With ers Without You

Stacked it

FYI peppermint is different to pepper with mint.

🌅

Crutch-less nickers sported in Coolangatta

Cool story

Six years on, there are wedding industry peeps still saying they invented pop up weddings, and although everyone is welcome to the phrase (we missed out on the trademark) I wanted to honour Britt in staking our claim in thinking of it.

Who disrupted the wedding industry with pop up weddings? Britany Withers invented pop up weddings.

Britt, aka my wife, thought of the idea in late 2013, I went live with them in early 2014 flailing about trying to figure out how to make them work, and then Britt left her job and joined me full time.

We transitioned from the brand Pop Up Weddings to The Elopement Collective because the brand was so heavily copied and we’d missed the opportunity to trademark it. Plus, Britt didn’t like my graphic design. Businesses were popping up every day using the words “pop up wedding” and most meant something different to what we intended, plus all of them were cheap and tacky, lacking the class, simplicity, and beauty we brought to the space.

Everyone else that does pop up weddings today is welcome to them, but don’t claim to have thought of it and disrupted the wedding industry yourself.

Here’s a few news articles from the time: WAToday, The Daily Mail, Hitched, Intimate Weddings, or just scroll back to the very start of the @elopementcollective Instagram account, it used to be called @popupwed.

I also just did the old scrolly back through Instagram and here’s some highlights, December 6, 2014, when we started transitioning to what we now call The Elopement Collective. That time we took pop up weddings to Hawaii, visited the White Magazine offices, but most importantly, that February 1 first post on Instagram that told the story of the fabled first pop up wedding, where we actually made a loss and could only convince one couple, one lovely couple, to get married at a pop up wedding. The second event, set for Star Wars Day had zero bookings but it did get us on Seven’s Sunrise TV show.

I’m allowed to boast about my wife, it’s socially acceptable to cheer on your favourite human, so I wanted to end on this note. Most people only have the chance to revoloutinise an industry once, but Britt, she not only brought pop up weddings to the wedding industry, she then went on to specialise in elopements with The Elopement Collective. The EC is a market leader, she was first, and she’s the best in her field. Every major market now has someone packaging elopements and you can draw a line back to Britt from all of those innovators.

She’s a pretty amazing girl my wife.

Britty with the good camera

The great hypocrisy in our society today is that we have the privilege, freedom, and the technological ability to publicly condemn Bill Gates, 5G, and China, from our 4G internet connected personal computing devices from not-China.

Through this time where businesses have been shutdown or sent home, and so much connection and communication has been forced online, there has been a real misunderstanding of how to simply be valuable.

Hey I’ve got a passport with stamps on it plus I have a recent model iPhone and MacBook, so does that make me a Global Elite?

Asking for a friend.

You’re A Miracle (And A Pain In The Ass) by Mike McHargue is an important book for the humans of Planet Earth.

It’s not important for the ground breaking research or scientific findings it contains, they’re accurately credited to the many smart people that found them in years past.

This book is important because of the important narrative that Mike weaves through the understanding that we humans are beautifully fantastic miracles, yet in so many countless ways thanks to our brains, childhood trauma, and the hyper connected world we live in today, we are massive pains in the asses.

Reading this book has given me so much insight into my own behaviours and just plain old stupid stuff I do everyday.

Thank you for writing this book, Mike 🙏🏻

When reading a book by a podcaster I’ve spent a long time listening to, I’m pretty much listening to an audiobook recorded live inside my head.

My secret superpower is being able to spot someone who sells essential oils from 100m away.

Coolangatta colours tonight

I just realised that the poker night I’m going to tonight requires me to know how to play poker. If you want to know how to play poker, don’t read these three books, they’re useless.

Picked up an iPhone 11 for Britt today.

One of these photos is from my iPhone XS and one’s from her iPhone 11, both shot from our balcony just now, no processing.

I’ll let you guess which is which.

“For example, over 500 businesses with ‘1’ eligible employee reported a figure of ‘1,500’ (which is the amount of JobKeeper payment they would expect to receive for each fortnight for that employee).” www.ato.gov.au/Media-cen…

COVID-19 threatened to take our breath and even our life, but the greatest threat will be that it takes away our common unity, our social nature, our creativity, or simply, our humanity. I hope we can preserve that through the disdain for the other felt in public today.

What a beautiful time to be alive

I love how the internet walks around like the html tags <marquee> or <blank> and things like Under Construction gifs never existed.