A guest blog by Maréa Janae, founder of Dream Catcher Weddings
The Origins of Dream Catcher Weddings
The decision to start a wedding planning business was not something I took lightly, particularly because I didn’t want to contribute to the culture of wedding materialism and excess spending. So many weddings are just focused on buying cheap junk that gets used once and is then thrown in a landfill, and I knew that didn’t align with my personal values. I wanted to do something differently, but I didn’t always know how to do that, or what that would look like.
The first few years of Dream Catcher were a period of evolution and discovery; it seemed like the more our team learned about sustainable practices, the more people I discovered who were seeking them out.
I was both excited and disappointed to learn that there was such an untapped market in our area, because it meant that there was a huge opportunity for growth. It also meant that the conversation was very much lagging behind. There was so much work that needed to be done to educate folks about this topic, and to offer something meaningful to our couples when it comes to fulfilling our promise of helping them have a wedding that is beautiful, intentional, and mindful of the planet.
What Sustainability Means to Us
We focus on three main areas of sustainable wedding planning:
1. Sourcing materials responsibly
Sustainable sourcing means choosing materials that are produced humanely with minimal carbon footprint. When we’re purchasing items, whether that’s invitations, or decorations, or flowers, or food, we pay attention to where those things are coming from. Are the flowers being flown in from South America and covered in toxic pesticides and shipped in refrigerated trucks? Or are they coming from local farms? Is that decor you’re getting coming from Hobby Lobby or from Amazon, which is probably sourcing it from a factory overseas, and is it going to come covered in plastic packaging? Or is it coming from the thrift store or from something that you already own? Or are you upcycling it or renting it from a local company?
2. Disposing of materials deliberately
Beautiful weddings can sometimes hide an ugly truth. One wedding planner estimated that her average weddings threw between three and four hundred pounds of trash straight into the landfill at every single event. So what we’re looking at is, where else can those items go? Can we save your half-used candles and repurpose those at another event or send them to a company that will melt them down and turn them into new candles? Can we compost your flowers, or donate them to a local nursing home? Can your food waste be donated to a local food rescue or sent home as leftovers? Can it be composted? We also enjoy delivering used wedding flowers to nursing homes love seeing elderly folks light up when they realize the flowers are for them.
At the average Dream Catcher wedding, we usually have about one trash bag that goes to landfill, one to two bags of recycling, and one to two bags of compost. So we’re able to divert, usually between two and three hundred pounds of waste from the landfill at every single wedding. And to me, that’s a significant difference.
3. Supporting values-aligned businesses
“Sustainability is about more than ‘going green.’ We’re not just talking about being mindful of the planet, but also about people.”
Dream Catcher’s “dream team” educates our clients on amplifying their impact by supporting values-aligned businesses. What kind of businesses do you want to see to stick around for another year? We try to help our couples make that investment into businesses that are doing good in the world.
Whether that means donating their DJ services to a local nonprofit event, donating a percentage of their profits to charity, sourcing local flowers and helping you dispose of that flower waste properly, purchasing carbon offsets for all of their travels throughout the year, or donating their space for a nonprofit gala. Whatever that is, we just want to make our couples aware, if you invest in this DJ company over this one, or in this photographer, instead of someone else, you’re investing in a person, in a business, that we see is trying to make the world a better place. And the truth is, small and local businesses completely depend on that investment to keep going.
Sustainability is about more than “going green.” We’re not just talking about being mindful of the planet, but also about people, social impact, and businesses that are doing right by their community by making sure that their supply chain is treating people well. It’s a very important part of this.
The Importance of Building Community
“Taking a community-centric approach also means respecting each couple’s vision and expressing sustainability in a way that’s authentic to them.”
While the sustainable wedding community is small, its members are loyal and supportive of one another. There’s not a ton of people who are prioritizing social and environmental sustainability in weddings. It is a small, but growing, very passionate group of vendors who are prioritizing this, and we absolutely cannot do it alone. If there’s anything the wedding community learned from COVID, it’s that we’re all in this together. There were just so many circumstances of things going awry, nothing going according to plan, and we had to have each other’s backs and have vendors that we knew we could fully rely on.
Having said that, certain vendors took better care of our clients than others, and couples who prioritized values-aligned vendors really won out in the long run. Those were the businesses that took care of their couples when COVID hit and everything was totally unpredictable. It speaks to the value of investing in businesses that share your ethics. Those are the businesses that are here to believe in and support the community as a whole, and not just make their money and fight for themselves alone.
On a related note, taking a community-centric approach also means respecting each couple’s vision and expressing sustainability in a way that’s authentic to them. I never want to be someone to pressure couples into something that they’re not looking for. One of our other core values is to capture each couple’s love story through authentic celebrations. We design weddings that are unique and authentic to every individual couple, rather than putting expectations and external pressure on them.
We have to take a step back and tell our couples, ‘Hey, we care about sustainability. And we want to empower you to do that in whatever way makes sense for you. Our goal is to make that as easy as possible, without pressuring you into doing things sustainably just because you don’t want to say no to your wedding planner.
Not everyone can have a zero-waste vegan wedding, where all their vendors purchase carbon offsets and donate to charity. And not everyone needs to have that kind of wedding. But if our couple wants to take a single step and swap out plastic cups for compostable ones, or swap out flowers shipped from Argentina for locally grown ones, we support that. We’re here to cheer them on and say, ‘Your small change is enough. You’re making a difference, you’re taking a step in the right direction. And that’s enough.’”
The Way Forward for Dream Catcher Weddings
We’re always looking to take on new projects and new ways of doing things! We’ve recently partnered with and taken on venue management of Venetucci Farm, a beautiful flower farm wedding venue down in southern Colorado Springs. We’re so excited to bring sustainable events to that historic venue. We’re also in the process of developing a partnership with a local hotel here in downtown Colorado Springs—stay tuned for updates on that announcement this year!
We’re passionate about finding ways to support our vendor friends, especially those who are just getting started in the industry. We love helping to make their systems more seamless and efficient so that they can provide the highest level of service, make sure that nothing slips between the cracks, and generate healthy profit margins. We also offer one-on-one sustainability consulting for businesses that want to start putting Earth first—if there’s anyone out there looking to collaborate in these ways, we would love to talk about how we can make the wedding world a little bit better, together.