Carl & Marc

We are absolutely in love with Carl and Marc's beautiful rustic wedding. Featuring succulents and tweed suits, their day was full of quirky accessories and personal touches.

How did you meet?
We met via an online dating app. Marc sent the first message so can claim credit for us getting together!

What's your favourite thing to do together?
We really enjoy entertaining guests, whether that’s Sunday lunch, dinner parties or our annual Halloween party (any excuse to dress up!). We both love to cook so planning and preparing food for our guests is something we both get a lot out of.

Tell us about your engagement
We both separately decided to propose on Christmas Day 2017 whilst we were on holiday in Guernsey. Carl beat Marc to the proposal by a matter of seconds as we’d both chose the same spot to do the deed. We then chose to keep quiet about it until New Year when we’d arranged for both our families to come round for a gathering. It was still hard work herding everyone together so we could make the big announcement. We were then able to finally let all our friends know the great news. We planned the wedding for March 2019 so we were engaged for just over 14 months.

What was the best thing about your wedding day?
The ceremony was definitely the best part, from the emotions of leaving the on-site cottage where we had got ready with our nephew and nieces to walking down the aisle. Seeing all our friends and family gathered around us for the first time while we made our pledges to each other and being greeted with a cocktail each as we left the ceremony and hurried off to have some quiet moments to ourselves before the big confetti shot.

What one tip would you give other couples planning their wedding?
Think about what is most important to you on your wedding day and plan your timings around that. We’d decided that we wanted to have as much time as possible with both our day and evening guests so we went for a nice early ceremony time meaning that we could start the evening reception as early as possible.

What has surprised you most about being married?
For the most part, day to day things aren’t really that different to before the wedding (other than the obvious ring on the finger) but the simple act of being able to refer to each other as Husband brings added warmth and meaning to our relationship.

Were you always planning to have a gift list?
We’ve shared a home together for 5 years now so we already have pretty much everything we could want for the house. We therefore decided we’d ask guests for donations towards a honeymoon if they wanted to give us something. We came across the Prezola site whilst looking to set up a Wedding Website on GettingMarried.com and realised it would be the perfect way to create a cash fund facility for our guests.

What's your favourite feature on Prezola?
The flexibility of the cash fund feature is great. We were able to make a completely personalised Honeymoon fund by itemising all the aspects of our Honeymoon and particularly enjoyed finding pictures for them all. It’s great that you can vary the values and quantities of the items so we were able to have a mixture of higher value single purchase items along with lower value group funded items. This meant guests could pick and choose depending on how much they wanted to gift us.

The fact that the Prezola gift list integrated seamlessly into the GettingMarried wedding website was the other main reason for us selecting Prezola for our gift site and we received lots of comments from our guests on how easy it was to use.

Tell us about your Prezola delivery day
The process of cashing in our gift fund was quick and simple. We also had a few bottles of bubbles that guests had generously added to their gifts and when those were delivered we were really surprised and touched to find all the gift cards which were also included in the delivery with printed messages from all our guests which they’d left during the process of purchasing the gifts online. We hadn’t realised we’d get those and it was a lovely memento to add to our wedding keepsakes.

Tell us all about your honeymoon! Where did you go and what did you love about it?
We went to Japan for just over two weeks. We planned and booked the trip ourselves and had pre-booked lots of activities and excursions throughout our stay. We set up a blog so all our friends and family could follow us on our travels and we were able to thank people individually for their gifts day by day. One of the highlights we were looking forward to was seeing all the cherry blossoms (sakura) and we were really lucky to see it pretty much throughout the trip.