Amy Shack Egan

Original Air Date: April 21, 2024

Amy Shack Egan is known as the anti-wedding planner, with her company Modern Rebel, specializing in a more inclusive approach to  wedding planning.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Sunstein Sessions on iHeartRadio,conversations about issues that matter. Here's your
host, three time Grasie Award winner, Shelley Sunstein. I want to introduce
you to Amy shack Egan, whodescribes herself as an anti wedding event planner.
And I have to tell you thebackstory of how I discovered Amy shack

(00:23):
Egan because I'm a big fan ofthe Sunday New York Times and I'll even
a bigger fan of their Sunday Stylesection, and so yeah, they're in
the March twenty fourth Sunday edition,a big half page story personality over tradition

(00:45):
with an anti wedding and I wasall in, Okay, explain what it
is you do, Amy, andthank you for doing this this morning.
Of course, thank you so muchfor reading and reaching out. So I
am a wedding planner, but Iwould say reluctantly one. I have been

(01:07):
planning what I call love parties inthe wedding industry for the last eight and
a half years with my team overat Modern Rebel, and we plan weddings
that break the rules. So somepeople break every single rule. And I've
planned space disco cowboy love parties andghost towns in Austin, Texas, and

(01:30):
a lot of people just want tobreak a few rules because the wedding industry
can feel kind of boxy for alot of people. So it's been fun.
It's all about infusing personality into weddingsand making sure that people make choices
that reflect who they are. Sono two love parties look the same,
which means my work is never boring. But yeah, it's been a wild

(01:53):
ride. So a love party meansthat it doesn't have to be a wedding
at all. It can just bean anything party, which kind of expands
your business right off the bat.Did it start out that way? I
mean, how did you come upwith this vision? So yes, I

(02:14):
was helping a friend wedding plan eightand a half years ago and she looked
at me and she said, Amy, you could be a wedding planner.
And I looked at her and Iwas like ew, I was like,
I hate weddes. I was agender studies major, I was fresh off
of breakup. I was the lastperson that was going to become a wedding
planner. But I was really goodat organizing parties from my friends and I

(02:36):
was juggling three jobs in New YorkCity at the time, and you know,
I thought, well, this industryis kind of outdated, and in
so many ways, women and peoplehave evolved, and the wedding industry has
kind of stood still. Maybe Icould bring something different to it. So,
you know, of course it wasn'texactly what it is today, but

(02:57):
so many of the values and principleswere there. I called it modern rebel.
I called it a love party fromthe get go, which for a
lot of people was like, whatis that? And I was like,
it's a party about love. Andthe amazing thing that would happen is that
immediately people were like, oh yeah, and it made them rethink what a
wedding could be. So a lotof people that get married with us are
actually legally getting married. A lotof people are already legally married and having

(03:22):
just a party. And then asmall sort of minority of people are not
getting legally married at all, butthey're still celebrating with us. Have you
thought of expanding to divorce? Someonealso brought up like life parties, you
know, funerals. I haven't.I haven't got that'll be the next thing

(03:44):
that absolutely be that'll be my generationthat does it. I mean, I'm
I'm open minded, you know,in terms of what it looks like.
But I'm pretty stoked celebrating with partnershipsand relationships right now. Okay, So
what percentage our weddings. Is thatthe majority of your business or is it
just the basic love party? Yes, because we call a wedding a love

(04:09):
party. To us all, it'sall a love party. I don't care
if you're getting legally married or not, because it's just about infusing this idea
that we don't have to follow ascript. We don't have to follow an
idea of what this event has tolook like. It doesn't have to look
like your sisters, it doesn't haveto look like your parents, It doesn't
have to look like every wedding magazinein the world telling you this is what

(04:30):
the perfect wedding looks like. Sothe love party energy is for legal weddings
and non legal ones. We don'tdiscriminate. What do you charge, it's
a full service experience. It's usuallytwelve to eighteen months. We charge around

(04:51):
fifteen thousand dollars. Planning, design, coordinating. It's a lot of work.
How does that rank with a truedditionalwedding planner because we didn't I got
married eight years ago and we didn'tuse a wedding planner. We did everything
ourselves, which is a mess.It was an experience, but we just

(05:15):
you know, we didn't hire someoneto oversee the whole thing. Yeah,
it's it's on par with New YorkCity pricing for a wedding planner. Usually
I see wedding planners somewhere ranging onyou know, experience, and if they're
also designing between twelve to twenty plusthousand dollars, And this is planning design

(05:36):
and on site coordination. It's thewhole thing to get people sort of from
beginning to end. And I thinkthe sweet spot of the service for us
is, look, I feel likeI can plan a love party with my
eyes closed at this point. Butlike it's to me, it's all about
making sure that the couple has anincredible experience too, and so we require

(05:58):
like both individuals in the partnership towork with us. It doesn't mean it's
fifty to fifty, because what's fiftyto fifty in a relationship, but we
require that like they're all on themeetings with us, Like we work with
them together because you're usually learning likehow to budget, how to communicate on
like a massive project together and it'sa great opportunity. So if you can

(06:18):
have fun and not get to thelove party day and feel like, oh,
I just want it to be overinstead to feel like, you know,
like we really did this as ateam, and we have this expert
guide and we planned our love partyand it's totally us and our love is
even stronger than when it started.Like that's I feel like that's the real
work that I It's why I'm here, still here. I just recently read

(06:43):
that people are hiring social media organizersfor their weddings and for their engagement.
So does the anti wedding or thelove party encompass that or do they have
to hire are a social media personon top of it. I mean everything
is changing. Yeah, it's wedon't offer that service, and I still

(07:09):
think that's you know a lot ofpeople are probably booking that service. I
don't see a ton of our clientsbooking it, so you know, who
knows. It's not usually a lineitem we have been putting in budgets for
our clients, but for sure,there's a lot of social media moments kind
of captured on the love party dayand a lot of like, I think

(07:31):
a lot of people tend to getsome inspiration from oh they did that,
Oh I can do that, youknow, like, oh, I don't
have to do it this way thatI thought I had to do it.
I think a lot of people loveseeing that. So if it's being put
out there more on social media,like great, people have a permission.
They feel like they have permission tobreak the rules. But no, we
don't include that in our It's justthe planning, design and coordination. I'm

(07:53):
speaking with Amy shak Egan. Shedescribes herself as a anti wedding event planner.
She actually organizes love parties and hercompany is called Modern Rebel. Okay,
so, over the years of yourbusiness, you yourself got married,
right, I did, yes,twenty eighteen. What if? What did
you? What was what was yourwedding? Like your love party? Yes?

(08:18):
So we met at sunset, andso we had this saying that we
used to say to each other,no missed sunsets, and it became the
origin for what we call it ModernRebel, the marriage mantra. So we
have all of our couples come upwith a marriage mantra, a phrase,
a lyric, a quote that sortof just embodies your relationship and where you're

(08:41):
at and your approach. And sofor us it was like no miss sunsets,
like good thing. We went outand watched the sunset that day,
so we tried to infuse that,in sort of easter egget into the design.
So we had sunset colors, Wedid a giant balloon installation above us.
We got married on a rug inthe round. We really wanted it
to feel like a community event,not just like a performance, and so

(09:03):
we had our our friends do whatwe call community vows, and some of
them were really serious and sentimental,and some of them were really funny.
Wait a minute, what does thatmean? What does that mean? So
instead of like we gave vows toeach other, but we also were asking
our community to sort of uphold vowswith us, like, hey, like
let's just say, like humor isan important value of ours. We want

(09:26):
to like make sure that we uplifthumor in our relationship. And so they
would give a stand up and givea vow on like Amy and John,
do you you know uplift you know, humor in your relationship, but they
did it in a super funny andsilly way, and so we probably involved
like thirty people alone just in thecommunity vows. And then we didn't have
cake. We did creps. Wedid a crep station because I lived in

(09:48):
France as a kid, so Ihave like a random French food connection.
John who's my partner, got mesuper into egg sandwiches, and so we
had like egg Sammy passed during thecocktail hour. We didn't do a sit
down dinner. We did a cocktailstyle event. We had on site poetry

(10:09):
at the event. My friend runsan amazing company, Ours Poetica, and
they did on site haikus with theirtypewriters. Instead of favors. We had
to do a favor table because volunteeringhas been really important in our relationship,
and so it was around the holidaysthat we got married, and so we
had our guests draw and write beautifulcards for kids that were spending the holidays

(10:31):
in the hospital, and we mailedthem off after the event. So,
you know, it's sort of likelooking at all these things that we see
in weddings, favors, cake cutting, and it's not about saying doing those
things is wrong. It's totally coolif you want to do that, great,
but it's just about investigating, likewhat do you really want to do,
what feels like you and starting withthat, And that's what we did

(10:54):
for our own love party. Whatdo you think was the most unusual love
parties through I think I've done afew that are pretty unusual, a few
that come to mind. I thinkI referenced it, but I did a
space disco cowboy love party and theycalled it that in a ghost town in

(11:16):
Austin, Texas. So we rentedthe ghost town. They literally film like
movies and TV shows on this ghosttown and we had different activations, like
we had one of the rooms waslike a saloon, you know. One
of the rooms was like a karaokeroom. We everybody the wedding party was
dressed in either astronaut gear or sortof psychedelic like spacey dresses. We had

(11:43):
a rocket launch rocket launch at theceremony. We had like a pump rocket,
which was really fun. That waspretty out there, no pun intended.
And then I recently did one outin Los Angeles and they don't love
to dance, and it was justgoing to feel like if we have a
dance party that's not going to feellike us at all. We love to

(12:05):
play video games, and so weinstead of having a first dance, we
called it a first match and theyplayed a video game against each other,
and then they actually brought their parentsin and did a first match against their
you know, instead of a parentdance, a father daughter mother son or
whatever gender dance you're doing. Theyjust were like, we want to we

(12:26):
want to rewrite the rules on that. So we did it, and then
we brought Boba t in and thatcouple's marriage mantra was, I don't want
to lean in, I want tolie down. And so it's about easter
egging. Oh. Who they areat their core are people that want to
relax and take it easy. Howcan we infuse that into an event?
Because if you showed up and itwas this stuffy, black tie, dancy

(12:48):
wedding vibe, that's not going tofeel like their kind of love party,
how would people get in touch withyou? Oh my goodness. They can
probably find me on seven different channels, but the primary ways to find us
are on our website, Modern Rebel, poco dot com, and on Instagram

(13:13):
at modern Rebel, and they canalso find me at Amy Shack again if
they want to see a peek intomy entrepreneurial wild life. How many employees
do you have? Five? Anddo you see yourself expanding anytime soon?
I mean, that was a hugearticle in the New York Times. I'm
sure you picked up a lot ofbusiness from that, didn't you. Yes,

(13:37):
yeah, definitely, I think youknow. I'm interested in expanding for
me what it looks like to putthe fun back in relationships. And I
feel like we've been doing that forour love parties. But I never feel
boxed into what a wedding planner hasto be because I don't really think of
that as my world. So Idon't know if that means product or technology,

(14:00):
but I'm interested in exploring what thatlooks like and how we as a
company can keep putting the fun backin relationships. So I would say my
eyes are wide open. I'm sortof in that exploratory phase that it's exciting,
you know, it was such acool article. I've been at this
now eight and a half years,which feels like a long time and no
time at all. So we'll justsee. But it sounds like the time

(14:20):
is right, I mean, especiallywith younger people. Although I'm sure you
get people of all ages, butisn't it mostly people? Yes, we
get people of all ages, butfor sure a lot of young people are
just so excited to rewrite their rules. I think it's interesting, though,
because a lot of older people,if it's like a second marriage, a
lot of times, it's exciting forthem to do it very different than they

(14:41):
did it the first time. Sowe get a mix a lot of really
cool people. I always say that, how lucky am I that I just
get to meet the coolest, mostinteresting people all the time. I feel
that's probably true in your work too. Yes, this is true. We
have something in common. Thank youso much, Amy shock Egan of Modern
Rebel. You've been listening to Sunsteensessions on iHeartRadio, a production of New

(15:05):
York's classic rock Q one O fourpoint three.