The Five Stages of Weddings
While many weddings tend to follow a standard timeline of ceremony, cocktail hour, dinner, dancing, we take a totally different approach to breaking down the wedding experience into its various parts. Not only does that allow us to rethink the wedding template, but the parts are based on engagement rather than events, which give us the opportunity to design the day based on meaning and emotion rather than just details. These are the five stages of the wedding experience according to the framework we use, also called the Five Es of an experience.
01 EXCITEMENT
The truth is, the experience of a weddings actually begins the very first moment someone hears about, which may be many months before the event itself. This is an opportunity to begin to build excitement and anticipation, and paint a picture for guests of what they can expect. The traditional touchpoints during this stage are your Save the Date, invitation suite, and the wedding website, all of which are a promise to guests, where the bar is set for what they can expect from attending this wedding, and communicate it will be worth the trouble and expense of getting there. How can you design moments during this stage to really generate that feeling of excitement for the day itself and communicate that it will be an extraordinary event? What if you took a completely different approach to the invitation, like this paper record player by Kelli Anderson. Or if you built an interactive website experience that created a sense of mystery and intrigue? Depending on what the guiding purpose of your wedding day is, building excitement is an incredible opportunity to prime guests for what’s to come, to get them in the right mindset, and ensure they come ready to be enchanted.
02 ENTRY
Finally, the day is here! How you invite people into the wedding sets the tone for the day. Th opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people. And in grabbing them, it should both awe the guests and honor them. It must plant in them the paradoxical feeling of being totally welcomed and deeply grateful to be there.
There is a threshold moment between the arrival of guests and the official opening of the ceremony or festivities. Anticipation builds between the initial clap of thunder and the first drops of rain; hope and anxiety mingle. Here is the moment to consider how to signify to start of things. How to welcome everyone. How to communicate that guests are about to enter a temporary alternate world. How can we design a moment of transition between our ordinary lives and this magical experience? Can the physical threshold itself be designed in an inspiring way? Perhaps guests have to physically pass through a walkway of flowers, or they turn a corner to reveal an unexpected dramatic setting. Or perhaps there is an experiential welcome; everyone is handed a custom cocktail as they arrive, or a candle to hold during the ceremony. How can the entry be designed to trigger emotion?
03 ENGAGEMENT
This is the meat of the wedding, or the wedding itself. From the ceremony until the last person still holding down the dance floor, these are the events of the day that you typically equate to wedding, and for our design purposes, they all fit snugly in one piece of the puzzle. There are a lot of touchpoints during this phase to consider, from the ceremony through the reception, there is so much opportunity to engage guests in a personal and meaningful way.
04 EXIT
Similar to the Entry, the Exit is an important moment of transition, where you ease guests back into the real world. The worst thing you can do is just let a wedding peter out without any definitive end point. Not only because it creates a feeling of incompleteness, but because it’s been proven that the two most memorable moments of an experience are the peak—when the action is at its crescendo—and the end. So for a memorable and enduring experience, it has to have an epic ending. One popular and beloved way to do this is the sparkler send off, but the possibilities for surprise and delight here are unlimited.
05 EXTENSION
And finally, the extension. Here we create moments and physical artifacts to prolong the experience of the wedding by helping guests reminisce about the way it felt. Traditionally this is done both with wedding favors, a small token that might serve as a reminder, and with thank you notes. But here is another often missed opportunity to create meaning. What if instead of a traditional thank you note acknowledging the gift received, couples send a personalized note with a photo of the guest thanking them for their role in the event, or in their lives as a couple? What if they sent a gift to each attendee after the wedding of a recording of the song they danced to? The perfect gift is one that is personally relevant and meaningful to the recipient, but it should also signal back to the wedding and serve as a spark to fond memories of an extraordinary experience.
All five stages of the wedding experience should serve the wedding’s guiding purpose, but it’s a great framework for finding touchpoints to add emotion, meaning, and magic.
