This Couple Hopes to Pay for Their Wedding Via Corporate Sponsorship

By Kelly Faircloth | August 26, 2014 | 8:00pm

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Here’s an unconventional approach to the ever-escalating cost of American weddings: One couple is courting corporate sponsors. The bride is quite literally willing to slap a logo on her wedding dress to defray their expenses.

Cosmopolitan talked to Courtney McKenzie, who dreamed up this plan with her fiancé
Jamil. They’ve set up SponsorOurWedding.com in an attempt to raise $30,000 to cover the costs of their elopement to Thailand. (They plan to donate a portion of the proceeds to charities including The Boys and Girls Club and Big Brother, Big Sister.) What’s in it for the companies, you ask?

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We are a young, fun couple who opted to have an adventure instead of a traditional wedding. We have created several sponsorship categories that incorporate your amazing company in our one-of-a-kind social wedding. We will be hashtagging, tweeting and instagramming our way through Thailand to our over 30,000 combined social media followers and we want to include some of our favorite brands on our adventure.

(This is a good place to note that the bride works in marketing.)

“We sat down to make the guest list and it was 250 people. But then we thought, ‘What’s true to us?’ and we decided we just wanted it to be a lot of fun,” McKenzie told Cosmo. Apparently, for them, that meant chucking the big gathering and eloping to Thailand, while including their family and friends via photos and social media. (And only via social media— her comments to BuzzFeed make it pretty clear they’re not bringing along guests.) Which meant they had something they could sell to advertisers.

So far, so good: The pair told The Today Show they’ve already bagged free accommodations and a wedding ring sponsor, though they’re only halfway to their overall goal:

“I’m looking forward to putting a logo on my wedding dress. I can’t wait,” McKenzie told Today, wholly serious.

Unsurprisingly, though, they’ve gotten a bit of backlash:

“I’ve gotten a lot of emails saying, ‘This is so tacky,’ ‘How can you put a logo on your wedding dress?’ ‘Your daughter will never be able to wear your dress,'” she said. “It stings a bit. But we feel good about doing it. And it’ll be a fun story to tell our kids.”

Personally, if I were soliciting money from Corporate America, it would be in the service of including more guests, not so I could zip-line without worrying about my credit card bill. I’m not going around to the Fortune 500 with my hat in my hand for anything short of 500 guests at the New York Public Library in May.

But weddings cost a stupid amount of money and I’m not going to question any payment strategy short of bank robbery. (And even then, hey, deposits are FDIC insured.) Bonus: It’s a clever way to completely sidestep the awkward discussion about the appropriateness of asking for cash donations to the honeymoon. Everybody wins!