much guarantee that no veil you buy for under $20 was hand made by a worker in the USA being paid a living wage. They only way items become so inexpensive is by cheap materials, cheap labor, and/or massive quantity of scale and a mechanized process (or large government subsidies). Unless you are rich and can buy everything hand made from an artisan, you'll likely have to compromise from time to time.

You might want to familiarize yourself with the concept of fair trade vs free trade. It's used more often for things like coffee vs wedding decor and bridal attire, but the idea is that FAIR trade means that the people creating the product have safe working conditions and are paid a fair wage based on agreed upon standard whereas FREE trade is almost an "anything goes" market. Free trade isn't necessarily bad, but it's impossible to ensure if products produced via free trade means are done so in a way that would align with our own personal moral standards or the work standards of a country like the United States, which has child labor laws, overtime and salary laws, safe workplace standards, etc vs another country where those sort of regulations might not exist. There are also other countries with stricter standards than the USA too, so that is something to consider as well.

Etsy consists of a lot of small business owners, artists, and creatives, or sometimes vintage thrifters and antique collector types. Some quick ways I go through Etsy sites is to read commentary about the products from both the buyer and seller, and to ask a question before purchasing an item. Generally you can get a better sense about the sellers connection to the items - if they discuss their creative process or customizations, they are generally doing some work, and if they tell a story about an item, they've probably done research about it's history. If people say "it's a boutique item" and don't give much more info they are likely buying mass produced products at wholesale and reselling - you'll see this a lot on sites like Poshmark and less on sites like Etsy. If you have suspicions about a product doing a reverse image search on Google will help you find similar images elsewhere on the web. When you find sixteen different retailers selling the same dress under different names but using the same photos, you know its just some inexpensive, often low quality mass produced item or a knockoff of a genuine designer product that is being resold by people at a markup, and most of the price you pay is going towards the reseller and no to the people who actually created the garment.