HOW DOES SOMEONE WITH ZERO INTEREST IN WEDDINGS END UP BUILDING A BUSINESS AROUND THEM? THE ANSWER IS LESS ROMANTIC THAN YOU THINK.
For the past twelve years, I have organised romantic destination celebrations, which is somewhat ironic, considering I have never been particularly interested in weddings.
And I get it: with the tattoos and loud music blasting from my car, I don’t quite look like the stereotypical wedding planner.
But for over a decade now, amongst other things, I have organised destination weddings, meaning celebrations for international couples coming to get married in Italy, and specifically in Le Marche, my home region.
To this day, it still feels quite surreal. I am not your typical planner, and it’s got little to do with the way I look or the music I listen to. The main reason is that, when it comes to weddings, I am not excited and I just can’t hide it.
Bridal gowns? I’d rather run a marathon barefoot than have to sit through a bridal catwalk. Bridal trends? Yack. Bridal magazines with the infinite rants on nails and veils? Nope. Pantone of the year? Hard pass.
And yet here I am, founder of Merry Le Marche, a destination event planning agency that for a long time had at its core the organisation of destination weddings. ( we also do other things too, and thank god for that).
So how the hell did I end up becoming a wedding planner?
Back in 2011, after wrapping up my language services business, I started to think about a new venture. I was living in London then and noticed that my region of Italy, Le Marche, was not promoted enough abroad. Le Marche was (and still is thankfully) a bit of an underdog region compared to the neighbouring Tuscany or Umbria, but definitely beautiful and with so much to offer. My initial thought was to do something related to language services as that had been my world for quite a while at that point: organise language retreats where the students could also take part in local activities such as cookery classes, terracotta making, to truly connect with the place. Looking better into it though, I realised that there was already a similar and quite established business in the area. A friend of mine was actually working for them and they were paying pennies. Also, it was still languages. I had worked with languages and translation for 8 years by then and I was kind of done.
I thought some more.
How could I attract a refined international crowd with money to spend? I wanted to bring revenue to the region, along with largish groups of people that then would potentially become return customers. I started to look into real estate and selling properties to foreign buyers.
There were a handful of agencies in Italy specialising in the foreign market and none focussing only in Le Marche at that time, so I thought it could be an angle. I started looking into it quite seriously. Unlike here in the UK, becoming an estate agent in Italy is quite complex and (surprise, surprise) highly regulated. You must attend a long and expensive course, pass a highly technical exam, then open a registered business, which was expensive in itself. I was overwhelmed. In the meantime we had moved back from England to Italy again, it was an intense period and something did not feel right. Most importantly the industry itself felt really restrictive so I decided to keep looking for a different angle.
I started to think about potentially becoming a travel agent. Surprise surprise again, this industry was also heavily regulated and, if by any chance you have read my previous article on Substack, you will know that nothing that feels cagey will work for me. So I let go of the idea.
Then I thought. How about international weddings?
I started looking into it. There was an angle right there. The industry was not regulated, nor restricted in any way. Meaning that, unlike estate agents, anyone could just start a wedding planning business without having some sort of formal “permit” or holding any specific qualification. Le Marche was not as touristically organised and upmarket as other regions such as Tuscany or Umbria, but it was organised enough. There were half-decent venues, good vendors, and the place itself was beautiful. There was scope for starting something.
I started a very thorough market research, reading wedding blogs, studying the competition, analysing competitors’ websites (there were virtually no competitors then), and reading all the available statistics. It made sense right away. I also found an online wedding planning course through a reputable UK institution that seemed good so I enrolled.
I had just returned to Italy and reconnected with my long-standing friend Chiara. We had known each other forever: Sunday school together as children, punk rockers in the same band as youngsters, but that is another story. She had been working with experiential tourism before it was fashionable and also cultural events. At the same time my brother’s girlfriend Nadia was really talented when it came to flowers and design. Somehow everything fell into place. I put us three together, came up with a catchy name and Merry Le Marche was born.
Our angle was to create an agency specialising in destination weddings and hands-on experiences so that our clients coming to Le Marche for a wedding and spending a few days here, could also truly get to know the region through activities. This would bring revenue to the area and to us. We quickly put ourselves online, created a website, our social media platforms and started to be out there. The original lineup would change after just a couple of years when Nadia left to start her own thing, but Chiara stuck around until after Covid and then left to prioritise other projects.
Back to the wedding startup, I had already run my own small translation business, and so management was not a foreign idea to me and I felt I could do it. I thought that I could by all means organise and coordinate a wedding, start to finish. And it turned out I could. I kept attending the course, put Merry Le Marche on social media, opened the infamous Partita Iva, and registered myself as self-employed.
It worked.
Right away I started to receive inquiries from foreign couples and in the first season alone I signed seven international weddings. Was there scope for improving my skills? Absolutely. Did I basically underestimate the huge amount of work involved and fundamentally worked for pennies? Definitely. But whatever the case, business came my way, came right away and from international couples, not from friends of friends.
The key ingredient to our overnight success in terms of the wedding side of the business was the fact that I knew my audience. I knew exactly who I was talking to, I could describe the buyer persona quite precisely and from day one via my website and social media I addressed that imaginary client right away. This is also when I also understood that I was quite naturally talented with branding and marketing and these skills would come handy later with other ventures I started, such as Borgo Loretello and Bar Giallo Loretello.
Although I had not even remotely nailed my pricing strategy and those first few weddings were grossly underpaid, it was all fantastic hands-on experience that allowed me to gather a good portfolio, reviews, and direct recommendations. I also completed the course I had enrolled in, and quickly realised how disconnected the course was from the reality of the job I was experiencing. The seed to start my own, actually useful course one day, was planted. (I am working on it, in case you are wondering, so stay tuned).
The first years I would basically do everything alone, even the day of coordination. And quite frankly if I think back to those first seasons, I don’t know how I did it as a few projects were quite large and complex. Yes, at weddings you work with vendors so you are not physically alone, but leading everyone can get intense.
In 2019, I was introduced to Rubina, a highly skilled marketing professional looking for opportunities beyond the fashion work she had been doing. As the season was approaching I thought that I could use a hand. “Come along for the day, see if you like it”, I said. Oh boy, not only was she good, but she was also a very nice person and, 7 years on, we still work alongside at weddings today. Even if the financial return is not what it could be as I am paying somebody else, at least I get to save my sanity. Aside from all the airy-fairy facade, this is a highly stressful job and no, it’s not because of Bridezilla – never met one by the way, do they really exist or I just get all the good clients?- It is because the weight of the responsibility is just too heavy to carry alone.
Then Covid came and all my international weddings were postponed to the following year. That infamous 2020 season I only had one last minute wedding for a vendor that got married at the new venue I had in the meantime started, Borgo Loretello. That was a hard time. I saw my livelihood shattered to pieces, and really quickly. Things picked up again eventually and we signed more weddings for the following years but what a terrible time that was for business.
In the meantime I decided to increase my rates quite a bit. By then I knew that planning weddings was such a tough job, that it needed to be worth my while. I made the conscious decision to become even more selective and couples with bigger budgets started to come. That meant more pressure, and it came at a time when I was already quite fragile and burnt out from the stress of Covid. I was juggling three businesses, Rubina had gone on maternity leave, which meant I was once again managing too much on my own, and we had relocated back to the UK.
At the time, I wanted to leave weddings altogether, but at the same time I couldn’t.
Seasons 2023 and 2024 felt like a cage. Then things got better. I was lucky enough to work with some brilliant couples, Rubina came back from maternity leave and I started to enjoy work again.
So, where am I now?
I have decided not to leave weddings altogether, but I am doing fewer and fewer events, and only intimate ones, while I expand Merry Le Marche to include more sides of the business, like properties and travel design. Also, I am doing consultancy within the wedding industry and rather enjoying it.
Am I finally getting excited about weddings? Not really. I definitely appreciate good wedding design but that kind of interest for the industry has never grown into me. I still enjoy the strategy side of things, the problem solving, the logistics, the fact that so many people that didn’t even know Le Marche existed, can get to discover my region and fall in love with it.
So no, I still don’t care about the Pantone Colour of the Year but I do care about the florist who has become a friend. I care about the venue owner who treats me like a queen whenever I work there. I care about the caterers who keep sending work my way. I care about the couples who arrive in Le Marche having never heard of it before and leave wondering how they didn’t discover it sooner.
Twelve years later, that’s what keeps me here. Not the wedding trends, the people.
