Real Weddings, Advice, & Inspiration

Catalyst Wedding Company highlights weddings by and for game-changers. We seek to amplify and empower voices and viewpoints that are usually missing from the Wedding Industrial Complex. We're a community of badass wedding professionals who love all things funky, fresh, diverse, unique, and personality-driven; we convene twice yearly for (un)convention, a collaborative workshop, styled shoot, and dinner party. We're also the publishers of Catalyst Wedding Mag, a resource for couples looking for inspiration and affirmation that doing things differently in wedding-world is not only ok, it's wonderful!

We have always wanted a fairytale wedding. Our thing is Peter Pan, so when we found the venue in a secret garden with all these magical lights, we knew we had to stick with it and create our own fairytale in our very own secret garden under the stars. The venue was a total accident. I was looking up photographers and saw the venue as part of a styled shoot, and Sam fell in love. I like navy blue, and I’m not sure how we landed on blush, maroon, and gold, but it worked out very well for our fall wedding.

Our wedding cake was created by the owner of Se7en Bites in Orlando. She made our cake and the whole dessert table. We absolutely love all of her stuff, and Steph created her website, so she gave us our wedding cake as a thank you which was very generous. We both decided on lemon cake with lavender icing, as well as mini oatmeal cream pies, coconut macaroons, vanilla bourbon bacon moon pies, and dark chocolate sea salt espresso brownies. Everything was so incredible.

Our florals were designed by the owner of the venue so it was very 'secret garden.' We put moss as our table runners and decorated with flowers and candles. We also had a lot of vintage books to tie into Peter Pan and Secret Garden themes. All of our table decorations were DIY. We had gnomes, which we got from a place called Glitter Alley in Melbourne, Florida. Our house is still covered in an obscene amount of glitter and gold spray paint (which we only used outside!)

My dad made our wine, and we spent a few months putting together the perfect playlist of music, so we skipped a DJ and rented some speakers instead.

We made a last minute decision to have our last dance with everyone around us holding sparklers instead of everyone being in a line doing a sendoff.

I wore a custom navy suit, and Samantha wore an incredible vintage ivory and nude lace dress. She was a complete vision.

My advice to other couples is to plan to spend 50% more than your budget. Even if you keep up with the wedding planner calendars, everything still somehow creeps up on you. Remember to take a moment to breathe at the wedding, in a moment with just just the two of you. Don’t stress the small stuff. Hire Jennifer as your wedding planner/coordinator because she’s BEYOND amazing!

Words by Stephanie, one of the brides, as told to Amber Marlow
Photos by Rudy & Marta Photography