Weddings are expensive, complicated and a source of frustration for a lot of couples. The happiness of engagement can quickly fade in the numbing horror of trying to plan even a relatively modest wedding, especially in the D.C. area. Sympathy for couples laboring under that stress inspired wedding photographers Maggie and Steven Gaudaen to start Pop! Wed Co in early 2014. Now the couple offers low-cost, speedily arranged weddings, with Steven serving as officiant and Maggie as photographer.
"It felt stressful to me even as a photographer seeing what it takes to put together a huge wedding," Maggie said. "We take all the awesome elements of an event-type wedding and destress all of them."
"We take all the awesome elements of an event type wedding and destress all of them."
She and Steven have been wedding photographers since they were in high school, where they also started dating. For their new project, Maggie is the photographer, while Steven got ordained as a secular humanist minister and officiates the wedding. Maggie said the roles made sense when they started and work well for them.
"Also, he looks awesome in a bow tie," she added.
Pop! Wed Co weddings start at $2,500 for the basic ceremony, photographer services and small wedding cake or alternative treats (a price many who have planned weddings will find quite reasonable). The cost covers the legal as well as ceremonial aspects of the wedding and a post-wedding photo session, all taking about an hour. The brevity helps keep costs low by letting Maggie and Steven perform multiple weddings in one day. There's an option for a $4,500 wedding with more photography and other features, as well as possible extra expenses depending on the individual wedding, but Maggie said that's all negotiated on an individual basis.
"The weddings are extremely lean, in tech speak," Maggie said, adding that thanks to the changes in D.C.'s wedding license rules ending the three day waiting period, the entire process can happen as quickly as schedules permit. "If someone emailed me today and everything is straightforward we could do the wedding tomorrow."
Pop! Wed Co has performed over 50 weddings since it launched, around half of them for same-sex couples. The services can be held almost anywhere the couple wants and Gaudaens can get permission. They've performed weddings at such venues as the Library of Congress, the Natural History Museum, various local parks, Miss Pixie's Vintage store, the DC Brau Brewery and even in local restaurants like Rose's Luxury.
"I think tech is really starting to embrace the wedding industry."
The company's website, full of pictures of smiling brides and grooms, reflects the fact that Steven is a web developer and Maggie's day job is as a designer at iStrategyLabs. They're working to revamp it now, possibly adding a mobile app in the future.
"The website is a whole product in itself," Maggie said. "I think tech is really starting to embrace the wedding industry and vice versa."
Though Pop! Wed Co is not her full time job, Maggie said the interest in what they do has led her and her husband to hire another team to help out with weddings in the area, with plans to hire another duo in California next year. Customizing the weddings and removing the sense of wedding planning as a chore has universal appeal Maggie said, and it's something she and her husband are happy to fulfill.
"We want the weddings to reflect our couples," Maggie said. "It should be adventurous, it should be fun!"
