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.