Wedding | Bailey & Gumer

Tell us a little about yourselves!

Gumer grew up in El Salvador and Bailey is from the US. After living in a few different countries and cities in between, we each separately moved to the Chicago area in 2018. Five years later and with a little help from Hinge, we first met over coffee on a snowy Sunday morning in January. Bailey accidentally ordered the only powdered sugar donut on the menu, but managed to avoid wearing enough of it that we went out for a second date that Friday.

We knew by late that summer that we wanted to build our lives together. Now, we live a 10-minute walk away from that coffee shop where we first met. We love both the home we’ve made in Chicago and being out in the world—and cultural curiosity has always been at the core of our relationship.

Why did you decide to get married where you did?

When we were beginning to imagine what our wedding may look like, we spent time sharing what expectations we were each coming in with. We talked about what events and traditions we were each used to in a wedding, from attending American and Latin American weddings in the past. We also named which wedding elements we liked and wanted to carry forward into ours (and which ones we were just fine with leaving behind).

Inspired by Priya Parker’s The New Rules of Gathering and Bailey’s background in marketing, we eventually wrote a creative brief as a vision to guide us in planning a wedding that felt most true to us. We landed on the deeper purpose of our wedding as a unique opportunity for our families (who live in the US and El Salvador) to meet each other and for us to share a city close to our hearts (Chicago) with those we love.

Since sharing Chicago with our guests—many of whom were first-time visitors—was a core part of our purpose, it helped spark other ideas too. Having travelled for friends’ weddings ourselves, we knew that guests’ free time to explore Chicago during our wedding weekend would be pretty limited. So when most of our guests checked in at the same hotel, we had cards waiting for them at the front desk with recommendations for a few of our favorite coffee shops, lunch spots, and nearby sweet treats. All of our recommendations were less than a 10-minute walk away from the hotel, to make it easy for guests to experience some of the best of the city in their short time there.

How many guests did you have?

In our creative brief, we had named the vibe for our wedding as both generous and intimate and the guest list as our closest family members (plus a few friends who had felt like family through the years). That landed us at 44 guests: still “small” enough so that everyone could share dinner around the same long table, which was an idea that had resonated with us from the start.

The smaller size allowed us to design an evening that aimed to make each of our guests feel individually seen, in thanking them for their time and travel to celebrate with us. As place cards for dinner, we handwrote notes to each of our guests naming a characteristic of theirs or an experience we’d had together that we really cherished. We also had two engaged couples in attendance. So, during dessert, we arranged to surprise each couple with a miniature cake and a Polaroid photograph of their own engagement (a surprise we had been the happy recipients of ourselves at a friend’s wedding).

Tell us about your outfits.

We each loved what we wore, but our outfits were actually not one of our highest priorities for our wedding. Bailey chose to wear a secondhand Sarah Seven dress that she and her sister found on Poshmark. Saving on shoes and wearing earrings she already owned also allowed us to feel better about going bigger on other aspects of the weekend.

What was the most important aspect for you, in terms of planning your wedding?

One of the areas we knew from the beginning that we wanted to prioritize was food and Lula Cafe was wonderful to work with. The New American restaurant is both James Beard and Michelin Bib Gourmand award winning. Yet their food was also accessible enough for our guests with a variety of tastes to enjoy. We bought a copy of their cookbook as our guestbook and our guests signed their favorite recipes, which we’ll cook in the years to come. Plus, we still dream about their Earl Grey chocolate ganache tartlets from dessert.

It was most important to us to be both true to ourselves and intentional in our choices. We really wanted to feel each of our cultures and our families represented in the day.

As an intercultural couple ourselves, we had the happy accident of setting the RSVP date for our wedding invitations to June 12th. In the United States, June 12th is also known as Loving Day. It recognizes the anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage nationally less than 60 years ago.

We blended both our cultures by handpicking all of our wedding day songs on a series of Spotify playlists to play throughout the night. Salvadoran folk music welcomed our guests before the ceremony and we chose mostly Latino pop for cocktail hour. We slowed things down over dinner with artists like Natalia Lafourcade and Maggie Rogers and—after dinner—brought the energy back up with nostalgic American jazz and rock classics. We were also able to bring in our own beverages, meaning our bar menu was a blend of some of our favorite places we’d imbibed. We brought beer from our favorite Chicago and Polish breweries (Bailey is part Polish) and rum from El Salvador along with Mexican mezcal and Spanish wine (which were places we had each lived).

We also remembered Bailey’s late grandmothers through family heirlooms: using her grandmother’s engagement ring box during our ceremony and her grandmother’s milk glass cake stand for our wedding cake. Gumer’s family helped us bring in sweets from El Salvador, so that we could gift every guest with an artisan chocolate bar at their dinner place setting and serve Salvadoran pastries from a friend’s bakery during dessert. After dinner, we offered a Latin American coffee cocktail called a carajillo—which was (and continues to be) a hit with Bailey’s side of the family.

Were there any elements that were important for you to incorporate?

With most of our guests speaking only English, some speaking only Spanish, and others comfortable in both languages, we knew we wanted to support as fully bilingual an experience as we could. This started with setting the tone for a bilingual event in our wedding invitations. The Chicago studio that we worked with for those (Steracle Press) had the great idea for a design that displayed both languages side-by-side, which felt more equitable to us than the typical format of one language on top of the other.

Excitement was high on both sides of our families before our wedding, but we also knew we wanted to help enable connection—even across languages—before the wedding itself. Instead of putting everyone together during a welcome mixer and hoping they’d hit it off, we wanted to offer some conversational handholds to make connecting with someone new a little less intimidating. So we sat down and mapped out for ourselves which of our guests had interests or experiences in common with each other that they may not have otherwise realized. What we found was a collection of eldest daughters, a group that had lived abroad, some who had started their own businesses, and a couple guests who had each worked in nursing.

At our welcome mixer the night before our wedding, we shared these categories one by one and asked guests to raise a glass if they identified with something we shared. The categories of sports rivalries may have been different: Philadelphia Eagles vs. Pittsburgh Steelers fans on Bailey’s side and FC Barcelona vs. Real Madrid fans on Gumer’s side. Yet the experience built on the openness and excitement that was already there by illuminating the constellation of experiences we already had in common.

Our people were also tremendously important in enabling a bilingual day. Bailey’s English-speaking godmother and aunt officiated our ceremony in English while Gumer’s bilingual godfather did the same in Spanish. We’re both bilingual, so we each said our vows in both languages. Yet it felt meaningful for us to start our own vows in our partner’s native language first, so that Bailey started hers to Gumer in Spanish and Gumer started his to Bailey in English. For speeches into cocktail hour and after dinner, a couple bilingual friends of ours were kind enough to help interpret as well. Bailey’s English-speaking dad surprised us all in the most wonderful way during his champagne toast by speaking for part of it in Spanish to Gumer’s family.

Any tips for couples getting married?

Plan a beautiful wedding, but keep your marriage the priority. In wanting to build a strong foundation for our lives together, we started proactive counseling with a therapist even before we got engaged. It’s because of the work we did there that we arrived at a set of common values that are important to us both individually and in our relationship together. Those common values are what we used as the organizing structure to write our own vows —and they’re a touchstone that we return to in making decisions as a couple.

If it works for your family dynamics, spend individual time with each of your immediate family members in the days leading up to your wedding. Your wedding day will have the beautiful tension of so many people you love in one place for a very short period of time. You can help ease the pressure of this by creating space to spend time with your parents or siblings in the days leading up to your wedding and in ways that feel good to you both. Before our Saturday wedding, Bailey went to brunch on Thursday with her mother-in-law, sisters-in-law, and our niece. We had dinner on Thursday night with our parents and Gumer’s godparents. On Friday morning, we went for coffee and breakfast sandwiches with Bailey’s sister and brother-in-law. So by the time we got to our Friday night welcome mixer, we had already spent time in smaller settings with each of our parents and siblings.

Pick a specific time when you’ll transition from planning your wedding to simply enjoying and experiencing it. Especially if you’re doing most or all of the planning yourself, decide on a specific time when you’ll stop planning your wedding and start being the guest of honor at it. For Bailey, that was the morning of our wedding, after our wedding coordinator had picked up our decor boxes. Designating a family member or friend as your wedding day “power of attorney” for decision-making on your behalf can help with this.

Are there any vendors that you would like to tell us a little more about?

Gumer’s family owns and runs two small businesses, so it was important to us to support small businesses here in Chicago wherever we could.

We’re so grateful we were able to work with Bradley Moss as our photographer. Photography truly is one of the few lasting parts of a wedding day and his keen eye and oh-so-apparent talent distilled ours in ways we’ll treasure for years to come. We loved the polished candids he captured of our loved ones and his film photography added such a gorgeous dimension that felt at once both timeless and instantly nostalgic.

We’ve been long time fans of another small business, Social Print Studio, to print custom photo postcards to send to friends and family. So once we received our full wedding gallery from Bradley Moss, we chose pictures of our guests to print as postcards through Social Print Studio and used those as our thank you notes.

Grace from Sustainable Soirées joined us about 3 months before our wedding to lead day-of coordination and what a gift that was. To say that Grace is exceptionally organized is an understatement. On our wedding day, she kept everything flowing seamlessly behind the scenes which allowed us to be fully present for the day.

Grace also helped us donate most of our wedding flowers through the Green Petal Project. We chose a Catholic nursing home in our neighborhood as the recipient, in a nod to Gumer’s family’s Catholic faith and the time Bailey’s own grandmothers spend in assisted living near the end of their lives.

We can’t thank Meg and Caragh at Pulp enough for their beautiful work with both floral and cake. The vibrant, drippy floral arrangement they created for the bar was a complete showstopper and the ceiling greenery was a sleeper favorite of ours to bring warmth to the space. We lost track of how many compliments we heard about how delicious their cake (lemon olive oil with raspberry jam) was. Someone even stopped us at one point to exclaim: “Did you see there are real leaves on the cherries on your wedding cake?!”

There are so many others we could thank—and we’re so grateful for the passion, thoughtfulness, and beauty each and every one of them brought to our day.

Photographer: Bradley Moss @bradley_moss | Flora & Cake: Pulp @_pulp | Day-Of-Coordination: Sustainable Soirées @sustainablesoirees | Ceremony & Reception Location: Charcoal Factory Loft 

@charcoalfactoryloft | Celebrant: Bailey’s Godmother (officiating in English) and Gumer’s Godfather (in Spanish) | Rentals: Tablescapes @tablescapeschgo | Makeup Artist: Sandy Thinnes @sandythinnes_

mua | Hair Stylist: Gabrielle Kuhn @hair_bygabrielle | Catering & Beverages: Lula Cafe @lulacafe | Invitations: Steracle Press @steraclepress | Salvadoran Pastries: Biscuit Factory @biscuitfactory1 | Favours:

Xocolatísimo @xocolatisimo | Dress: Secondhand Sarah Seven via Poshmark @poshmark | Suit:

Suitsupply @suitsupply | Veil: Weddings 826 @weddings826 | Engagement & Wedding Rings: TheClassic

Gem @theclassicgemjewelry | Bag: Susana Díaz @susanadiazsv | Thank You Notes: Social Print Studio

@socialprintstudio