How I styled my Sydney book launch

Published 03/20/2017
What a night! It was so fabulous to host my friends, family and media contacts last week at private business club CUB in Darlinghurst. I ummed and ahhed about hosting a book launch party for a long time and then decided that it was worth the effort and money to do it as I would…

Emma-Blomfield-Home-Book-Launch

What a night! It was so fabulous to host my friends, family and media contacts last week at private business club CUB in Darlinghurst.

I ummed and ahhed about hosting a book launch party for a long time and then decided that it was worth the effort and money to do it as I would probably regret not throwing a huge party to celebrate. I couldn’t let the release date pass without some sort of party so I embraced it and threw a big party.

It was a bit like when you are a child and you invite your entire class to your party and then sit and wonder if anyone will actually turn up. I was blown away when I made my speech looking around the room and seeing 50-60 of my favourite people in one place.

Emma-Blomfield-Book-Launch-Party

How I Styled The Venue

I use the CUB private business club most weeks for meetings or to work from so I was lucky to have a beautiful space that only needed a bit of styling and I could access the venue well before the event started and make a mess arranging flowers!

The book launch was on a Thursday evening so the day before I was up at 5am to go to the flower markets and purchase as many pink roses as I could find. I didn’t have a flower theme for the event, I just knew I wanted the flower to match the book and the roses at the markets kept appearing in the perfect colour combinations so roses it was. I also raced around ordering big balloons for the entry way and a few more vases from West Elm (you can never have enough vases right?!) then to buy tissue paper to wrap any book purchases in and white paper bags.

Home-Book-Launch-Sydney

 

I had already ordered a Square credit card reader to take credit card payments on the night to sell the book, candles and my stationery range with Little Branch so I was all set up and ready for books to fly off the shelves.

On the Thursday morning I was up early packing the car with props, flowers and all the books ready to take to the venue. I stopped and got my hair and make up done on the way in so I didn’t need to fuss about later in the day and then Alicia (my PR manager from Harper Collective) and I picked up the balloons and headed to the venue to start setting up. We started putting the flowers together at about 3pm into all the vases and the lovely staff at CUB moved two beautiful mirrored bookshelves into the entryway ready for me to style up a storm. I roped my business pal Elyse into helping me set up the bookshelves and she did a fabulous job of collecting props and stacking the shelves with books. I varied the items on the shelves by mixing up horizontal stacks of books with vertical stacks of books, I grouped candles together and then popped the vases of roses in the blank spots. It all came together reasonably easily which was a win!

Jules-Sebastian-Emma-Blomfield

It was a bit of a pink explosion on the shelves, I don’t think I’ve ever been allowed to go SO rogue with pink ever in my life, it was so pretty!

Bookshelf-Styling-Emma-Blomfield

Once the shelves were stacked with books I quickly got dressed and was ready to greet guests at the entry. One by one they all filtered in and my lovely friend Dorina came in holding the most beautiful tray of cookies she had baked for the occasion with the word HOME stamped into them and watercolour fondant in the same colours as the book. So much love!

Dorina-HOME-cookies

We all chatted and mingled for an hour or so before Claire Bradley, editor of Inside Out Magazine got up and introduced me to the crowd and then I had my turn thanking all the amazing people that helped me along the book journey. It was so nice to be able to publicly thank them and acknowledge all of their efforts. It might be my name on the book title but it wasn’t a solo effort to get it onto shelves.

Emma-Blomfield-Book-Speech

After speeches were done everyone ran to the shelves to buy their own copies of the book for me to sign. It was so fun being able to write little notes in my friends books and to think that they’ll have it on their shelves with a personalised message for years.

We continued to party until late and kicked on with some family and close friends at the local pizza place! It was a bit of struggle to get up the next day and pack things up but it was worth it 😉

A huge thank you to Alicia for all her efforts helping me organise and set up the event, to Elyse for hustling like there’s no tomorrow for the entire set up and at the launch and a huge thank you to everyone who came along and supported me on the night, it was so magical to share the occasion with you all. As I said in my speech, often we only stop and celebrate achievements in our personal lives rather than business or career achievements so I wanted to stop and celebrate this milestone with my favourite people.

Although the book has now sold out on my website you can pre-order a copy via this link for delivery mid-April.

Emma x

 

 

 

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