Weddingbee Blog

I’m relatively new to the world of Etsy, and I just discovered the Alchemy section of the site. OMG. If you don’t know about this, you should and I can’t believe no one told me about it earlier. Where was I?!? For those of you who are a little slow like I am, Alchemy is basically where you can request a custom item from Etsy sellers. It. Is. Awesome.

Now, we have yet to settle on a cake design, do a tasting, or find a baker, but I’ve been on the hunt for the perfect cake topper to match the rest of our wedding look. I was searching for someone who could make a custom topper with our wedding logo that I could embellish with crystals, but I couldn’t seem to find a place online that offered just what I was looking for. You would think it would be easy to find, but my Google search came up with some VERY pricey options, and on Etsy, I found pretty much every other kind of cake topper you could think of (bride on a horse with her snowboarding groom, anyone?), but didn’t see anything screaming, “Send me your logo. I’ll make you a cake topper.”

Patysclay on Etsy

Thank goodness I stumbled upon Alchemy.

So, it works like this—you post a request for the item you want made with as many details as possible, like the date that you need it, the amount you want to pay, and anything else that would be helpful for sellers. The idea is that Etsy sellers who can make what you want submit a bid, telling you details about what they can offer, including a new price or new delivery date if it’s different from your original request. You get to look at the bids and decide which seller you want to go with. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s not!

Within a couple of hours, I had bids from 6 different sellers offering everything from a cake topper hand carved out of wood to one made out of foam core. In the end, I chose the seller offering to laser cut the logo out of acrylic for only $25. Score! Meghan from Pile of Hats (I know, she makes hats, but she also makes acrylic cake toppers, apparently!) was awesome to work with and even double-checked to make sure that I knew that the logo I sent her would be 10 inches wide when blown up to the 5 inch height I requested because of the height/width ratio. Uh…that’s kinda big! I made some adjustments to the logo and the finished size we ended up going with was 4 inches tall and 6 inches wide. Within 36 hours of my original Alchemy post, I had settled on using Meghan and she sent me photos of what she had done.

Wanna see?

I’M SO EXCITED! She ended up doing two versions—one is 4 inches tall, while the other is 5 inches tall. So now I have two (which will be a nice back up should my rhinestoning skills prove less than stellar)!

Has anyone else had luck requesting something custom from Etsy?