Credit Every Vendor, Including Yourself

Somewhere in your files is a wedding you have been meaning to submit. The gallery is chosen. The story is written. The piece still outstanding is the vendor list, and it is the piece most likely to arrive half finished.

Crediting is the least glamorous part of a submission and the part carrying the most weight. It is how a stationery designer gets found by the couple who loved her escort cards. It is how a rental company's linens get traced back to the company that owns them. It is how an editor confirms that the work in the photographs matches the names in the caption.

It is also, far more often than it should be, incomplete.

A credit list is part of the work. The vendors who treat it that way get published faster and get their whole team named properly.

1. Your Credit List Is the Only List We Have

A photograph shows you a table. It does not tell you whose linens are on it, who printed the menus lying across them, or who built the arrangement running down the middle. Our editors cannot reverse engineer a vendor list out of a gallery, and we will not guess at one. Guessing is how the wrong company ends up credited for somebody else's work.

So when a submission arrives with gaps in it, the process stops. Someone on our side writes back to ask who made the cake. You reply a few days later, once you have checked with the planner. Meanwhile the date we had set aside moves, because a feature cannot run with a blank where a name belongs.

It is not always obvious who to ask, either. The photographer knows the planner. The planner knows the florist. Nobody reliably knows the name of the company that supplied the votives, and by the time that question has been passed down the chain and answered, another week has gone.

Every missing name is a round trip, and a round trip takes days. A submission with four gaps in it can lose two weeks to correspondence alone.

Practical step: Build the vendor list in the same sitting as the gallery, before you submit. A list assembled while the day is fresh is far more complete than one reconstructed three months later.

2. The Credits That Go Missing Most

Four categories disappear from submissions more than any others: stationery designers, rentals and linens, beauty teams, and favors.¹

They have something in common. Their work is everywhere in the photographs and almost never in frame as a person. The florist is on site all morning and hard to forget. The company that delivered the chargers arrived at seven, left at eight, and is now visible in most of the reception shots without anyone remembering they were there.

Beauty teams go missing for a scheduling reason. Hair and makeup finish before most of the day's coverage begins and are packed up long before the reception, so they are absent from the stretch of the wedding a submitter is usually looking at while writing the list.

Favors go missing for a different reason. They are often sourced by the couple rather than booked through the planner, which makes them feel like a personal touch rather than a vendor's product. If a company made them, that company is a vendor.

The instinct to leave someone off usually sounds reasonable in the moment. They only did the napkins. She only made the welcome sign. The rule is simpler than that judgment call. If they touched the day, they go on the list.

Practical step: Walk your gallery photo by photo and name every object you can see. Linens, signage, glassware, the cake stand, the ribbon on the favors. Each one belongs to somebody.

3. Links and Handles, Exactly as They Appear

A name on its own is not a credit. There are several floral studios in the country operating under some version of the same word, and a reader who wants to hire the one who did your wedding has no way to tell which. Every vendor needs two things sitting next to their name: a website link and an Instagram handle.

The handle matters more than it looks. It is what we use to tag the feature when it goes out on social, and a handle typed from memory is a handle that tags nobody. Occasionally it tags a stranger, which is worse than tagging nobody. Copy it off the vendor's actual profile, character for character.

Handles are their own hazard because they so rarely match the business name. A studio trading as Wildflower and Fern might post as something shortened beyond recognition. Guessing the handle from the business name produces a tag that belongs to a stranger, or to nobody at all.

The same goes for the website. Send the address the vendor puts on their own materials, and open it once to confirm it still loads.

Practical step: Open each vendor's Instagram profile and copy the handle from the page. Do not type it from memory, and do not rely on autocomplete to finish it.

4. Put Your Own Name on the List

The credit missing most often from a submission belongs to the person who sent it in.

It is an easy omission to explain. You are writing about the day rather than about yourself, and adding your own business to a list you are handing an editor can feel like reaching. From the inside it reads as modesty.

From the outside it reads as an absence. The feature runs, the whole team is named, and the planner who spent a year on the wedding and an afternoon on the submission is the one name a reader cannot find. Nobody else is going to add you.

There is a practical version of this as well. Features get indexed and searched. When somebody goes looking for the planner behind a wedding they saw last spring, the credit list is what they search. Leave yourself out and the wedding you built quietly becomes an advertisement for everyone except you.

Practical step: Put your own business at the top of the vendor list before you add anyone else. Give it a role label, a link, and a handle, exactly as you would for a vendor you are crediting.

5. A Complete List Is a Professional Signal

Vendors notice who credits them. A planner who consistently sends complete lists builds a quiet reputation among the photographers, florists, and rental companies they work with, and that reputation turns into referrals in a way advertising does not.

There is a mechanical benefit alongside the reputational one. Every vendor named and tagged in a feature is a vendor with a reason to reshare it. A submission carrying fourteen complete credits reaches fourteen audiences. One carrying five reaches five.

There is a reciprocal effect worth naming too. The vendors you credit properly tend to be the vendors who credit you properly on their own submissions, and most of them submit. Crediting is one of the few habits in this business that compounds without costing anything.

The list you send is the list that publishes. It is worth ten more minutes.

Practical step: When the feature goes live, send the link to every vendor on your list. The people you credited are the people most likely to share it.

The Bigger Picture

Recognition, accuracy, and integrity are heavy words for a column in a spreadsheet, and they are the right ones. A wedding is built by a group of people who mostly will not appear in any of the photographs. The credit list is the only place that group exists as a group.

It is worth remembering who actually reads one. Couples read credit lists, and they hire from them. Other vendors read them, and they refer from them. Editors read them, and they plan from them. A name left off is a name absent from all three.

Getting it right costs a few minutes at the end of a project that already took months. Getting it wrong costs somebody else the recognition they earned on your job.

Send the whole list. Put yourself on it.

Sources

1. The Scoop: crediting vendors, published by the Style Me Pretty Little Black Book on Instagram, November 21, 2025. The seven-slide carousel is our editorial team's own submission guidance and the source for the four most-missed credit categories. View the post

Credits

Photographs from a colorful celebration at The Hillside Estate in Dallas, published on Style Me Pretty in July 2026.

Additional Credits

Event Design and Event Planning: Gathered Events | Floral Design: Wedfully Yours | Dress: Iconic Bride | Cake: Blush and Whisk Bakery | Invitations: Scribbles and Swirls | Catering: Bluefire Catering | DJ: Gemini Performance Events | Band: Manhattan Orchestra | Wedding Venue: The Hillside Estate | Beauty: Bridal Pros | Cocktails: Mama's Medicine | Transportation: Pegasus Collection | Content Creator: Blissful Details