Giving gifts to wedding guests is still a common tradition. A 2023 study by the Knot showed that 52 percent of nearly 10,000 couples who were surveyed handed out wedding favors.
But there’s now a new spin on the custom. Couples are creating gifting suites, lounges and tables, where guests can choose gifts to take home after the celebration. Experiential gifts, where guests participate in activities in which they make their own presents, are also a popular option for couples looking to treat their guests to a distinctive gifting experience.
This approach stems from guests increasingly appearing to have grown tired of the old-fashioned wedding favors and welcome baskets that were often left behind or unused. (Think baseball hats with the couple’s names, bottle openers or mints.)
A 2024 study from the wedding platform Zola said that 62 percent of around 7,000 couples viewed traditional wedding favors as “somewhat outdated.”
Vanessa Kreckel, the founder of TPD Design House, a design agency in Wayne, Pa., said that she was now creating gifting suites and experiential gifts for around 80 percent of her wedding clients, a 50 percent jump from two years ago. “Couples always want different,” she said.
Abby Argo, 28, a real estate agent, and Phil Sprio, 30, a project coordinator for a security company, are Taylor Swift fans who hosted a welcome party with an Eras Tour theme when they celebrated their marriage at the Four Seasons Resort in Vail, Colo., during the weekend of July 4. The main attraction for their 140 guests was a room filled with more than a dozen different items, such as tube socks, Vail hoodies and hats, and friendship bracelets similar to the ones often worn by Ms. Swift.
For their rehearsal dinner the next night at Flame, the resort’s restaurant, the couple’s event planner, Cassie LaMere, created a stylish cowboy hat bar where guests could customize their headwear with details like bands, feathers and initials.
“We wanted something out of the box, and wow, when it came to guest gifts, and wedding baskets seemed so boring,” said Ms. Argo, who lives in Austin, Texas, with Mr. Sprio. “When you’re doing a destination wedding and people are making the effort to come, you want to treat them like celebrities.”
Mr. Sprio added that the gifts spoke to their interests: Taylor Swift, streetwear and sneaker culture. “We wanted to share who we are with our family and friends,” he said.
Amanda Freche, one of Ms. Argo’s friends and a wedding guest, said that the gifting component was unlike anything she had seen before. “The weddings I’ve been to have the typical welcome bags or favors at the end, which I usually throw away,” she said. “This was so cool because I got to pick a sweatshirt that I wanted and now pretty much live in.”
Ms. Argo and Mr. Sprio’s nuptials are part of an overall shift in the wedding industry to be more creative and less wasteful with guest gifts, according to their event planner, Ms. LaMere, who is working on multiple weddings that include experiential or choose-your-own gifting stations. “We have all received a lot of things at weddings, and we don’t always find them useful,” she said. “The gift of choice is truly the ultimate gift.”
Lyndsey Lane, the founder of the Lynden Lane, an event planning company based in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., said that she had begun incorporating experiential gifting into her weddings after attending Engage Summits, a luxury wedding conference.
Rebecca Grinnals, a founder of Engaging Concepts, a wedding industry consulting firm that hosts the summits, said she and her partner started offering “gifting suites and personalized gifts when we noticed that the planners who attended the summits weren’t using what we gave them in their welcome bags. Now, everything we do at Engage Summits is experiential.”
Ms. Lane planned a destination wedding for 105 guests last September in Nantucket, Mass., for Amy Layton Lambert, 34, an apparel designer for Brixton, and Scott Lambert, 37, an apparel designer at Tenōre. The couple’s welcome party at Sandbar at Jetties Beach featured a gifting station that had items inspired by the destination, including sweatshirts from the local boutique Nantucket Clothing Company, plush Serena & Lily cream-and-red-striped blankets, lobster mallets and bibs, coasters, and Nantucket hats.
“When Lyndsey suggested the station to let guests select what they liked, we jumped,” said Ms. Lambert, who grew up in Nantucket and now lives in Newport Beach, Calif. “Now, almost a year later, we see our friends wearing the sweatshirts and hats and talking about how cool the gifts were.”
Marcy Blum, an event planner based in New York, said she almost always incorporated gifting suites and experiential gifts into weddings, describing them as “alluring.” “Getting to pick is like Christmas,” she said. “I can’t tell you the amount of waste I’ve seen with welcome baskets, even extravagant ones.”
These specialized gifts, though, don’t come cheaply. Wedding planners say that prices span a wide scale, typically averaging at least $50 per guest, and can total several thousand dollars.
But Ms. Blum noted that not all innovative gifts are expensive. She planned a wedding with 200 guests in July 2022 at the Montage Palmetto Bluff in Bluffton, S.C., with a gifting suite at the welcome party modeled after an old-fashioned general store.
The wedded couple, Riley Kim, 28, who works in marketing at Bloomingdale’s, and Michael Kim, 29, an analyst at an investment bank, have “massive sweet tooths,” Ms. Kim said. So they filled the store with tubs of their favorite candies, such as Canadian wine gums, sour belts and Twizzlers. Sunscreen, locally grown peaches and cans of Poppi soda rounded out the lineup. Guests were invited to fill their canvas bags with anything they wanted and were encouraged to return for seconds.
“The candy was a sensation at the wedding,” Ms. Kim said. “The best part is that Michael and I dug into the stash and enjoyed it during the entire party and afterward, too.”
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