A new chapter

Yesterday, we made a very big announcement at Southern Weddings: that the tenth-anniversary issue will be the last for our team. Among many other things, I’m thankful that the site will remain active as an archive, and also that the Joyful Wedding Planner (which I co-wrote!) is still available in limited quantities. You can read much more on the Southern Weddings blog as well as Lara’s blog, and I’d encourage you to do so!

Here, though, I wanted to take a little bit of a different take, and share a bit more about what this change means to me.

For a very long time – long before I worked at Southern Weddings – I have been a person defined by weddings. I wrote about weddings here on Em for Marvelous from the beginning. I interned for a wedding magazine in college. I began subscribing to Martha Stewart Weddings in seventh grade. When I was five, one of my favorite hobbies was sneaking into our church’s balcony with my Mom to watch wedding ceremonies unfold.

I’ve had a hand — sometimes very heavy, sometimes just the lightest touch — in pretty much every friend and family member in my life who has gotten married in the last fifteen years, and each time it has been a joy! I have always thought there are few things more magical than a wedding day, and nothing in the last ten years has convinced me otherwise.

So to say serving as the Creative Director of Southern Weddings for the last nine years was a dream job is a little bit of an understatement. It has been one of the greatest joys of my life, and truly the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I feel incredibly, incredibly lucky that this actually happened to me. It just as easily could have not.

But it did. In addition to my day-to-day responsibilities in the office — choosing weddings to feature, writing about weddings, developing products for brides, and producing photoshoots (all dreamy-enough things on their own!) — my work had two incredible additional perks.

First, I got to travel extensively around the South, seeing amazing places through an incredibly intimate and unusual lens. For someone who loves to travel and loves getting a glimpse into “local life,” this was heaven! Not only have I worked in almost every Southeastern state, including Texas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and all the usual suspects, but I have seen them in a way that I never would have been able to otherwise.

I spent the day on a family-owned polo farm in South Carolina. I twirled across the lawn of Biltmore House at 6am, before the gates opened to the public. I rose off the ground in a hot air balloon in an Asheville dawn. I got as grimy as I’ve ever been in my life at an abandoned flour mill. I’ve worked a full day from the roof of one of the tallest buildings in Raleigh, imagining what it might be like to live a city existence. I’ve led a prize-winning cow through a cornfield and into a shot. I’ve been dressed to the nines for a gala at The Breakers where stilt walkers handed down glasses of champagne. I’ve traveled to Grand Cayman twice to speak about my company. I had my pick of vibrant, floral backdrops at the iconic Greenbrier in West Virginia. I even got to theme an entire shoot around one of my favorite TV shows of all time, for goodness sake!

The second was that I got to work with and learn from the most incredible, big-hearted vendors you could ever imagine. That includes pretty much every “big name” wedding photographer in the Southeast (as well as many talented folks based elsewhere!). It also includes some of my best friends, as well as strangers who became dear friends along the way. It includes TV celebrities and my own younger sister :)

In addition to forming relationships, I have learned SO MUCH from every person I’ve ever spent the day shooting alongside. They are a big part of what has kept my job fresh. I would have been happy doing my exact same job for another ten years.

Given all this, I suppose it’s understandable that one of the first questions family members had for me when they heard the news was whether I’d look for another position in the wedding industry. My answer was simple: I never considered it. There are so many reasons for this, but here are three.

First, I think it would be nearly impossible to find another wedding team that includes such amazing people, that is salaried, and that shares my heart for weddings — namely, that wedding days are magical, and also that they are only the beginning to an even more magical lifetime together.

The second is a bit harder to admit. While it’s absolutely true that I would have happily done my job for another ten years, after nine, I’m excited about applying my skills in a different way and also trying something entirely new. Going forward, I will serve as both the Creative Director and Chief of Staff for Cultivate What Matters, the sister brand to Southern Weddings. As the Creative Director, my position will look similar to what it did as the Creative Director of SW: I’ll concept and produce brand photoshoots and add to the visual aesthetics of campaigns.

Chief of Staff is a fancy way of saying I work with our CEO on projects that benefit our growing team (like implementing a new 401k provider – y’all know I was excited about that!) as well as helping to shape larger business decisions. Some of this I have been doing informally for years, but a lot of it is new and challenging, and that’s exciting even as it’s sometimes hard and overwhelming.

Finally, as much as I will always love weddings, I find the work we do at Cultivate extremely meaningful. As I wrote here, my job allows me to share the gifts God has entrusted to me, work alongside amazing people in an incredible environment, and to see the fruit of my work every day. I couldn’t ask for much more.

Thanks for allowing me to reminisce and offer some additional insight into this huge change in my life, friends. It is a joy, as always, to share with you. And never forget: whether we’re virtual or “real life” friends, I’ll always be available to offer wedding planning advice, ooh and ahh over your gown, or walk you through whether or not you need a videographer. Some things never change :)

Thank you, too, for indulging all of these beautiful photos I’ve worked on over the years! Here are the very deserving credits:

Biltmore photo by Henry Photography / apron photo by Davy Whitener