#235 Weddings Designed With Connection in Mind

What if your wedding was designed using a holistic approach focused on people and not things? How could you make sure that everyone at your wedding will feel like their presence is an integral part of the celebration? Listen in as Michelle interview's Experiential Designer, Julie Comfort, and learn how to do all this and more.

As a destination wedding photographer for ten years, Julie Comfort attended over 250 weddings in 15 countries across 5 continents, covering a staggering number of cultures, traditions, and venues, yet often feeling a huge missed potential for more personalization and connection. Ready for a new adventure, she moved to Berlin in 2015 and studied experience design at Kaospilot, where she immediately recognized that a holistic design approach focused on people not things was the missing ingredient for truly meaningful and magical weddings. Julie founded The Comfort Studio, an experience design consultancy dedicated to designing celebrations with intention, heart, and wild creativity.

Julie designs weddings that elicit the desired emotion in your guests. Joy, happiness, peace, etc. This helps create weddings that are an entire experience.

Big Takeaways

• Think about how you want people to feel. Start with how you DON’T want them to feel and work from there.
• If you don’t want your guests to feel awkward at a table of strangers, have a table host for each table! Someone assigned to welcome people to the table, pour wine, make introductions, etc. Think of which of your friends, at each table, that would be great at doing this and reach out to them before hand. Tell them why you chose them.
• People love to help in small and big ways. Having come from the world from destination weddings, Julie really recommends including the guests in meaningful ways. When they just feel like an audience, the wedding is less of an experience and more of a show, they won’t feel as important to the big day.
• In the future, it will be even more important to design around the people, and less on the spectacle of the big day. Think about a dinner party and how people are engaged. Connection is key.

Links We Referenced

NEW SITE since this episode aired: https://www.theexperientialwedding.com/ - Use code: BIGWEDDING for a 20% discount

15toasts.com

instagram.com/theexperientialwedding

The Big Wedding Planning Podcast is...

Hosted and produced by Michelle Martinez.

• Edited by Veronica Gruba
• Music by Steph Altman of Mophonics
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