Torpedo Factory Wedding

Derrick and Paolo’s Torpedo Factory wedding featured beautiful personal moments that captured these two as individuals and together as a couple. One of Derrick’s sisters, Jenny, created a large Life Map (and smaller handouts for guests) of Derrick and Paolo’s journey to each other. Derrick and Paolo built small Lego bouquets that were incorporated with the florists’ real floral arrangements for the dinner centerpieces. (They enjoy building Legos together). Their good friend from San Francisco, Justin, was their officiant (in drag!) and opened the dance floor with Paolo and Derrick with a dance to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”.

Derrick and Paolo enjoy puzzling together and asked guests to sign pieces of a big puzzle that they then can build together and read the sweet messages people left. Paolo is Filipino and very much wanted his culture to be represented at the wedding – all the food was Filipino food and the ceremony featured two Filipino elements. First, the candle lighting symbolizes wisdom and guiding light to support the couple in their marriage. Second, the Arras is the exchange of coins to represent provision, welfare, and prosperity in married life.

Thank you to Derrick and Paolo for this review of their Torpedo Factory Wedding!

“We had a blast working with Maya and the Honey & Lavender team and would recommend them for planning and executing a great wedding celebration! Maya and her team helped us two grooms put together a moody tropical + lively disco inspired celebration for our 120 guests at the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria, VA. They did all this while coordinating with us from afar as we live in Brooklyn, NY and our venue and their team are located in the greater Washington, DC metro area.

From the start, my partner Derrick and I knew we wanted to find a wedding planner that could help us brainstorm and refine our ideas early in our planning process, help us navigate the vendor landscape around DC, and help us create a unique multicultural gay wedding experience. We started working with Maya and the H&L team well over a year before our wedding and hired her for partial planning services. Maya was collaborative and open to all the varied ideas we were bringing to the table. Immediately, she and the team put together a helpful vision doc that synthesized all of our ideas and served as the foundation for our wedding planning.

When Derrick and I brought additional ideas that we sourced from Pinterest or even brought brainstorming images we made from ChatGPT, Maya further iterated on the doc and helped give us a sense of what was feasible, outlandish, budget-dependent, etc. She truly helped us with executing our vision on everything from having a wedding ceremony-in-the-round all the way to folding in elements of Filipino culture into so many part of our wedding.

Fast forward to the week-of and day-of the event, Maya and her team excelled at handling everything to do with our vendors and with logistics. Derrick and I were able to focus on spending time with our family, friends, and just us, while their team took the reins on making sure everything was coming together smoothly. As Derrick and I were finalizing the last few things during the week running up to the wedding, Maya made sure to fold us into any important updates or need-to-knows from the vendors. On the day of the wedding itself, if there was anything that went awry or not according to plan on the backend, then Derrick and I didn’t know whatsoever because from our perspective the entire wedding programming ran on time and without a hitch.

I’d like to especially call out Maya and her team’s rapid problem-solving ability! When Derrick and I learned the unfortunate news that some of our wedding place cards weren’t going to arrive on time for the day of the event, Maya was quick to surface an alternate solution using their own name tags that would make sure our guests knew where to sit and wouldn’t clash with our existing wedding decor. Shoutout to Jules especially who helped hand-write all the alternate place cards in time for the reception!

Lastly, Maya and the H&L team were adept and diligent in working with all of our vendors and making sure they all knew what to expect for the event. From the moment we signed a vendor, Maya would take the lead on handling communications and coordination and making sure that each vendor understood our vision for the wedding and also understood the quirks of executing an event at the Torpedo Factory. We always felt like each new vendor that we brought to the team was in good hands with Maya!

An unintended plus that we didn’t anticipate when we hired Maya was that once we landed on the Torpedo Factory, we learned how Maya and her team was so well connected in the city of Alexandria. For example, when we were having some trouble confirming reserved parking spaces in front of the venue, Maya knew exactly who to contact in the city to make sure that the paperwork moved forward.

Bottom line: we highly recommend Maya and her team at Honey & Lavender events for bringing our vision for our wedding to life and executing it seamlessly on the day of the event!!”