How One Couple Used Wedping to Plan 3 Magical NYC Wedding Weekends

Sometimes you love each other so much, one wedding is not enough! Hear about Rebecca's experience planning three magical wedding weekends in NYC with a little help from Wedping to keep everyone on the same page.

Tell us a little bit about you and your partner!

My husband and I had been together for almost 10 years before getting married last year. We came together via our love for languages - we were both in the same dual-degree program at Penn that had an emphasis on foreign languages. I studied German and he studied Japanese. Ironically, I was the one who ended up working for Kirin Ichiban (a Japanese beer brand) and he now regularly flies to Germany to visit a portfolio company.

Tell us about your wedding. What was your vision for the big day?

We always knew that we didn’t want to just have one big wedding - it felt like too much pressure on one moment/weekend. When we thought about what felt like the most fun to us, we thought about how smaller group settings really brought out the best in us and our family/friends. We decided to host 3 separate “wedding celebration weekends” with our closest friends and family that fell into 3 main categories - immediate nuclear family, best friends from college, and best friends from a high school study abroad year (trust me, it was transformative).

Each wedding weekend celebration was held in NYC, and we were excited to curate our favorite aspects of the city for each of the different groups.This approach meant unfortunately that I didn’t get to celebrate with one-off friends that didn’t fall into these categories, but ultimately meant that the group celebrations I did have really consisted of groups who already had deep history together, so there was no stress about having to mediate or introduce people. That was a huge weight off our shoulders.

Photo by Sandy Soohoo

What was your absolute favorite part of your wedding?

We loved getting to have really long, lavish meals at our favorite restaurants in NYC. It’s amazing the type of spaces that you have access to when you don’t need a dance floor and you’re not trying to treat 100+ people! We really optimized for places with great private dining rooms and food, like SAGA and Ci Siamo. We prepared conversation menus for each of the guests and my closest friends prepared trivia and other fun table discussion fodder to ensure that great convos were flowing all night long. My biggest fear with a wedding was that we’d have people fly in all over just for them to ask each other the cookie cutter small-talk questions like “So when are you flying back? What travel do you have planned this year?” The wedding may not have made for the best sizzle reel (as there was no dance footage/cake cutting/flower toss/etc) but actual memories from the dinners continue to live rent free in my head.

How did you use Wedping leading up to and during your wedding? How was your experience with the app?

I had attended a wedding the previous year where a communication snag caused some guests to miss the bus from the hotel to the venue. I remember thinking, if only there was a way to send a blast text reminder (rather than email only, which many people aren’t checking regularly during a wedding)! So when my friend Laura told me about how her brother Dylan was starting a service addressing this issue, I immediately signed up for the beta. Wedping was so seamless to use throughout the process - for gentle reminders leading up to the event and recaps after each night. The design of the app is also incredibly fun and colorful, unlike most of the vendors in the space, so it genuinely brought joy to my wedding planning experience.

What advice would you give to couples who are currently planning a wedding?

Plan the wedding that you will genuinely enjoy the most, not the one that will make for the best pictures! So many people I know look at their wedding photos only occasionally or don’t even have them organized in a physical album. When planning, it can feel so tempting to do all the things that look Pinterest-perfect, but at the end of the day, you know what actually feels the most fun to you, so just do that!

Photo by Anna Maria Lopez, Hair by Abèli Studio, Dress by Delfina Balda