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!

Each year Catalyst holds a styled shoot competition where teams receive a mystery box of props and then have two weeks to put together an amazing shoot with models and couples that are often underrepresented in wedding media. It’s like Chopped for styled shoots!

This year our mystery box was full of truly amazing goodies. The curator Leah Weinberg of Color Pop Events created a 90s-kid-Lisa-Frank-dream with colorful confetti by The Confetti Bar, acrylic name tags by California Lustre, and bright wrapping papers from Suite Smith. Teams were also provided with apparel from Ash and Light, JLM Couture, Ti Adora, & Courtney Noelle, as well as neckwear by Becoming, and jewelry by Rosey West.

Every member of our team is very talented, but very different from each other in terms of style. Our biggest challenge was to bring all these micro visions together cohesively in a crunched time frame. We didn’t have any preconceptions before receiving the mystery box; we purposely wanted to push our boundaries, and we waited to have the the box on hand before getting to work.

As soon as we saw the wrapping papers included in our mystery box, we were transported to the end of the 80s and early 90s. All the textures, patterns, and shapes brought us back to a time of bright makeup, Saved by the Bell, flashy clothes, and fun music. We wanted to make sure those textures and patterns were felt and seen throughout the shoot as our inspiration, but with a contemporary modern twist.

We included bright colors through our vegan doughnuts that were iced and decorated with bright fruits. The bridal ensemble incorporated layered tulle, which was a statement of the early 90s, yet they were separates, which is a current wedding trend.

The flowers were different styles, sizes, and textures, and we incorporated elements like curly sparkly strings. The bride’s hair and makeup was layered. Her eye shadow and extensions brought a pop of color, and in the end, every element was inspired by the Suite Smith paper.

80s and 90s music was an underlying vibe, which was emphasized by the records that we used as place cards and in the stationery design.

Words and photos by Sandrachile