About

Hello everyone,

This is it, our own little nook in the blogosphere — the start of an online journey filled with bouquets, banquets, and everything related to weddings. Can you believe it’s already been more than five years since our first issue of Wedding Essentials? Looking back, we can’t help but thank God for all the serendipitous encounters He prepared for us. Through our experience, we learned, as we stated in our first issue, that every bride-to-be can indeed have the wedding of her dreams in her own unique way. All it takes is a little creativity and plenty of inspiration, and that you will find in every issue of Wedding Essentials and in this blog.

Because we love weddings. We loved weddings as newlyweds years ago, we love it even more now. We get a high discovering new concepts to make a wedding even more unique and get a high implementing it for the magazine we both also love. We decided to take this love affair with weddings further by – tada- blogging about it. Thus, weheartweddings.com was born.

Hooray for weddings! We heart weddings!

Cheers!

25 things you didn’t know about us…’til now:

1. A popular illustrator and TV personality once said that Wedding Essentials magazine is an obvious case where the editor-in-chief and the creative director are in harmony with each other. We thank our advertising industry training for that, and of course, it helps that we really like working with each other.

2.  WE are shy. Very shy actually. At each event WE sponsor, we push each other to do the talking and if one finally does talk, the other has to stay beside the one doing the talking. We were like that when we launched in 2004 at the Manila Hotel, and we were still like that at our event late last year at the Manansala Loft in Rockwell.

3. WE are also very camera-shy. Why do you think we still have the same profile pics after all these issues?

4. But when it comes to food, we’re not shy with each other at all. During our first meeting at Chocolate Kiss in UP Diliman to supposedly to talk formally about the project, Marbee ordered salad and Beef Stroganoff (so not first-meeting food), while Cynthia ordered The Kiss Club (if you’ve seen Cynthia, you’ll wonder where the food went).

5. WE both share a deep love for cheese, Veronica Mars, Japan, anything kawaii, The Eraserheads, and New York.

6. While sightseeing in New York City, WE chased a car down Central Park on foot, thinking the driver was Sarah Jessica Parker. It turned out be a lookalike. But the run was surely fun.

7.  In one trip in Cebu, WE not only passed up joining the rest of the team on a night out but slept without knowing until the following morning hat our hotel room door was open, yikes.

8.  WE’re fated to work together. Consider the connections:

• Arnold Arre, Cynthia’s hubby, is best friends with Sam Alapan, Marbee’s former teammate in Ace Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising. During that time, Sam was reading a graphic novel entitled “Trip to Tagaytay” and told Marbee, “My best friend and his girlfriend are two of a kind, pareho silang genius!”
• Pia Recto-Cruz, Marbee and Cynthia’s common friend, recommended Cynthia to Marbee without actually mentioning Cynthia’s name that time, saying “I think I know just the right person for you.”
• At the same time, Marbee’s sister Rochelle Shing came home from work one day saying, “You might want to try calling my officemate Alvin’s sister-in-law.” The officemate said his sister-in-law’s dream project was to do a wedding magazine. Alvin the officemate turned out to be Alvin Arre, Arnold Arre’s brother and yes, Cynthia’s brother-in-law.

9. More than those connections years ago, WE know we’re fated to be together because we can read each other’s minds, respect each other’s space, and are interested with what goes on in each other’s lives – up to now.

10. WE both feel that marrying our husbands is the best thing we’ve done so far (apart from churning out issue after issue of WE).

11. Both of us got married in the same year, 2003 (Marbee in January, Cynthia in December), and had our respective receptions at the Edsa Shangri-la Hotel. If we had known each other then, WE surely would’ve been at each other’s weddings!

12. Aside from having the same reception in the same hotel, WE also had the same event stylist: Tony Rodriguez.

13. Both of us took Continuing Education courses abroad to further enhance our education: Marbee at Stanford University and Cynthia at Parsons School of Design. (Aside from education, it was also the perfect excuse to travel for a longer period of time).

14. Both of us had ZERO experience in publishing before we took our positions at WE. All WE had were our combined wedding preparation experiences as our guiding force and the will to not just make it work, but to make it work well.

15. In our more than five years in the market, WE’ve already put out 15 issues (including Destinations and Beautiful Weddings), 18 different covers, and have featured over a hundred unique, beautiful weddings. Despite this, WE continue to gush over beautiful weddings, marvel at beautiful gowns and unique styling created by young designers and event stylists, get excited over the prospect of attending upcoming wedding fairs, and look forward to cake and coffee with industry friends—you get the drift.

(To be continued…)