Photo Credit: Andy Stenz Photography
Angela and Greg Quigley began planning for their 2006 wedding the same way most couples do: with a Google search. At the time, though, they found the results less than helpful. “The only thing that came up was one of the big national websites,” Greg recalls. “So we jumped on there and started looking around and it really wasn’t the best. It kept taking us away from Milwaukee, and it was kind of an ad-oriented site.” On a whim they registered the domain name for Married in Milwaukee, which over the years they’ve built into one of the city’s most comprehensive resources for local wedding vendors and offerings. The Quigleys chatted about common mistakes people make when planning their wedding and new ways couples are finding to localize their ceremonies.
I imagine running a website like this you must discover all kinds of information you wish you’d known before your own wedding.
Angela: Oh absolutely. I’ve written a couple articles where it’s four things I would do differently if I were getting married now. I think the big one was when we got married we did not use a professional photographer. And now we see all these beautiful images from weddings taken by professional photographers, and it’s like, “Arg!” So that’s one of our biggest regrets.
Greg: One of the things that being in this industry has taught us is about all of the different wedding vendors out there that are amazing artists. There are these amazing photographers, and amazing DJs and amazing caterers—you name it, it keeps going on and on. So we see this amazing art that people are producing. They just happen to be producing it for weddings and making a living off of it.
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Have you noticed any new trends emerge in the five years you’ve been doing the site?
Angela: Yeah, video is huge now. That’s an emerging trend. You know, back in the day when we got married 10 years ago, video was just something set up on a tripod, then you got the 20-minute video of your ceremony and that was it. Nowadays, the video is a creative film. A lot of times I compare it to a four-minute music video of your wedding that really incites a lot of emotion and memories. So I think video is a huge trend.
Greg: There are a lot of trends in the design of weddings now. One that we’ve seen is a live event painter coming to an event. So you have your reception, and you have somebody that’s an artist that sits there and makes a live painting of your event. So it’s a cool focal point while you’re at your reception, but you also you get to keep it afterward.
Angela: Another trend I would say is the wedding weekend. So you kind of make a whole weekend out of the wedding. It starts with the rehearsal dinner, and those dinners are getting larger, because more out-of-town guests are coming in. So you have the rehearsal, a smaller intimate gathering where you have dinner and drinks, then next day you have the wedding. The next day you have the gift opening and the after-wedding brunch. That’s a trend, making more of a weekend out of it, especially if you have a lot of out-of-town guests coming in. They want to experience the city, and couples are looking forward to showcasing how awesome Milwaukee is for their out-of-town guests.
Greg: We see that a lot in Milwaukee. There’s a lot of Milwaukee love here, so people like to theme their weddings around Milwaukee, whether that’s having local Milwaukee beer served or local Milwaukee spirits like Rehorst or Great Lakes Distillery or something like that. We’ve even seen weddings where people would get old Milwaukee photos and use them as their table numbers, keeping that Milwaukee spirit alive.
Angela: We’ve also seen a lot of weddings bring in the racing sausages, so that’s a fun, popular trend. I’ve seen Bucky Badger show up at some, too. It just seems like couples are starting to think about their guest experience at their wedding. They’re starting to think about, “How do we make this event super fun,” and how they can add some unique elements that make it memorable for their guests.
