10 Tips to OWN Your Intimate Wedding

What is an intimate wedding? For us here at Nomad it’s weddings with 60 guests or less. The perfect size for you to invite your core group of friends and family to join in celebrating you and your love!

Own your plan! – One of the hardest parts about having an intimate wedding is that you may feel like you’re letting people down…people who expected to be invited, parents who dreamed of a big wedding, etc. Reminder, this is YOUR day. And while input is always appreciated, others do not get to tell you what you want for your wedding. Let everyone know up front, “hey guys we’re doing an intimate wedding, this is what we’ve dreamed about. No hard feelings.”

2. Treat Your Guests Like VIPs – By keeping your guest list intimate, you really can hone in on details and connect with every person in attendance. With larger weddings, details & chatting with your guests can feel more like a burden versus something to enjoy.

3. Lean into the space – Most intimate wedding venues are unique spaces, not rectangular ballrooms. Lean into the aesthetic of the space. Trying to make a modern art gallery look like a woodland escape is working against the grain. And ultimately you’ll be spending more money than you’d like on redesigning the space. If you want a ‘woodland escape’ find a venue that naturally emulates that.

4. Intimate weddings are… more intimate! – We’ve all been to a wedding where we barely even get an opportunity to connect with the happy couple. An intimate wedding allows intimacy! Connect with your guest, have a conversation, don’t feel rushed, it’s an amazing feeling!

5. Explore the area – If you leaned into an intimate wedding because you wanted less wedding stress, we feel you! The upside of that is you have more time to get out and enjoy the friends and family that are in town to celebrate. Plan an excursion or two. Visit a local brewery. Go fishing. Do a yoga class. Take a hike. It’s an added benefit of extra memories for your celebration than just the wedding day!

6. Focus on your foodie side – Larger venues often have cookie cutter food packages. So take advantage of having a more intimate crowd and create a menu that makes you drool. Intimate venues tend to have chef’s that thrive on a challenge, so lean into that.

7. Focus on the why - When planning a wedding it’s easy to be overwhelmed by ALL the information. It’s coming at you from all angles — Pinterest, your sister, your mom, your new MIL, the lady at the bank… Don’t let everyone else’s opinion bog down your wants and desires. Taking advice and considering it is one thing (hey, sometimes people have good advice) but letting it dictate your decisions is not cool!

8. Get a Group Photo – Almost impossible with a larger guest list but completely manageable with an intimate wedding, be sure to have your photographer get a picture with everyone in attendance! It’ll be a great memory of your big day and each person who spent it with you.

9. Leave the stress behind —one of the main benefits of an intimate wedding is reducing the stress. But that takes a conscious choice! So as decisions present themselves throughout the planning process… make your mantra ‘less stress, less stress’.

10. Be present with your partner - remember your wedding day is a day to celebrate this new chapter the two of you are going on! Spend it WITH one another! Yes, you want to connect with friends and family, but do it together. With an intimate wedding it’s not like you have 200 people to greet. There shouldn’t be anything keeping you from your new partner’s side for such an amazing day!