#Seandra2020

I decided this week that I needed something of a mental health break. I hope you’ll all forgive me for wanting to write about our wedding in a time of globalized political, economic, and public heath turmoil. I just need a little bit of solace here – our wedding was a tiny little oasis of hope and joy in the year that is 2020. At this point, I just want to make sure I don’t forget anything about it. A lot of what I’ve written here is coming from a very pre-pandemic mentality, because that is when we planned it, and I know weddings are going to look much much different moving forward, at least until a vaccine is developed. What a weird thing it is to realize that we got super lucky.

Somehow through the mercy of the good and great universe, Sean and I managed to pull off a wedding sometime between a volcanic eruption and ongoing … events. I wanted to write about what planning that was like as a wedding supplier with an interest in non-traditional events. And since most events are going to be non-traditional by default for the forseeable future, i guess I also hope that maybe this will encourage someone.

We managed to do it on a budget of 350,000 PHP (less than 7000 USD) – without asking for any discounts.* (Which at the time of this writing is looking like a loooot of money that we could have been using for GROCERIES, had we known what lay ahead) All our suppliers received their asking price**. As small business owners, it was something we decided was important.

We also wanted to pay for the whole thing ourselves. This meant an entire year+ of saving up.

We managed to get 160 guests*** in, thanks largely to our venue and caterer, Ilustrado Restaurant.

* I did ask if removing the on-site slideshow from our photography package would affect our supplier’s rate, and it did lower it by a little bit. We also sourced the textiles on our own for our clothing, which lowered costs for dressmaking and tailoring. But i do not consider these discounts, just package adjustments. We still paid everyone what they asked for, and did not question their rates.

** We also received certain items and services from the suppliers themselves as personal gifts, like our band played for free, and our wedding cake was also a gift from the baker.

*** A CHALLENGE FOR ME IN PARTICULAR, as there are 80+ people on my immediate dad’s side ALONE. He’s one of ten kids, I’m close to my cousins, it’s a whole thing. Anyway I invited my faves lels

The Philosophy

People would ask us what our “theme” for the wedding was and while i understand that the question is largely an aesthetic one, and the reason people are curious is because Sean and I are both artists, we did not really have an answer. The easily digestible answer was “uh, nerdy stuff?”

But we did not really need a theme. Instead of making choices based on a visual aesthetic, we would ask this question any time we made a decision: “Is it meaningful?” Are we doing a thing because it meant something to us, or because we were told it had meaning or that it had to be there? Our goal was to trim the fat: no bullshit! And this truly helped. From selecting our godparents (we only wanted to ask people we really had relationships with) to choosing our accessories, this was our vision – a wedding that was entirely meaningful.

Our Privileges

I think the biggest privilege we had, that we did not forsee, was this: deciding to get married in January 2020. This date was already our dating anniversary, and we had already gotten engaged on this date last year, so we decided we didn’t wanna have to calendar more than one anniversary.

But even if working with our budget was certainly a challenge at the time, I can 100% say that we managed to have exactly the kind of wedding we wanted. I recognize that this is thanks to a lot of things that Sean and I had going for us that really relieved us of certain financial and social pressures:

1. We don’t care about tradition – Thankfully, Sean and I were never the type to fantasize about the beautiful traditional princess wedding where everything is picture perfect and instagrammable. That is not really our style. More on this later, but this mindset was incredibly helpful because it allowed us to cut out certain expenses without qualms.
2. Our parents did not interfere – This is a HUGE one. I recognize that not everybody gets to do it this way, and listen, that’s fine too. Weddings are (usually) social events, and therefore must be considerate of others. But because both his and my parents are super chill, they did not dip a pinky into how or what we were doing at all. No guests we didn’t know, no managing this person or that person’s expectations, none of it. We got to do it the way we wanted with no apologies, and for that we were incredibly grateful.
3. Christian weddings don’t ask for much – Thankfully, our religious affiliation made it so that we didn’t really need to jump through too many hoops to do it the way we wanted. Our pastors were Sean’s childhood friends who were not only super accommodating about our sensitivities (more on this later) but it was also very comforting to have friends present on stage with us. Thank you, Dags & Migs!
4. We had people we could ask for help – When we couldn’t do a thing ourselves, we asked people (mostly our bridal entourage and some close friends) to lend a hand. From pressing play on our Spotify playlists to manning the registration table, we had many a friend snapping together to the other friends to form the mecha of our wedding. I will enumerate how we got this done shortly, but yes, while we did pay suppliers their rates, we did take advantage of friends offering free labor (of which there were many!).

Mostly this section is a recognition of the deep privilege we were afforded to be able to do this wedding the way we wanted. It might not look this way for everyone, and that’s okay too.

What We Didn’t Have

If you’re planning a stripped-down wedding for the forseeable future – and if you’re engaged, likely you are – take this section as an encouragement. It’s doable.

First on the chopping block is the big one: we did not hire wedding coordinators. Not because we don’t believe in the service, but because we wanted to do something else. Instead, we wanted a working bridal entourage.

In the Philippines, it is common for the bridesmaids and groomsmen to be mostly ceremonial stand-ins. They don’t usually have much to do at the event other than… hold stuff. I know this both as a supplier that has asked many a clueless groomsman a logistical question, AND as someone that has been part of many a bridal entourage. You go to the fittings for the nice clothes and then plan the bridal shower, and then just show up on the wedding day and smile for the pictures. Sometimes you get to sit at the VIP table and taste the swanky eats. It’s THE BEST.

But we gave our bridesmaids and groomsmen jobs. This meant a crucial thing in our selection of our entourage: they had to be people we had no problem asking for big favors from. These had to be our very best people, our top humans.

I must say, i think this only really can work if you either work in events or are as familiar with weddings as someone in the industry might be. There’s a lot of stuff that I was able to anticipate solely because of my experience shooting. I imagine this might be harder to accomplish successfully if you’d only been to few other weddings. It’s “just a party,” yes, but it’s a party with a ton of weird moving parts that everyone that works at those parties will know about – but if you’ve only ever been a guest, you might not.

But this actually brings me to another thing we didn’t have, and really the only thing I wish we had had the budget for – we didn’t have clothes made for anyone, not even our parents or our godparents. This would have been a nice thing to gift everyone as a thank you for their help and friendship, but since we could not provide it, we instead told them to wear whatever they wanted. They didn’t have to buy new clothes, they could just wear whatever they already had.

Of course they all still wanted to get new digs because, like I said, these were our very top humans. This… worked out in a weird way? Sean’s groomsmen ended up finding very similar royal blue blazers:

And my bridesmaids Tinka and Keisha ended up buying the exact same dress from Evernew without knowing it in THE MOST SPECTACULAR COINCIDENCE.

Another big thing we did not avail of was videography service, and this was for two reasons. One, I don’t like being in videos, that’s the end of that. Secondly, my sister actually works in video production, so we asked her and her partner to do single cam coverage of the ceremony.

No same day edits, no stopping the action so they could get in position, no retakes for safety. We just asked them to set up the tripod during the ceremony, take what they could get, and get on with their lives.

There was just one hiccup – my father gave an unexpectedly EPIC father of the bride speech which lasted for, really, twenty minutes (he insists it was ten but i promise you it was twenty) (we gave him five minutes, so either way it was a violation of our parameters) that included a song and dance number with our family band?!?! And we have no recording of it!

It now only exists as legend, and will be passed on through oral tradition. Papa, what have you done.

Another big budget item we cut was renting a place for preps. I am sure people do this because they either don’t have space at home, or they want to be closer to the venue, or they think their houses don’t look “proper” enough. But I promise you, as a photographer – there is no such thing as an uninteresting home. I think if you have the space, people’s homes make for more memorable photographs than hotel rooms. Our house is pretty spacious, and full of curious bits and bobs because my parents like weird shit, so we did all our preps at my family’s house.

I also did my own hair and makeup. This was mostly a preference thing. We had friends offering to help out with this but I am very particular about my hair (curly girls representttt) and I love doing my own makeup, so this was an easy pass.

We went an unusual route with our godparents. We elected to not have them join the wedding procession and instead, asked them to come to the event as guests. We took them out to nice dinners before the wedding so we could talk instead. We told them not to consider the wedding a financial obligation, and instead to consider it a relational one – please just check up on us from time to time after we get married, and make sure we are doing ok!

We also went without an event host. Instead, Sean hosted! Yes, he did. Because he is a control freak that likes to host things.

Other things we went without: wedding souvenirs, bouquets for the entourage (we went with corsages and boutonnieres instead), a photobooth (everyone has a camera nowadays anyway), the term “principal sponsors” (which i detest), games (i also detest), a bridal car (i just rode my normal car because who cares??). We were going to go without paper invitations as well, but in the end decided to have the barest minimum printed so we could use it in our studio’s portfolio.

A Sensitive Ceremony

Here’s the deal: I get super triggered by sexist rhetoric at weddings. Tough luck in my line of work, I know. But it’s really a thing i pay attention to. Sometimes, it’s what the couple wants, and that’s fine I guess. Other times, ceremonies can tend to run away with themselves, or people just go with a script and say things without context or explanation, and it ends up sounding like women are bound in sexual and domestic servitude to their husbands and that’s just the way it goes. ~ Patriarchy is the virus~

So it was very important to both me and Sean that we have a ceremony we could stand behind, and not one that we would have to explain later. Getting dear friends to officiate was a huge deal in making this happen because we were able to discuss with them making certain emphases (Equal stakes! Mutual submission! Jesus as the example of sacrificial love!), cutting certain things out (such as being “given away” – I had no desire to be handed off to my husband, I wanted to walk to him on my own), taking into consideration the diversity in our guest list (LGBTQ attendees are often ignored in these spaces), and making sure that Real Jesus^TM was at the center – not the weird mutant Jesus that sometimes shows up at these things (also known as White Jesus. We are not fans of White Jesus).

We cut out a lot of the symbolic stuff that didn’t really have any personal significance for us such as the cord, veil, candles, sand, array, all that. We just did rings and Bible, that’s it. This was our ceremony lineup.

It lasted 45 minutes and everybody cried, very much including me I’M NOT SORRY

What We Did Have

The MVP trophy has got to go to Ilustrado Restaurant and our account manager, Kay. What a bunch of heroes she and her colleagues turned out to be. We found them somewhat serendipitously; Sean recognized the venue from their booth at the only bridal fair we went to in 2019 (for the record, it was Bride & Breakfast’s Toast!). Kay herself handed us a flyer and from then on, it was a love affair.

Their package made perfect sense to us financially, and had so so so many unbelievable inclusions. We got a free grazing table?? And got to invite 10 extra people! Basic venue styling was included. We also got a night’s stay at Manila Hotel built into the package. The inclusions we didn’t need (like, uh, the doves/butterflies lels and a bridal car), they deducted from our costing. We had two food tastings with them and each time we were blown away, unable to believe they’d be able to scale it (spoiler: THEY FUGGEN SCALED IT, we got compliments on the food for weeks).

It was also important to us that both the ceremony and reception take place in the same location. We didn’t want to have to move everyone from one place to another anymore, and Ilustrado was perfect for that setup.

The venue itself also has this old colonial Filipino aesthetic to match their menu (and Intramuros, of course), so we didn’t feel like we needed to add much else to style it. We were pretty happy to pay for the string lights for a bit of that Bilbo Baggins’ birthday party vibe.

I also am not a fan of centerpieces, we kept the tabletops bare so that people could see and talk to each other.

When things would come up during planning, Ilustrado were there helping us problem solve and telling us what we COULD do, rather than charging us for every single move we made. When they realized the cash bar they promised us couldn’t happen, they waived our corkage. When Taal erupted and threatened our event, they offered their indoor ballroom. When we asked if we could do long tables instead of round, they found a way.

The catch, such as it was, was parking. Slots on the property were limited, with few nearby lots. We also got married on a Sunday, and anticipated other events taking place nearby would compete for the existing slots. Our workaround was including a parking map with our invitation, and advising everyone to carpool or take Grabs.

Our next biggest expense was photography – of course. Oak St. Studios were my first choice for their effortless and spontaneous style. Not stuffy or sanitized, as I’m sure you can tell by now I am allergic to.

They were just a dream to work with, and frankly if i can make brides feel the way they made me feel – which was unencumbered by having to look or act like a princess or a doll – then I will consider my business a success. And if i had half their talent, I’d be twice as successful as I am now, let me tell you. They also expedited their turnover by a few weeks per my request for a family event, and we appreciated that very much!

Clothing was our last big expense, and for this we were helped along by family and friends. A good friend that runs a textile business helped us get fabric at a good price. Originally, I was going to buy a dress off the rack so that we could allocate our clothing budget towards Sean’s suit (which he can reuse). But as it turns out, buying a dress off the rack is about as expensive as having one made anyway. And if i had it made, I could get exactly what I wanted. So I went with Teena Sabrina Tan whose portfolio I loved, and who gave me a good rate for a short dress with no frills. Oddly, it wasn’t her bridal work that sold me (even though her bridal stuff is stunning), but her work on bridesmaids and flower girls.

Sean’s suit on the other hand, he had done at Talusan. It was important that we find a tailor that knew how to work with his body type, and I think he was done real well!

We didn’t full on hire a florist to deck us out, but we still enlisted the help of Bungkos By Arielle for the few florals we had. I wanted a bouquet that looked wild and unmanicured. That was really my only qualification – i was not really particular about the types of blossoms.

Once upon a time I was in a band for a few months. That band was the Etiquettes, and I love love love everything they did, it’s just that i am bad at being in a band so i quit. Kim, Howard, and their friendly neighborhood sessionists very kindly played two amazing sets for us.

And aside from the wines that we bought for each table, that’s pretty much it! That was the wedding, that was everything we spent. Very grateful that we got to do it the way we did, for our friends and family that helped out with big and little things, and for all the hard work our suppliers put in. It could have been a real shitshow, let me tell ya. We’re very thankful we managed to sidestep all this current madness, and even managed to sneak in a honeymoon that i’ll write about in a future post.

Right now, we’re enjoying being newlyweds in a post-apocalyptic world, and really very grateful that we didn’t burn through all our savings getting married, especially since our businesses have pretty much ground to a halt. It could be worse I guess. We’re pretty thankful we got to have this.

If you are interested in seeing an exact breakdown of our costing, I can send you our very disorganized budget spreadsheet – but i’ll avoid posting it as it is embarrassingly unpresentable.