Real Weddings, Advice, & Inspiration

Catalyst Wedding Company highlights weddings by and for game-changers. We seek to amplify and empower voices and viewpoints that are usually missing from the Wedding Industrial Complex. We're a community of badass wedding professionals who love all things funky, fresh, diverse, unique, and personality-driven; we convene twice yearly for (un)convention, a collaborative workshop, styled shoot, and dinner party. We're also the publishers of Catalyst Wedding Mag, a resource for couples looking for inspiration and affirmation that doing things differently in wedding-world is not only ok, it's wonderful!

I'm Katy. I work in hospitality so have loads of contacts, which came useful in wedding planning! My partner is Shelly. She works in management in the City Centre. We spend most of our time with our friends, family, and little dog, Bertie.

We looked at a number of different venues but absolutely loved Constellations and of course Hannah, their events manager. It’s an open warehouse, with an industrial feel, boasting a rustic outside area, which we prayed would come with sunshine for our spring wedding! It was a completely blank canvas, so we were super excited to put our own stamp on it.

Capturing our day was important to us, so we spent quite a lot of our time finding our amazing photographer and videographer. They both captured the day perfectly, and because we’d met them in person, they knew exactly what we were trying to achieve.

My mum came wedding dress shopping with me, and I was adamant I didn’t want to make a big fuss over a dress, so I ended up with the first one I tried on, and it was completely different from what I had in mind. Shelly, on the other hand, tried on thousands of suits, and just when she thought she’d found the one, she took it back and found another one.

We had a simple civil ceremony at St George's Hall in the centre of Liverpool.

For the party, our motto was "Shut Up and Dance" (our first song for the dance floor). We had our four nieces as Bridesmaids and our eight best friends as Best Lasses who all gave a fabulous speech. Shelly had planned an unexpected Beyoncé flashmob for the reception!

For decor, the theme was just "anything goes." We love the spring, so we chose bright spring colours within our flowers and table decorations. The venue was a blank canvas for us to put our own spin on.

Words by Katy, one of the brides, as told to Amber Marlow. Photos by Shane Webber.

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Wedding dance floor at Constellations in Liverpool

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SHANE WEBBER

Shane Webber is a Manchester, UK-based wedding photographer with a natural and contemporary photography style. Shane loves to capture the real moments and emotion in his images. Shane says, “Combining interesting compositions with real moments is what I’m constantly pushing for. Documenting the story of the day is the most rewarding part of being a wedding photographer.”