George's wedding range helps make the big day more affordable

I'm really excited about the new wedding collection we've added to our George Home range – and as we enter the peak wedding season I can't wait to see photos from customers with some of the products around their big day.

Asda is really good at helping people celebrate special moments like Christmas, Easter and Mother's Day – and weddings felt like a natural extension. Last year we looked at our space and range and realised that if a wedding collection was just added as a promotion we'd only have it for a few weeks, whereas if we put it into our range it would be there all year round. That's the route we went down, as it meant customers would be able to buy items when they had the money, and they could save and maybe buy one item every week in the run-up to their wedding.

We made sure that a lot of the range isn't totally wedding day specific so that customers can use the items before and after the ceremony – like mini Moroccan-style lanterns that are really cute and that you can use in your garden, or on tables or window sills after the big day.

With our floral arrangements we took inspiration from things that we'd done in our home range before which we knew worked really well – like white roses and mercury glass vases, just things that we knew our customers loved anyway and they felt like the right things to add into the range.

Then with the really specific products, like the hanging signs saying things like "wifey for lifey", we've added them to the range at a lower price point as we knew customers would be ok to buy them as a one-off purchase for the day and still love them.

We knew that the colour scheme – white and silver – was a really popular wedding colour scheme and our design team did lots and lots of research on what was the best way to go from there. We also know that grey is a colour that our customers love so we incorporated the grey with the white and silver to give it a bit more of a contemporary feel, as we didn't want it to feel too similar to ranges that are already in the market.

First and foremost the range is definitely about affordability. We want to make sure that customers can celebrate the big moments and we want to make weddings more affordable for customers – so they don't have to spend thousands on table decorations if they don't want to. They can come to Asda and probably spend £20 and get some really nice table decorations that they can then use afterwards in their homes – it's about making it practical and affordable.

The Mr & Mrs light up signs are one of my favourites in the range. None of the items in the range are specific to any type of wedding, so they can be used for same sex weddings. The "Mr" and "Mrs" parts of the display are individual, so you can buy a Mr and Mr or a Mrs and Mrs – or however you want to do it. They're a really good price and you can use them on the day as they're a nice size, but then you can add them to your home afterwards and they won't look absolutely huge so that it takes over everything.

We also love our hashtag sign, as we know our customers love taking pictures and putting them online. So we made our Please Hashtag our Wedding sign so that people can put their own hashtags on and it felt like that was a really modern way of adding to the range, as we know it's important for people now to be able to share these events on social media. I think it's really cute and that people will think it's a really cool product.

We've also got some chalkboard arrows to direct family and friends where to go on the day, little ornaments and mini lanterns to use as decorations and also tealight holders with a lovely iridescent finish, which we know is really popular with our customers and key in seasons to come as well.

We wanted to make sure the range has all aspects of the journey, including the saving and planning side so we've got a little wedding fund money box and a calendar to count down the days to your wedding day too.

I've already seen some great comments about the collection on Instagram, including some from people who can't believe that Asda are doing weddings now! I'm so excited to see posts on social media from weddings with our range in them. We're still quite early for peak wedding season, but I'm looking forward to seeing lots of lovely pictures soon from customers who have picked items up from the range and shared them with us.

We launched the range before the announcement of the royal wedding, but after the last royal wedding we did see some trends emerging, like bridesmaids wearing more white and longer sleeves. I'd expect to see some sort of influence from the royal wedding.