This transcript is auto-generated and may contain spelling and grammatical errors

 

Tyler Jorgenson (00:01)

Welcome out to BizNinja Entrepreneur Radio. I am your host Tyler Jorgenson. And today I get to talk with somebody who I’ve known for a while. We’ve been in some masterminds together. We’ve chatted, we’ve gotten to know each other. And then it’s been a while since we’ve talked. And I realized the other day when I saw his social media and how powerful he was sharing his stories and I was connecting with his audience. was like, why have I never had Matthew Wengerd from a fine press on my show? So I reached out and he was so

 

Matthew Wengerd (00:10)

It’s been a long time.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (00:31)

Gracious to come on the show. Welcome out Matthew really excited to have

 

Matthew Wengerd (00:35)

Thank you so much. Excited to be here, man.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (00:37)

So in the world of weddings, the world of invitations and all this, and it’s a world that things sometimes just get really simplified and productized, right? How did you land in this space, first of

 

Matthew Wengerd (00:51)

totally. man. All my education is in music. I wound up in grad school because I thought that I was good at business, right? So I hustled my way into an assistantship because I was a horrible musician. But I thought I knew business more than the people I was hanging out with. I hustled my way into an assistantship that got me in. And while I was there, I wound up having to do some graphic design.

 

And this was at the time, do you remember the time when like hipsters were bringing like spinning wheels into coffee shops and stuff? It was this like hipster or Amish era. And I realized like all that was was a whole generation looking for a way to connect a ritual, to slow down and do common rituals together. The only things we all really experienced together, despite whatever we believe or whoever we are, is some version of weddings and some version of death. Everything else we kind of might do on our own.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (01:22)

Yes.

 

Matthew Wengerd (01:44)

But this was a moment where we all gather and we all experience it. So I kind of geeked out on weddings. And because of the graphic design stuff I was doing in grad school, why don’t I make invitations and see what happens? And here we

 

Tyler Jorgenson (01:57)

Yeah. And so you guys do something that I just think is fascinating. And I love how you say it on your Instagram. You create holy shit stationary for nonconformists, right? And some of the things I remember you’ve done, some of these, you like, these are not, first of all, not cheap, right? You do really high end, very cool stuff, but really like, it is amazing. Like some of the skulls that you’ve done as invitations and stuff like this, but

 

Matthew Wengerd (02:06)

That’s it. Yep.

 

That’s for sure. Yeah.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (02:27)

you do like old school printing, analog and real like you have a press and all this stuff. Like when did you first realize that you were like an entrepreneur and a creator like

 

Matthew Wengerd (02:41)

man. I think that in grad school, I realized it was not creating music that I was longing for, but some act of creating. And then essentially what happened was I’ve realized in the last year and a half since I got my ADHD diagnosis, far too late in life, that essentially my entire life has just been a series of hyper fixations. And one day I hyper fixated on this old tech thing and it’s

 

even necessarily the core of my business anymore, but it just happened to coincide with this revival in, tactility and printing. now there are actually a bunch of really great, modern digital options that still create tactility, but there was this period where like either everything was flat and boring like a magazine or it had depth and, and intricacy using these old machines. So I started buying them and, was moonlighting for a while.

 

And if you’re a disc profile person, I’m a high I and a high D. Like D is the secondary. And what I realized is the three jobs I had after grad school all sold as like influence jobs, and they were all paper pushing jobs. So not only did they not fit my disc profile, they were also maddening for the dopamine chaser in me. And I was terrified to go do it on my own. And it actually took getting fired from my last job.

 

And I went out looking for work pretty hard for a few months and just realized there was nothing that was going to do what this business can do for the skill set that I had. And so I just kind of fumbled my way into

 

Tyler Jorgenson (04:22)

Talk about your favorite piece that you’ve created.

 

Matthew Wengerd (04:27)

That’s tough. Yeah, that’s I always that’s my trick. Yeah, exactly. Man, I just did an invitation that I was really excited about this couple like they’re really into like EDM and festivals and and all sorts of like they have a very eclectic.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (04:28)

You can, go one, something from the top five. So you don’t have to, you don’t have to be upset if you were wrong.

 

Matthew Wengerd (04:51)

middle of the century vibe, like 60s, 70s, lots of great patterns. And they just had this really interesting life. And we have this moment where we got to tell like half a dozen little stories through the invitation. We actually shipped out branded cassette recorders in a box that were like fixed into the box that we had put their monogram on. And then she is an English teacher. And so we went really heavy on

 

The activities they do together like the New York Times crossword puzzle and mad libs and all this kind of stuff so we created a Mixed tape for them put it in with a tape player and then did like a 12 page luxury printed we did a thing that was like a riff on the New York Times spelling bee and all these different pieces so that there was an interactive moment and the bride literally built two crossword puzzles and the spelling bee and the mad libs and and made all of this stuff that I got to play

 

And it was just so cool. It wound up getting an unboxing video on TikTok that went like mini viral that I was super stoked on. And the best part is between that and the photographer sharing it on Instagram, there were like a dozen holy shit comments. And I went, bingo, I’m doing exactly what I set out to

 

Tyler Jorgenson (06:04)

Okay, so when the average person thinks of a wedding invitation, they don’t think of what you just described. Okay, you said something before we started recording about what’s happening into the middle of the market. So talk to me about what tech is doing and then talk to me about what people need to do if they wanna stay in business.

 

Matthew Wengerd (06:09)

Yeah. Not at all.

 

Yeah, it’s I think it’s happening across most industries. I don’t like lose sleep over thinking about which ones I might not might be the exception. But tech is moving so fast, especially, you know, what’s happening with large language models and all these things. Most. This actually goes straight back to the reason I started and this thing about ritual. I believed that the I believe that our parents generation and their parents in the name

 

of convenience got rid of the rituals in their lives. They stopped honing or stropping their razor, refilling their fountain pen, wringing a chicken’s neck. Now they go buy boneless skinless and they use disposable pens. And theoretically, this was all supposed to be to free us up to live our best lives. And all we did was fill it with more crap. Now all we do is consume. We don’t create enough. We don’t engage with each other enough. And I think what it is is ultimately

 

when you try to appeal to everyone, it is always a race to the bottom. And so now tech with these large language models are creating a custom race to the bottom, where you can get something that is very custom and of a relatively high quality at next to no cost in terms of creative. I think that we are less than a year away from a full stack tech solution for weddings, where a couple can input

 

Tyler Jorgenson (07:46)

yeah.

 

Matthew Wengerd (07:54)

their set of inputs, whether it’s a questionnaire or an interview or whatever it is or upload a Pinterest board. And there’s going to be a company that does a full stack solution that partners with a company like Minted, who’s one of the big affordable print houses for invitations. And there’s a digitally created invitation with one round of revisions that no human touches at all.

 

where there’s floral design that happens with photorealistic mockups and Ikea -like instructions that they can send to someone in a local network of florists to go deliver, where they hook into Spotify’s API and create the most banging playlist. It won’t be able to read a room yet. It’ll even be able to do that at some point, at least know if people are dancing or not, right? So a couple could go in for five or $10 ,000 and get all of that creative, plus whatever the hard costs are for production.

 

And I think the middle is going away. On top of that, there’s economic pressures too. For the second time in two months, I just heard someone reference that the number of stealth weddings at publicly accessible venues is going up, where people are sending out invitations to venues that they have not gotten permission to have a wedding at. And they just have everybody, like a flash mob, show up, get married real quick, hopefully before security catches them. I think people

 

Tyler Jorgenson (08:46)

Yes.

 

Matthew Wengerd (09:10)

aren’t willing to invest, if you’re the average wedding in the States, I think they’re saying is in the low 40 ,000s right now, which is both an insane amount of money and also no money to actually produce a real wedding at this point. yeah, it is.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (09:23)

That’s such that I want to pause on that. That is such an interesting paradox, right? Because it is like, that is a lot of money, right? For that is for many of us, that is the amount that our grandparents more than our grandparents paid for their home, right? Yet it really isn’t a lot if you want to actually put on the weddings you see in the movies. So what you’re talking about is exactly what you just said. The middle.

 

Matthew Wengerd (09:32)

Yep.

 

Exactly. Exactly.

 

man.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (09:52)

doesn’t exist because it’s not possible, right? You can’t, yeah. No, please.

 

Matthew Wengerd (09:54)

No, not at

 

Here’s the crazy thing. I’m sorry to interrupt, but this is what’s wild. That’s I think unique in the wedding industry. All of the wedding publications, right? They make their money primarily off of the backs of vendors with advertising. But their readers are not affluent and don’t want to spend money. So their editorial is all about cutting out the vendors, about reducing your costs, and it creates

 

uneducated consumer that has done the work to be educated, but their sources suck. And so now you’ve got this thing happening where you literally have these magazines whose names I won’t name because they all know who they are, who are publishing $40 ,000 is what a wedding costs and this is what stationery should cost and flowers. And all of those numbers, the weddings they actually show, they get them the eyeballs on the Instagram that pull them into the website are 150, 250 million dollar weddings.

 

You know, they just, they’re all over $100 ,000 and they’re going around saying weddings should cost $40 ,000, $60 ,000. And so it’s just, it’s absolutely killed the educated consumer, which is why you have to have a trusted guide, trusted impresario to guide you through the wedding planner to say this is how much this should actually cost.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (11:21)

I feel like that example is kind of similar to when like fitness models are selling hamburgers, right? It’s like, hey, you can look like me and eat this. Like, no, you can’t, right? Hey, the magazines are like, you can look like this at this budget. It’s like, no, you can’t, right? And so you don’t work in that lower market. And first of all, I noticed that from you day one and I love that you firmly planted your flag in luxury.

 

Matthew Wengerd (11:27)

Bingo.

 

You can’t, you don’t get it both ways.

 

Exactly.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (11:49)

Like, I love it, I think it’s brilliant. What’s your advice to people who are in the space now, somewhere in the wedding world in creatives and on how they’re gonna navigate the next couple years?

 

Matthew Wengerd (12:02)

That’s a great question. This year has been, everything since lockdown has been weird. Last year was a giant catch up year, there was a ton of weddings and now everyone is talking about how couples are booking later. The timelines are shortened, they’re more demanding. know, just the culture has shifted and then the tech is continuing to be disruptive. And so what I believe is going to happen is either you have to go fast and cheap and maybe you can make a living for a

 

but you can’t out Amazon Amazon, you can’t out Walmart Walmart. The other option is to go to the other end because the couples who are willing to spend 100 ,000 plus on a wedding are doing so because they’re already willing to tell a story about what they value, that they value human connection more than anything else really. And they’re willing to invest in humans to create on their behalf. Here’s the thing, a ton of people are pushing towards the top. They’re trying to just raise their prices, they’re trying to do all these things.

 

The differentiators are really hard to find. The way that you find them is by not being afraid of rejection, remembering what your minimum viable audience is, and then getting really idiosyncratic about it. My friend James Victoria is a graphic designer that is a hero of mine that I now account amongst my friends. And I have a poster in my studio of his that says, the things that made you weird as a kid make you great today.

 

And it’s about leaning into your idiosyncrasies. I always say, if you’re not pissing people off, you’re not exciting anybody either. And so for me, the path forward, think, for anyone who wants to really make a name for themselves and continue to thrive is to recognize what stories in their own lives and in their work demonstrate about how they see the world. Because I think ultimately it comes down to potential clients, couples that are engaged are going to look at vendors and go,

 

Do they see the world through a lens that looks like mine? And the only way to know that is through story. You can’t see that on an Instagram feed. You know it because people have learned to tell better stories about how they exist, how they think, and what brought them to where they are today. So that’s, I think, the only option forward.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (14:12)

I don’t think I can adequately unpack all of that. if you’re, wherever you’re listening to this, I want you to just rewind two minutes and listen to it again, because you shared several really powerful things there. And the part I am gonna dig a little deeper on with you is being able to and willing to piss people off or just have people disagree with you or just not accept you, right?

 

In telling stories, we draw people in, but we push people away. How do you balance that? And what’s your encouragement to others to just to become more comfortable doing

 

Matthew Wengerd (14:52)

Yeah, so first of all, being comfortable with rejection is a real thing. love, I’ve seen probably three or four creators on TikTok that have done the month of rejection where literally every day they just go ask for some absurd thing somewhere. Can I get on the roof of this building? Can I have a free cup of coffee? Can I, whatever it is, always expecting the answer to be no, just so that their body learns that no is not unsafe, right? I think there’s some real value to that.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (15:16)

Yeah, that was one of the homework assignments in the four hour work week that Tim Ferriss wrote. And it was one of the best parts. It was basically just go do things like that, right? Just so that you get used to, go haggle at the farmer’s market. Just get used to that getting told no isn’t, yeah, you’re still safe. I love it, yeah.

 

Matthew Wengerd (15:20)

Yes, I remember that. Yeah.

 

Yep.

 

That’s it. Your body treats a no the same way as it does an animal attacking you, right? There’s that same bit of fear and lack of safety, that sense of a lack of safety, and it’s training ourselves to recognize this one is not unsafe. This one is okay. And then the other half of that, I think, is that for me it comes down to when I recognize that I could figure out what parameters gave me the space to possibly do my best work, right? Under what conditions do I know that my best work isn’t coming?

 

I have to never put myself in a position where I know that I can’t give my best. And so that means I have to set boundaries around the things that I require to do my best work. that is the thing, right off the bat, I’m going to piss some people off with those. It’s a trope in the wedding industry that the higher you go in terms of budgets, the less access you have to the final client, right? There’s the bottleneck of a wedding planner or usually a wedding planner.

 

And that tends to be true. Most of the wedding planners act almost like a concierge and they become a single point of contact. And it’s a completely legitimate way to do business. But if I believe that my work is to reflect my couples so that they can be known and remembered by their people, then I have to meet them. I can’t reflect something I haven’t seen. And so I choose only to work with wedding planners who will let me have access to couples. And that immediately knocks out 70, 80 % of the market at that price point.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (17:00)

Yeah.

 

Matthew Wengerd (17:01)

and I have to be okay with that. And what it is is I recognize it’s not a judgment about me, even if they think it is, it actually isn’t. It’s about this integrity that I choose to live in to say, I won’t work with you if I know that I can’t give you my best.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (17:07)

Sure.

 

Yeah. Yeah. And I think so many times boundaries and rejection just take reframing it from a place of like, it’s actually empowering, right? Not, and it’s hard. It is super hard being rejected, especially if you’re in a, you know, you’re really trying to get something going, build momentum. can really impact you. You’re, you’re, you know, your soul, but the reminder of like, yeah, the reminder of like, you’re just, that’s getting you closer. Now you said something about a minimum viable audience.

 

Matthew Wengerd (17:38)

your ego, your sense of safety.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (17:46)

or minimum viable market. Expand on that, please. That sounds really fascinating.

 

Matthew Wengerd (17:49)

I feel like Seth Godin is probably the first person I ever heard say that. and it’s the idea that, you know, when we were growing up, you buy a spot at the super bowl and you, you just, you, you brutalize them with information until they buy. Right. And the goal is mass and it was always about mass and it was always about growing, but we’re shifting into our silos specifically because of tech and communication

 

And this is they it’s all the mumbo -jumbo about marketing things like the long tail and things like this, right? People essentially have so much choice that the goal is no longer to scale but to create people who really truly believe in your vision of the world and then work with them to find the products that they want to find the services that they want to find a way to talk to them and that’s honestly that’s a big part of why I’ve been talking about story so much in my own social media is to draw in other people in the wedding industry who understand and care about

 

Ultimately, I’m working on some education on storytelling too, but I really started it just specifically because I recognized if someone doesn’t believe in the power of story, they’re never going to understand what I do to begin with. They’re a wedding planner that hops on a call with me and a couple and I start talking the way that I do. If they don’t care about story, they’re going to be like, who is this guy? What is he doing? So I would much rather show up as me up front and tell the stories

 

what shaped me and let them decide.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (19:19)

It is an interesting thing, another paradox, where most professionals and creatives and service providers, their business would be drastically improved if they added 10 clients. Yet if they don’t get a thousand or a hundred thousand views on something, they’re devastated. And I’m like, no, those are real people. Like imagine if you were sitting and able to pitch to a hundred people that were your dream customers and actually

 

Matthew Wengerd (19:40)

Right, right.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (19:48)

Like that’s a good thing, right? And so I think we also have to change our goals on social and where we’re engaging with people because it’s not about masses, right? It’s about the right people. And yeah, and that’s even better, right? And yes, we still look at some metrics to know that there’s at least a conversation that happened or a possibility of one. What are you working on right now that you’re just really excited

 

Matthew Wengerd (19:50)

That’s

 

totally.

 

Nope. It’s about meaningful conversations.

 

Exactly.

 

it, this has been the last month has been wild for me. actually booked a client from my time on clubhouse, which I want to say was like beginning of lockdown was when clubhouse hit, right? And, he took the wedding industry by storm and for like six months every day, I was on clubhouse six hours a day, starting new rooms, doing all sorts of things until what I realized is that the, the lack of context.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (20:29)

Yep. Yep.

 

Matthew Wengerd (20:44)

meant you wound up with people in the room that weren’t speaking the same language as you. And every conversation, you had to start from step one and start rebuilding all the assumptions. So one day, I just didn’t log in again and then never went back. And just last week, I had a wedding photographer contact me and said, man, we’ve been following you since Clubhouse and love the way that you share and how you see the world. And we are ready to work on a branding project with

 

So I’ve got a couple client projects I’m really excited about, but in the middle of all of that conversation, I hopped into a group call from an education thing that I was in years ago. And a friend of mine who had been in a mastermind I did was in there and hosting it. And the questions essentially came up that we were just talking about, like how in the world do I differentiate myself? How in the world do I get people to understand? And why am I getting people to ask all these questions beforehand?

 

that undermined my value and all this. And it was the answer was storytelling in every single case, whether that’s in the structure of your business or your words on social media. And so my friend who was was guest hosting this call afterwards, we hopped on a thing and went, man, there’s there’s a very much a need for people to understand the power of story and how to build better stories for themselves. And so we’re working on building out an educational product for the industry for that. And the thing that I’m honestly really excited about

 

The things that make those things hard for me, a lot of those stem from my ADHD and my challenge with momentum in projects like that and in keeping my attention. And she very much has the exact opposite side of her brain working. And so when she says something’s going to happen, you know it’s going to happen. I’ll come up with 100 ideas this week and maybe one of them might stick. She is really great at honing in. And when I have that accountability, I can be too.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (22:27)

Huge. That’s awesome.

 

Matthew Wengerd (22:36)

So we’re working on a project that hopefully will launch in about two months. And then next year, we’re planning on the possibility of doing maybe even some traveling to do some of these things in person too. So I’m very excited about this.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (22:36)

Yep.

 

Cool. Ooh, I love that. Yeah, we need to talk more about travel and education offline. So you’ve been in this industry now pretty a while, right? How old is a fine press

 

Matthew Wengerd (22:52)

Yeah.

 

Yeah. Technically, I think 11 years, think. I moonlit, you know, just kind of doing it for a few years before that, but it’s been like 11.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (23:03)

Okay, sure. Yeah. In this process, what was one of the major failures or obstacles or just major like, shit moments and how’d you overcome

 

Matthew Wengerd (23:17)

Yeah, man, there are a million of them and and honestly a lot of it starts with my beating myself up over my lack of attention I wish that I had understood everything happens in its own time And I’m thankful that it happened when it did But I wonder what would have happened had I been diagnosed earlier and would I have been capable to understand that? The things that I had internalized a shame that kept me from moving forward because every time I thought about

 

I felt so much shame that I couldn’t take the step. Now I recognize it’s not a thing to feel shame about. It’s literally a thing that I can’t control, but I can manage. And so that has been probably the biggest, hardest lesson. I literally have started sending out emails and texts that I call ADHD apologies that basically go, I recognize I didn’t honor our relationship the way that I should have. And I didn’t have the ability to see that in that

 

and I’m so sorry, here’s what I’m doing to work on it. And it’s, don’t need their forgiveness. I don’t need to work with them again. I just want to recognize that I was not honorable in that relationship. And the response has just been so uplifting and these people have held me so gently and it’s really helped me heal from these things. So the ADHD is the big one, but a lot of it has been recognizing that the difference between me and a lot of

 

Tyler Jorgenson (24:35)

Awesome.

 

Matthew Wengerd (24:43)

and a thing that has made the education part, my trying to find the right education for me so hard is most business education that I had ever encountered always started with the assumption that the goal of the business was to make as much money as possible, like maybe without losing your soul, but money was number one. For me, feeding my creative soul is number one, money is number two. And so right off the bat, I’m going to make a whole different set of decisions, and I didn’t know how to live in that space.

 

because no one else I knew was, no one else had that perspective on things. And so it was a lot of floundering because I listened to people who were trying to make me scale and grow in ways that I recognized actually didn’t give me what I wanted out of my business. And so then when I started looking at actually, what do I just want my day -to -day to look like? What’s that look like? That’s been so helpful. And it’s led right into this place where I’ve recognized there are two things in my business that are where I add more value than any other place.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (25:15)

Sure.

 

Matthew Wengerd (25:43)

and my kind of lower middle class, Great Lakes Midwestern upbringing that does everything yourself, I’ve been all of the parts of my business and I’ve been my biggest bottleneck. And so right now I’m learning to outsource the things that the goal is that by the next six to 12 months, I am only doing two parts of my business, which is ideas and people. And I have people doing every other part

 

Tyler Jorgenson (26:06)

Cool. It’s amazing. You’ve gone through a lot and you’ve experienced a lot and you’re growing through a big growth moment right now. And I love that you’re making changes in your business. But to me, life is more than just business and so it is to you because you care more about the creative outlet. But that being said, what is one item on your personal bucket list you’re gonna accomplish in the next 12 months?

 

Matthew Wengerd (26:31)

my goodness, that is a great question. Here’s this very silly one that just means the world to me. I did not realize how much I loved the beach and I experienced over spring break of this year, we took our kids out to go on an airboat ride and I experienced sunrise on the ocean for the first time. And I vowed to experience that at least eight to 10 times a year. And I found it to be the most wonderful grounding thing to just go put my toes in the water.

 

and welcome the day. And I live two hours from the East Coast, so I could literally wake up one morning, go do it, and be back in time to start my day if I needed to. So that is the number one thing I wanna make happen. And then from there, I’ll build the rest of that list.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (27:10)

Yeah.

 

Yeah. One of my favorite hacks for like entrepreneurs who just need to sometimes change their location is to go work at like the lobby bar or the like lobby restaurant of really high -end hotels on the beach. It’s such a great place to be, you know, and

 

Matthew Wengerd (27:28)

Yep. Bingo. Yep. Yeah, that’s actually a really great. It is. And if you’re working with affluent people and you yourself are not, I always say my client’s cars cost more than my house did. Being in those locations just helps you reset your understanding of how the world works. It’s always been amazing.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (27:50)

Yes. Yeah. If you are marketing to the affluent and that’s your client base, you have to find ways to, to experience that and be around it and have that proximity even sporadically. Right. So yeah, I love that. I’m much more of a sunset at the beach guy. Maybe that’s cause I’m on the West coast, but, but I love it. Matthew, it’s been an absolute pleasure just getting to know you a little bit more.

 

Matthew Wengerd (28:02)

Even if it’s just going to the art museum, that’s a really great place to do

 

Yeah, I get that.

 

same.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (28:18)

Thank you so much for sharing your stories. Where can people go to find out more about

 

Matthew Wengerd (28:23)

Yeah, @afinepress on Instagram and TikTok and the website and all those things. If I can manage the YouTube channel will show back up soon because there’s a lot of stories left to tell.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (28:36)

I love it. Thank you so much for coming out. To all my bizninjas wherever you’re listening, watching, or tuning in, it’s your turn to go out and do something.