Our History
Sixteen years, told in seven of them.
Most of what this practice believes was learnt the hard way, on a specific afternoon, usually in the rain. These are those afternoons.
2009
One engagement, one borrowed car
Esi was twenty-six and working in a bank. Her cousin's engagement had no plan, four aunts with different opinions and a date six weeks away. She took two weeks of leave, wrote everything down, and discovered on the afternoon that both mothers sat through the entire rite — which neither had ever managed at anybody else's.
Sixteen years later that is still the only thing we measure.
Seven afternoons that changed it
2009
Esi Bonsu plans her cousin's engagement in Kwabenya because nobody else will. The list is written on the back of a church bulletin and the canopy comes from a man who also hires out plastic chairs.
2012
Eleven weddings in a year, all by word of mouth, all in Greater Accra. Adjoa joins from a hotel events desk and brings the first proper run sheet the practice has ever had.
2015
The first wedding planned entirely from abroad — a couple in Manchester, married in Aburi. It takes fourteen months and forty-one calls, and it changes how we work for good.
2018
We stop taking commission from suppliers. Income falls by roughly a fifth for two years and three marquee firms stop speaking to us. It remains the best decision this practice has made.
2020
Thirty-one weddings move. Nobody is charged to move a date, then or since. We spend the year running fourteen-guest ceremonies in gardens and learn more about the trade than in the decade before.
2023
The two hundredth wedding, at a family house in Kumasi — six hundred and forty guests over two days, and still the largest thing we have run.
2026
Six of us, around twenty weddings a year, and the studio closed for the first fortnight of January. We have turned down more work in the last three years than we took in the first six.
Where that leaves us
weddings run
years in Accra
regions travelled
dates moved, none charged
We are not trying to get bigger.
Twenty weddings a year between six people is the size at which everybody still gets a planner who knows their aunt's name. Beyond that we would be a diary, and we have watched what happens to couples who book a diary.
The two hundred and sixty-first is still open.
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