In this episode, we discuss how the wedding industry may change or grow as a result of Web3.

This episode came about because of a conversation Angela had with her niece who works in the Wedding industry.

We discuss how some people have and will have their weddings in the Metverse. How the Metaverse can help to plan your wedding. How you can use NFTs and AI to create a better experience and if you are in the wedding industry how you can use Web3 technologies to grow your business.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/15/1069848/taco-bell-metaverse-wedding/

https://www.brides.com/throw-wedding-in-metaverse-5270428

We hope you enjoyed the show and that it inspired some ideas. Join us next week to delve further into the Metaverse

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IMPORTANT NOTICE
This podcast is for entertainment and education purposes only. We do not give any investment or financial advice and we strongly recommend you always DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.

Show Transcription

[00:00:00] Cheryl: Welcome to Women of the Metaverse. I am Cheryl Laidlaw. 

[00:00:08] Angela: I am Angela Harkness. We have been and are still on a journey to discover the Metaverse with 3.0 NFTs and anything that we are required to know to join this world. 

[00:00:21] Cheryl: From this podcast, we will help you to unlock how the metaverse is going to impact your brand.

[00:00:27] Cheryl: Your business and even your personal life. 

[00:00:31] Angela: Join us as we take the mystery out of this new digital universe. Welcome to Women of the Metaverse. In this episode, we are talking about weddings. This episode came about because my niece works in the wedding industry, and I sent her an article that I found about a couple that was married in the Metaverse, sponsored by Taco Bell because they won a competition.

[00:00:56] Angela: We’ll put the link in the show notes so you can have a full read cuz it’s very [00:01:00] interesting. But this led to a debate between my niece and I about how this digital universe would change weddings. She was not having it. She truly believes that people would not want to hold their weddings in the metaverse.

[00:01:13] Angela: And I did tell her that I would wear my, I told you so. T-shirt, when people started to grow considerable businesses by creating venues and planning metaverse weddings. Granted, it doesn’t sound like the most romantic way to get married. Still. There are several aspects to it that we are gonna talk about that could make it more practical, but also it may be a fun venture, mainly if you are coming at it from a business perspective.

[00:01:40] Cheryl: Well, even Bride’s magazine is writing about it. So your niece may have to change her mind. Yeah, she will. Mm-hmm. So in July, 2022, they published an article titled How to Throw a Wedding in the Metaverse. In the Brides article, they [00:02:00] talked about a couple Kandice and Ryan Hurley, who had a traditional wedding in 2008, but in 2022, renewed their wedding vows in the metaverse at the offices of the law firm Rose Law Group.

[00:02:15] Cheryl: They had a metaverse architect build the venue and NFTs of a picture of their dog were gifted to the guests. We will put the full article, of course in the show notes for you to check this out. Another couple mentioned in the article held a physical wedding, but along with traditional wedding rings, they also gifted each other N F T pieces of art with a smart contract written by the groom.

[00:02:44] Cheryl: And on the morning of the wedding day, they exchanged the art from their crypto 

[00:02:48] Angela: wallets. I quite like some of these ideas. Petechia, I like the, um, Giving guests an N F T gift. [00:03:00] I like the 

[00:03:00] Cheryl: vows. I like how they are encrypted in a code. Yeah, I think that’s a good idea. 

[00:03:08] Angela: Yeah, I think, I think when my niece was thinking about it, she was kind of thinking all in, but I think there’s certain aspects that you can, you can bring table, incorporate, and I think people are a bit more used to it because.

[00:03:22] Angela: When it was lockdown, people would attend wedding virtually anyway. So I think this next step into the metaverse, but also architect creating a metaverse venue for you. Amazing. Would that be? That would be 

[00:03:40] Cheryl: awesome. This could be an alternative for guests, but what if you work in the industry? 

[00:03:47] Angela: As with all of these new chapters, there are always opportunities.

[00:03:52] Angela: You may be a traditionalist when it comes to weddings, and we would imagine that most people are, but you can still use this technology [00:04:00] to help. One of the most useful ways, I would imagine, is to be able to show the bride and groom exactly what their wedding could look like by creating this in the metaverse so you can walk through the wedding, both where the ceremony and the party are gonna be held, and know that everything is gonna be exactly as you want it.

[00:04:20] Angela: Metaverse architects, as we just said, is a perfect opportunity. The other aspect is for some cultures you are expected to invite a huge number of people, and weddings can go on for days. It’s not always possible for people to travel all over to attend weddings and be able to attend online, not just by Zoom, but actually feel as if you are in the venue and joining in may solve a lot of problems for people.

[00:04:48] Angela: You could help people to plan their wedding this way, and you could make it part of your wedding planning expertise, 

[00:04:56] Cheryl: or to keep it simple. People could use NFTs for [00:05:00] invitations and gifts to the guests. This could be part of the service you could offer to help them create and distribute NFTs. What other ideas for wedding opportunities are in the metaverse?

[00:05:15] Angela: Well, we talk a lot, a lot about avatars, which I think we is one of our episodes soon. And I think avatars are gonna be so big in people’s lives, particularly this kind of younger generation who are used to gaming and having avatars. I think that’s gonna be a thing, you know, your avatar, getting married as opposed to yourself.

[00:05:37] Angela: Um, that’s one of them, definitely. 

[00:05:40] Cheryl: Yeah. What about, um, metaverse Florist? 

[00:05:44] Angela: Yes. Yeah. Love that idea because there’s so many different things. Flowers don’t then just need to be flowers, do they? They can. Play music, they can sparkle, they can, they don’t just need to be sat in a pot. 

[00:05:59] Cheryl: [00:06:00] And the experience from the guests.

[00:06:01] Cheryl: Can you imagine watching the bride walk down the aisle? Or you can actually sort of be in the eyes of the bride and all the flowers open up. I dunno. Yeah. Outside the box here. 

[00:06:10] Angela: Yeah. But even confetti could actually turn into little ferries, thirds or ferries or something. But there’s so much, you know, just to be able to design that and.

[00:06:22] Angela: Like we said, your wedding invitations could be NFTs, so you as a designer could create, um, wedding invitations as NFTs. Definitely. I actually saw somebody who did really cool designs for, um, QR codes in ai and they, they were really creative and it’s kind of that similar thing to do a wedding invitation.

[00:06:47] Angela: I just think you could just go mad. 

[00:06:49] Cheryl: Yeah. You could really, really, Go crazy. And especially if you haven’t got the budget in real life. Yes. You could make it really immersive and beautiful. Especially with now we’ve just had the [00:07:00] announcement literally yesterday, uh, with the new Apple, um, vision Pro. Vision Pro coming out.

[00:07:07] Cheryl: Yeah. So it feels like it’s getting closer and closer now that Apple revealed their launch date. Yes. Yeah. I mean, we’ve got a hell of a time to wait for it, but you know, it’s coming nice on this 

[00:07:19] Angela: country. We do in this country. Oh, you know, same mate. Same old. I know, but Cheryl and I are miserable about this because we get really fed up that everything gets launched in America first.

[00:07:30] Angela: Then you have to wait. But that’s not what this episode is about. 

[00:07:34] Cheryl: Okay, so unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past six months, there has been an explosion of AI tools and these can be used to your advantage to help plan a wedding, whether it is for your wedding or whether you work in the industry.

[00:07:50] Cheryl: Most people do not have the budget to have a wedding planner, and it can become very overwhelming when you have so many factors to consider using AI to [00:08:00] help plan what needs to be done, when and how could help take some of the strain off of you. AI could be used to design wedding invitations, give you ideas on how you want the wedding venue to look, plan menus for all the different food options you may have to deal with and generally help you structure the day so it goes to plan.

[00:08:22] Cheryl: You could even get AI to be creative and ask it to come up with your own wedding cocktail. And of course wedding vows. 

[00:08:30] Angela: Yeah, there’s so much even. Since we wrote this episode, as with ai, the number of tools that come out, but now even chat, g p t has all the plugins. It now scrapes up to date the webs, um, um, web brow.

[00:08:48] Angela: Yeah. So even now there’s more it can do since we started to write and research this episode. Mm-hmm. So just being able to like, [00:09:00] Find sources about how you plan a wedding or suppliers or you know, all these sort of things. Yeah, it, AI will just make this so much easier for you. So 

[00:09:11] Cheryl: what about if you work in the industry, how could you use 

[00:09:15] Angela: ai?

[00:09:17] Angela: This would be my thing if I, I think about this a lot. I almost wish I understood the wedding industry because a lot of people can’t afford planners like we’ve said. And if you are a wedding planner, you could use AI to do wedding planning light. So you could charge a certain amount of money and you could map out somebody’s wedding day for them.

[00:09:40] Angela: Particularly because I think in wedding, the relationships with suppliers is really important. So glorious and caterers, um, you know, all of that aspect of a wedding, those relationships you could. You could incorporate that into this plan and charge a small amount, but [00:10:00] something that would really help with bride and groom, just run their day smoothly.

[00:10:03] Angela: Like these, this is the date you need to put, design your wedding invitations. This is the date they need to go out. This is the date you need to do this. These, you know, 

[00:10:13] Cheryl: uh, basically ha have put in your wedding day. And then it will basically work backwards from that. Yes. 

[00:10:18] Angela: Yeah. And that I, if I was in the wedding, I would be doing that, you know, just.

[00:10:24] Angela: Doing loads of those because you can use, I think part of this was I saw Gary Vaynerchuk was asked a question in this woman said, how can you not let AI take your job or your business? And he answered this question so brilliantly because he said, I would give AI this prompt. And he went into a prompt about wine and he basically was saying, I’m an expert in wine, so I know what question to ask it about wine.

[00:10:52] Angela: You are not so you don’t know to ask it the right question. The same if you work in the wedding industry. You [00:11:00] know the, the things that go wrong, the things that go right, you know what question to ask it. Well, and hours 

[00:11:06] Cheryl: are blooming 

[00:11:06] Angela: at what time. Exactly, exactly. You know how to think about the weather.

[00:11:11] Angela: Some of the things even my niece told me was the, the wedding venue she works at, they have marble floors. So you can’t have colored flowers going down the aisle because the colors go into the marble. I wouldn’t think to, I would expect somebody to tell me that you can’t have confetti unless it’s white again, for the same reason, and also because there’s peacocks on the ground.

[00:11:32] Angela: So you have, you know, all of those things, all those little aspects, all those little aspects that, and you would know what was going wrong. And I think this wedding planning light is, uh, just something you could do, you could add to your thing. And if you think people wouldn’t pay, people, would people have money to pay for all sorts of things.

[00:11:54] Angela: So there is definitely. There is definitely a lot more that can be done [00:12:00] that to incorporate ai, the metaverse, and all of these things in the wedding industry. 

[00:12:04] Cheryl: Definitely. I mean, I even loved, I found a TikTok the other day about the content creator that goes to your wedding. 

[00:12:12] Angela: Oh, you love this one. 

[00:12:13] Cheryl: Goes to your wedding and films the whole day and makes trending videos.

[00:12:19] Cheryl: For you and your bridesmaid, the transformation, the, uh, I just thought it was genius. I have no idea how much she is, but, um, I think she’s a great addition to any event, wedding. 

[00:12:32] Angela: I think the wedding industry, particularly those people that have money, has just gone crazy. I was sending my niece videos of this particular wedding, and it happened over three days in Italy and.

[00:12:47] Angela: God, the amount of money that must have been spent on this wedding, they, even for one of the meals, had their own, um, wedding sort of dinner service created. Wow. So that all the [00:13:00] guests had a plate, like with their name on it, just the, the aspect of it. But if you then add the metaverse into that, if you add ai, if you add NFTs, there’s a huge, I mean, it’s a huge industry anyway, isn’t it?

[00:13:15] Angela: So, yes. It is. So yeah, there’s a lot you can be done. 

[00:13:21] Cheryl: There is always a movement in time and change is always guaranteed. Some of these ideas may seem far fetched, but over time some of these elements will become normal. And as always, we urge you if you are a small business owner, not to miss the opportunities that this digital universe offers you.

[00:13:39] Cheryl: We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Join us next week as we continue our journey into the Metaverse. Bye canal. 

[00:13:46] Angela: Bye.

[00:13:50] Angela: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women of the Metaverse. 

[00:13:54] Cheryl: You can find all information, links and people we talked about in the show notes on our [00:14:00] website. If you have 

[00:14:01] Angela: enjoyed this podcast, please comment and 

[00:14:04] Cheryl: subscribe. Join us again in the next episode as we continue this exciting metaverse journey.