“A cascade of lace right here, here, and here.” I tapped my pen hard against my notepad, punctuating each spot as my cousin nodded eagerly in agreement. At eight and ten years old, we pored over our hand-drawn wedding dress designs like our big days were just days away, not decades. While our parents prepped dinner, we ran through every step of our dramatic bridal entrance, mapping out every tiny detail.
I’d guess I’m not the only kid who daydreamed about their future wedding this way, but I never could have guessed that silly childhood role-play would eventually grow into the career I have today. Everything clicked for me after my own 2021 elopement, followed by a big blow-out celebration with all our loved ones a year later. My husband and I ended up juggling a mess of countless chaotic spreadsheets, tangled email chains, scattered invoices, jumbled notes, and sticky notes covering every surface of our apartment. I felt overwhelmed by how few functional tools existed to pull off this huge, complicated logistical feat—and that’s when it hit me: I could make a living fixing this kind of wedding chaos for other people.
My unconventional career path
What I love most about working in weddings isn’t the romantic details—it’s the systems and operational work that makes the whole day come together seamlessly. It took me a few different jobs after college to figure out that this problem-solving side of events was what I was meant to focus on, though.
The summer after I graduated, I worked as a tutor for middle and high school students while I hunted for a full-time permanent role. Within just a few days of starting, it was obvious the entire tutoring company was an operational shambles. I immediately got to work mapping out a plan to move all of their records to digital systems, including digitizing homework assignments and practice flashcards for students and teachers.
My next position was at a small boutique marketing firm. After a few months on the team, I realized the company was far more scrappy and unstructured than I’d initially expected. What had felt like charming, quirky operational novelties at first quickly started to feel frustrating, and I found myself brainstorming new workflows to make every process more efficient, just like I had at the tutoring company.
My next role finally let my operational skills find their true home. I led a team of operations specialists at Carta, the high-growth unicorn startup. That experience ended up being the perfect, crucial foundation for the wedding planning business I would go on to launch later.
Doing my best work in chaos
Throughout the months I spent planning my own wedding events, one question kept circling through my head: Why is this so hard? Roughly 2.5 million couples get married in the United States every year, yet every engaged person I knew—including me—had to reinvent the entire planning process from scratch, turning what should be an exciting season into a deeply frustrating, incredibly time-consuming chore.
