If you are reading this during Christmas week and you have just got engaged, congratulations darling. This is such a special, giddy, heart-full moment, messages flying back and forth, plans being spoken about out loud for the first time, that goosebump feeling of “we’re actually doing this”. I got engaged on Christmas Eve myself, so I know the magic of it well, and it’s exactly why I wanted to share something special with you today!

Today marks the start of our partnership with Gather, a beautifully designed digital RSVP and guest management service, created by a team I know well and trust deeply.

Co-founded by Dom Beaven and his daughter Ellie, Gather is very much a family business. Dom brings decades of experience as the founder of Prezola and the Getting Married website, having supported hundreds of thousands of couples and millions of guests over the years. Ellie brings a Gen Z perspective, shaped by growing up organising life through phones, links and shared spaces, with an instinctive understanding of how people want things to work now, without adding friction or demanding more time.

Although Gather describes itself as a digital RSVP service, that only really scratches the surface.

This personalisation is key; guests only ever see the information that is relevant to them. Evening guests see evening-only details, day guests see the full plan. There is no oversharing, no awkwardness and no confusion, just clear, appropriate information.

For couples, this brings a sense of order and calm to a part of planning that can otherwise feel scattered across conversations, spreadsheets and inboxes.

And what I love so very much, is how Gather has been built to sit alongside, rather than replace, beautifully printed wedding stationery. If you love the tactility and design of beautifully crafted paper products, and if supporting small independent design businesses is important to you, then Gather will work alongside and support all this. Gather provide a ‘Gather Card’, which includes a QR code linking to the Guest Hub, that and can be slipped inside your wedding invitations. This allows stationery to remain a meaningful and keepsake-worthy aspect of your wedding, while the practical details can live digitally and can be updated easily if plans evolve.

Full transcript below if you prefer to read

Gather is a digital RSVP service but it doesn’t force you to choose between beauty and practicality, or tradition and modern convenience. You can have both without compromise.

What Gather ultimately does is remove friction – it takes a part of the wedding planning process that s often becomes noisy, repetitive and time-consuming and makes it simpler for everyone involved. Guests know exactly where to go and what to do, couples don’t have to chase, explain or repeat themselves, planners can collaborate easily – everything lives in one place, and everyone sees only what they need to see. Perfection!

And more importantly, Gather has been designed with every kind of wedding in mind – it’s as useful and efficient for teeny, tiny, intimate weddings as it is for large, multi-day, international celebrations with guests travelling from all over the world. Whatever the size of your wedding. Gather simply adapts without adding any complexity.

Having spent time exploring Gather properly myself, it’s clear how genuinely useful it is in practice. It’s just genius and I highly encourage you to find out more. There’s a one-off activation fee and that’s it! No monthly subscriptions to pay. You pay once to start using it and from then on, your wedding planning will be easier, far more organised and stress free.

Do watch the video above – a transcription for which is below. And if you’re standing at the very start of planning your wedding, I wish you all the love and congratulations on your engagement! Make activating Gather the first thing you do before you do anything else!

Gather Founders & father daughter team, Dom & Ellie

Gather is a brand new digital wedding and events RSVP service. It ias a family business, founded by father and daugther, Dom and Ellie. Do is also the original founder of the hugely popular wedding gift list company, Prezola and the wedding website Getting Married.

DOM: My name is Don Bevan and I’m the founder of Prezola, the wedding gift list company and Getting Married, the wedding website platform, so I’ve been hanging around the wedding industry for a very long time – and now I’m working with the next generation of our family to create the next generation of wedding technology, called Gather.

ELLIE: I’m Ellie and I’ve been beside you in the wedding industry for ten years and kind of growing up – watching from the sidelines, a start-up that very much started at the kitchen table, the same kitchen table I was eating at! So yes I’ve been in the sidelines from the very beginning of the Prezola days, in the warehouse, unpacking boxes, etc – I’ve watched it scale up into this really exciting business. And then I kind of went away and gained my own experience and now I’ve come back into the fold to join Gather properly as co-founder and Head of Brand.

DOM: So this is genuinely the first new piece of technology in the wedding industry for over a decade. We really understand the market. Back when we started, Instagram and Facebook weren’t really a thing and you were doing print advertising, so we’ve seen it all come and go and it’s a really exciting time in terms of change in the market and this is a really cool piece of technology, we think.

We’ve generally dealt with hundreds of thousands of weddings and millions of weddings, guests. So we kind of know where the touch points are, where the problems are and we’ve just taken all of that and applied it to the kind of way people use technology these days, which is basically their phone.

ELLIE: Gather essentially integrates into the busy lives of modern people. Growing up myself as someone who’s digitally native, as we say, ‘Gen Z’ generally, we knew that that was a behaviour that we wanted to tap into. So with Gather, you can have everything centralised on your phone. So as a host, it’s where you put all of your wedding details, it’s where you put your events, it’s where you put your venue, your date, everything. You can recommend accommodation to your guests, you can build your menu and ask for choices and directory requirements, and lots of other clever things like our integrated cash gift fund. So you can request cash contributions and all within one central hub.

DOM: The headline for us was that we didn’t want to need any change in behaviour because changing consumer behaviour is very difficult and so we wanted to tap into what people were doing already and Ellie’s been instrumental in that really from a UX perspective.

ELLIE: Yeah, I think having kind of seen the way that my peers navigate daily life and as they move towards that milestone of getting married, they didn’t want to compromise on the lifestyle behaviours that they were used to, either aesthetically or behaviourally. So I think seeing thats and then seeing the tools that were available having been alongside Getting Married for so long and having done a bit of competitive research into the market, it exemplified that there was a gap there for something that meant they didn’t have to compromise. And so having something that was on their phone that they didn’t need to download, they didn’t need to ask guests to download, all of that was really important. And it also meant that they could fire off things into their existing ecosystem.

So all your conversations happen on your phone, be that on Messenger, on Instagram, for work, on Slack, or on Gmail, and with Gather, it means that you can just copy a link from your Gather account and just send it off on your share sheet into your existing ecosystem. It doesn’t mean that you have to be flicking through all of your different contacts across your universe, you can just have it all centralised in one place.

DOM: The biggest question I was saying at ‘Getting Married’, was, how do I integrate this with WhatsApp? How do I send things to my existing WhatsApp groups? And that was kind of where this started, I guess.

Everything we built with Gather had to integrate into what was on your phone already. We’ve built our own in-app guest messaging, but even that goes out via WhatsApp, text and email, etc.

It’s very straightforward, so you sign up with Google or Apple and once you’re in, you start putting together your events. We start very early in the planning process, so we do a digital save the dates. So you can upload a photo, create a message for guests and send a save the date via any platform you like, like WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. And you can also use that with another product we built called ‘Contact Collector’. And that lets you add just a simple name to your guest list – guests can then add their own postal address, their email address, their mobile number, et cetera. So your guest list effectively builds itself throughout the journey. Do you want to go to the next couple?

ELLIE: Yes, Contact Collector I think is a really helpful tool because we like to think that ‘many hands make light work’.

So once you’ve done your save the date and you’ve built your guest list, you can start to build your event so you can add the details of the venue, the times, etc. and anything people need to know. You can also add little guest details and headline information. So for example, if there’s a certain dress code that you want people to know from the outset. And then you can also add accommodation suggestions, so be that the ones that you want to recommend yourself, if you know the area where you’re getting married and you want to have a few kind of references there for people, you can just drop in the name of the hotel that you’re recommending and we’ll generate some images for you to accompany it and we’ll make sure that guests have all the details. Or we have our own accommodation finder, so based on the location of your wedding and the availability of the hotels nearby, we’ll generate a list for you, so guests can have everything in one place and it makes it super easy and seamless for them.

And then as well as that, we collect menu choices so you can build different menus for every event you have. So whether you’re having a rehearsal dinner, with a sit down dinner and kind of an a la carte menu and you need people to make their choices, or for the reception, maybe you’re having a big buffet where you just want to let people know what to expect and collect dietary requirements. You can do all of that in app.

And then we’ve got our new integrated gift fund, which is really exciting product we think. So you can already integrate an online gift list, like Prezola, or you can use the integrated gift fund, which is really secure and discreet because we find it can be a bit of an awkward conversation asking people for cash contributions. Our goal was really to make that as frictionless as possible, both for the hosts and the guests. So lots of nifty tools, I think!

DOM: I think the way we’ve made things very different is we’ve created something called a ‘guest hub’, and each guest has their own guest hub. if you have a wedding website like Getting Married – that’s great, but everything is public to everybody and it’s not a particularly personal experience – just like turning up at any website, everything is public. Gather isn’t a wedding website, Gather is just a series of personalised guest hubs.

So if you come along, put your name in, Annabel, it will say, ‘Hello Annabel!’, show you the events that you’re invited to and ask you to RSVP. It’ll ask you if your menu choices, if you’ve got a plus one and share all the details. And then it will show you into your personalised guest hub and that keeps everything that you need to know like about details, locations, maps, those kinds of things. But also the gift registry is in there so you can go off and buy a gift. The hotel recommendations are in there too.

If the host needs to message you or you need to message them, again, you can do all of that from your personal guest hub. Once you’ve accessed it once, we send you a magic link so you can just get straight back into it from your phone.

It was in build for over a year and having it go to market and see all of those points validated and kind of those tension points in particular that we’ve added so much ease to. I think the big thing has been people not having to have multiple wedding websites. This is something that we’ve heard or having to kind of compromise on RSVPs. So for example, having to design one in Canva because they want something that feels personalised to them and then having to download that and send that individually and maybe the file corrupts or it’s too big and everything feels suddenly really complicated and what should be really exciting becomes something that feels quite problematic and heavy for hosts. So a lot of those things – so like with the launch of our ‘Save the date, all of that is easy and streamlined and it means that everyone gets a personalised journey, so you never have to worry about people seeing things you don’t want them to.

DOM: I think that’s one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve had – is that it makes it very easy. If you’ve got different groups of people going to different events, the most common one we see is, you’ve got a celebration and a reception and then an evening party with more people joining. Gather makes it really easy for you just to separate those people out and the evening guests will only ever see the evening details and the daytime guests will see everything that they need to see. So there’s no risk of confusion, there’s no risk of somebody thinking they’re invited to the day when they’re not. That’s probably the single biggest piece of feedback – the relief that it really works. But yeah, it’s just very easy to set up and I have to say it is, definitely.

ELLIE: And I mean, as head of brand, I selfishly have heard a lot of feedback in terms of kind of the visual side and the aesthetic side, that it actually feels more modern. So not only is the product really intuitive, also functionally it aligns with what people are wanting aesthetically. So even simple things like we offer a curated selection of colour pairs that we’ve kind of mixed together. And we offer a selection of fonts that you can apply to your text hub so that it’s completely personalised. Or if you have your own hex code, say maybe you’re working with a designer or a lovely printed stationery and you want to incorporate some of the visuals from that, you absolutely can. So it seems to be hitting that perfect point between customisation, but also not the overwhelm that you tend to get with wedding websites where you have hundreds of options of eucalyptus or, you know, petals to add. It just seems to be, yeah, hitting that mark where people want.

ELLIE: I think it’s a really common misconception that we see actually that you have to have one or the other. So it seems to be people believe you can’t have the convenience and functionality of a digital tool alongside the beauty and the utility of printed stationary. Whereas with Gather, you make it really easy for you to do both. So we offer things called a Gather card, which has your own personalised QR code on it that you can just slip into printed stationery. And that means that you have the printed stationery itself that can become kind of a lovely keepsake for you and for your family and it includes the bare minimum. And then from the QR code, people are directed to that personalised guest hub. So that’s where all of the specific details are kept. So you don’t have to worry about things being printed and then maybe there’s a change in time or a change in venue or a change in details. All of that lives separately in your digital hub and printed stationery can sit as a lovely complimentary piece that people can keep forever.

DOM: The other thing you can do is, it reduces the volume of printed stationery that you need because you’re not printing some of the finer details and including that in the envelope but also if you have got different people coming to different events actually Gather figures that out, you just need to guess name so you don’t necessarily need to say this is an evening only invitation you just sort of invite people to your wedding with a beautiful piece of stationery and when they arrive and put their name in, we figure out what they’re invited to show them, etc. And of course it means that you’re not having to buy RSVP return cards or ask people to buy stamps and those kinds of things. So it works really well with printed stationery. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a really beneficial kind of complimentary piece, we think. yeah, our vision was that you should never have to compromise on the traditions that you want to keep just because you’re going for a digital alternative.

this kind of marries the two together. I mean it works perfectly well without print-a-stationary as well but it’s, whatever suits you basically, but yeah, we are fans of printed stationery.

DOM: Yes, we’re bound to say that, but we’ve seen both recently actually, so we had a wedding last weekend. They signed up a week before – only 18 people for a very intimate wedding in London, and they were using Gather just to collect many choices from their guests. So a week before their wedding, rather than having to get hold of everybody to find out about the chicken or the beef or whatever the ⁓ I’m sure it’s a nicer menu than that, they just used to Gather to collect menu choices and it worked really well and they were delighted.

ELLIE: So that’s kind of one side of the coin I guess where people are using that as an alternative to having an event planner, when it’s a smaller scale event there’s much more intimate and kind of shorter timeline and then on the other scale it can also be used as an assistant for events themselves because you can add an Planner as a collaborator on your account. So we’ve been working with an event planner and they’ve got a wedding in the Azores with people coming from all over the world who have individual flight details that need to be communicated – they have people arriving on different days going to different parts of a week long event, so it’s huge considerations in terms of scale and it works perfectly for that too because you can send individual guest messages to individual guest groups or to different events. All the people going to different events, you can do all of that really seamlessly just with one click. So it’s a really perfect solution for that as well – those larger scale weddings. And we’ve seen people getting married in a month that set up their account in 10 minutes and off they go. Or we’ve got events going on in 2028. So, you know, either way, it’s a perfect solution.

ELLIE: I watched Prezola from the sidelines for so long and I saw so many shifts, both in kind of how the business ran in terms of the different levels of scale, but also in terms of the wedding industry and the way it changed throughout those eight years that Prezola was within the family. I think it meant that it gave this really foundational understanding of the technology side of things as well as the wedding market and how technology could really bring a lot of ease and convenience to this milestone moment that people put so much pressure on. And the idea that technology, as I said before, it doesn’t have to compromise the tradition and the fun. It can actually add more fun and joy because it means that hosts, if everything goes well, can just focus on the celebration itself.

So I think having managed, millions of wedding guests at this point and having years of understanding the process, it just meant that we could apply all of those learnings here and had that really strong foundation. Because I think I’m strong believer that you have to understand something to be able to change it and develop and innovate. I think that’s exactly what Gather is really, it’s building on that strong foundation of years of learnings, millions of guests and applying for a new generation.

ELLIE: I’ve often felt there’s quite a misrepresentation of the new generation (Gen Z) and quite a divide. And I think there’s power in having intergenerational teams that work together to kind of pair those learnings instead of have them be combative and tense against one another. Instead, we found the best approach was to cherry pick the best of each era and apply those learnings for new talent. I don’t think that Gen Z and new generations more broadly want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I think there are a lot of things that we want to retain but it’s more not wanting to have to compromise on ease and functionality and lifestyle and so Gather is all tailored for that.

DOM: I think probably our experience, so we’ve had literally millions of wedding guests over the years and we just understand what the pinch points are. We understand the things that irritate guests and we kind of understand that an irritated guest is going to be a problem for you because they’re not quite sure what they’re doing, etc. And so we really know how to make the guest experience warm, thorough and cover everything that they need to know. And we’ve applied all of that learning to Gather and really stuck it in their mobile phone. And that’s the core thing from my perspective, I guess.

ELLIE: I think ease is kind of one of the key things that people struggle with when they are being told something is a new piece of technology. It puts up an immediate barrier in your mind that it’s something new to learn, it’s something new to understand. And also, especially when you’re dealing with a wedding and you have multi-generational guests, I think there’s a concern that that’s going to be a problem and that maybe your grandparents are going to struggle to navigate it, but also you’ve got your young niece who’s going to find it really intuitive and that you’re going to have different experiences. I think that Gather works really hard to make that as intuitive and easy for everyone. And I think ease is a word that’s really been at the heart of the brand from the beginning. The idea that we want Gather to become a short hand for ‘ease and convenience‘, so that if you’re seeing a Gather card in a wedding invitation, it gives you a sigh of relief as a guest that you know that you’re going to have an amazing experience because everything’s going to be really seamlessly wrapped into one.

And I think that kind of, speaks to our vision for the future, I guess, of becoming that default solution – that we represent a really seamless and beautiful experience, both for guests, also for hosts, because it means that you get to focus on the joy of the day instead.

We always say the heart of it is bringing people together shouldn’t feel like hard work and that Gather does the hard work for you in making it so that you can focus just on having the very best time possible.

Just come to hellogather.com and you’ll find us or follow us on socials at @gatherguests.

Register here – it’s quick and easy and you’ll gain access to your own personal dashboard, where you can save all your favourite Love My Dress content, including this article, alongside all your favourite real weddings, shop items, ceremony readings, inspirational editorials and directory listings.