“This way to wedding planning paradise.” In the store window, there are nearly life-sized figurines of a bride and groom. The groom is clasping his bride in a loving embrace, her leg kicked upwards in newly wedded bliss. The subliminal text: come on in, you’ll be like us. From the outset, Zola knows its customer base and how to lure them in. The upward curving arrow, reminiscent of the Amazon logo (likely done on purpose), is in a delicate pastel color, sending out a calming message meant to reassure engaged couples that they will get through the process of cakes and registries just fine.
Love, on its best days, can be paradise, but wedding planning often evokes the opposite feelings. Brides stand to suffer the most, because visions. More often than not, getting engaged brings on an onslaught of decisions, almost all of which involve purchasing. From drawing up a guest list to booking a photographer and everything in between, involve their own miniature purchasing cycle. The traditional solution to this is hiring a wedding planner, which can expensive. And there are plenty of wedding planning horror stories to go around, all ending with a bride screaming or in tears on what is supposed to be the happiest day of her life. Then there are the realities of changing societal attitudes — married couples are no longer exclusively a man and a woman. So how do you get someone to care about your wedding, representing your love story as much as you do?
Enter Zola.
Zola, which has been an exclusively online wedding planning brand, has experimented with pop-ups before and liked the reception. In an email interview with DMN, Jennifer Spector said, “We’ve experimented with pop-ups in the past. Last year we even turned a vintage camper into a registry on wheels and built a podcast studio in the back where hundreds of couples in New York, Chicago and DC recorded their love story. Having a physical presence has helped us build a very vibrant community of couples. The store is another opportunity for couples to shop for thousands of gifts, experience our best in class customer service, and get inspired by other recently married couples who loved Zola.”
Zola stands out in the sense that they do not seek to inundate you with stuff: it seeks to create an experience that retains the feeling of excitement that comes with the first flush of getting engaged. The whole point of getting married is pretty obvious — sharing a life with someone you love, but it’s easy to get buried under the stress of deciding whether or not to invite your college friends or your cousins.
The pop-up store is stacked with dishes and appliances, but they are not cluttered. There are invitations, and envelope linings, but they don’t look gratuitous or silly. On the right wall are oversized cards that you can turn like flipping records featuring real-life couples who look genuinely happy to be together, not stiff and contrived.
On the second floor, there is a room filled with cameras — 66 to be exact. Instead of using a dated cake topper, you can take a picture with your fiancé and whatever object means the most to you — a pet, a keepsake — and 3D print it into a cake topper. The result is something personal and meaningful that can be used to decorate a joint home together, not just a generic artifact with no meaning attached to it.
Zola seems to have succeeded in making wedding planning seem fun, and with them, it just might be.
The pop up store on 5th Avenue in New York City will be open through April.
