Weddings at City Hall in New York City are often intimate and without pricey flourishes, but Pinterest saw an engagement opportunity there by adding special touches to couples’ daytime nuptials during a pop-up outside on April 30. The brand covered their marriage license fees and gifted them free bouquets by Sprig & Social, a champagne toast at Champers Social Club, and custom wedding portraits by photographers Jenn Goz and Deirdre Alston.
The pop-up was an IRL manifestation of Pinterest’s Wedding Week, a fully shoppable, weeklong in-app experience that invited users to gather inspiration from more than 150 curated boards. Covering engagements, weddings and honeymoons, the highlighted collections from 50-plus merchants and talent, like celebrity nail artists and wedding planners, aligned with findings from the Pinterest Annual Wedding Trends Report.
More than 3.8 billion wedding-related searches take place in a year on Pinterest, and among them, city hall and courthouse weddings are surging, thanks to Gen Z. The intimate and cost-effective weddings are becoming their own chic aesthetic, and Pinterest is helping young couples discover ideas for “civil ceremony photography” (up 637 percent) and “courthouse wedding dresses” (up 137 percent), according to the report. This low-key type of wedding was the trend Pinterest zeroed in on for the NYC activation that complemented the digital Wedding Week.
“What we’ve seen over the past few years is this evolution into more intimate weddings. The micro weddings that were big in the early 2020s were definitely influenced by the pandemic, and then we had a trend last year in our report around quiet weddings,” says Sydney Stanback, global trends and insights lead at Pinterest. “This is taking into consideration the people who really matter the most at a wedding. The overarching vibe of this trend and the event is that it’s intimate, it’s romantic, it’s just really beautiful.”
For the free bouquets, Pinterest and Sprig & Social offered options that fit trending arrangement styles, such as “surreal florals,” which are created with flowers like calla lilies, dahlias and anthuriums for unique, artistic silhouettes. Brown has emerged as a popular wedding color (think: rich chocolate tones), so “brown wedding bliss” also influenced the florals available at the Pinterest-branded cart. Throughout the day, brand ambassadors pinned Polaroids of the participating couples to the flower cart.
“Gen Z is a very nostalgic generation, and they’re known for tapping into and reinterpreting past decades, redefining them with a more modern take,” Stanback says. “It’s really interesting to see how things have resurfaced for weddings.”
To drive buzz around the pop-up and the report, Pinterest partnered with Meet Cutes NYC to create content on Instagram around city hall weddings, featuring real couples. Vendor partners also shared the event on social media. Agency: Autumn Experiential.
Photos: Courtesy of Pinterest
