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!

Our story follows a RVA couple that have been together for several years, have a great house, have a sweet pup and have finally decided to get married. She bought a wedding dress, they started the planning, picked out stationary and did all the things that a normal engaged couple would do. Until one Sunday morning they woke up and thought, “Fuck it. Let’s just go and get married.” They ate breakfast, got dressed, took their dog on a walk, got married and went back home to eat cake and Netflix & chill. Maybe not the most glamorous of wedding days with dreamy sunsets and gold rimmed place settings but the two most important parties showed up for one another and isn’t that all we really hope for on a wedding day.

Photos by Chris Bavaria, words by Marita Cardenas of Slingin' Pretty. You can see a full list of vendors at the bottom!