The world of weddings is woven into Ellie Beaven’s DNA, having been raised alongside the UK’s favourite wedding gift list Prezola by husband and wife team Ali and Dom Beaven.
Now, alongside father and co-founder Dom, Ellie is following in her familial footsteps with the launch of Gather: a new digital RSVP service designed to make wedding organisation stress-free for hosts and seamless for their guests.
Pairing Dom’s commercial acumen with Ellie’s instinct for audience desires, Gather brings together expertly designed tools that help hosts share exciting event details – from venue maps and start times to menu choices, accommodation suggestions, and registry links – while collecting and managing guest information, all from their phone.
At the heart of Gather’s mission is one core belief: that bringing people together shouldn’t feel like hard work. By tailoring tech solutions to modern needs, Gather lets couples like you focus on what matters most – turning moments into life-long memories.
Unafraid of rewriting convention, Ellie represents a new generation of industry pioneers, marrying a sharp editorial eye honed through years in luxury branding with the kind of entrepreneurialism that can only be bred, not taught.
I love working in the wedding industry because..
Weddings, at their simplest, are about bringing people together. When you remember that’s at the heart of everything you do, you always come back to this feeling of joy knowing you’re being entrusted with such a singular, special occasion.
As well as being an industry centred on togetherness, the wedding market is also a place of limitless opportunity. Having been confined by convention for so long, we are seeing a real appetite among modern couples for modern solutions that integrate into their busy, complicated lives. I love the challenge of balancing time-honoured traditions with tech-driven solutions, crafted with care to add real-world value to life-defining moments.
Gather is best known for..
At the moment, the story’s unwritten! But ultimately, our goal is to become the world’s favourite RSVP service. We’re defining the category, but we’re also defining the culture around wedding organisation. My hope for Gather is that it becomes the default RSVP solution, trusted by hosts and loved by their guests.
My biggest achievement to date is..
Never being bound by the expected. From putting myself up for a top performing arts boarding school at 14, to moving to Edinburgh for university at the height of the Pandemic, to going it alone after landing in a “traditional” post-grad job, I’ve always been driven by passion and instinct as opposed to convention and safety. Blame the entrepreneurial parents! But really, they gave me a blueprint for doing things differently, and I’m proud to have both learned and lived that lesson.
We’re inspired by..
Pastures new, and the fellow industry leaders brave enough to cultivate fallow ground together. But also making the mundane truly enjoyable, providing solutions before users even know they have a problem.
The current wedding tech trends we’re loving are..
Smart solutions that honour the beauty of by-gone traditions while satisfying modern needs. Naturally I’d put Gather in that category with things like our Gather RSVP cards, a custom QR code you slip into printed invitations to direct guests to their personalised Guest Area, but also tools like virtual guestbooks, collaborative picture galleries and digital seatplanners, all centred on streamlining the guest experience while making it easier than ever to collect memories in one place.
Our favourite features on Gather are..
A favourite feature of mine is the free Contact Collector we’ve integrated into the guest list. We know how tedious it can be to trawl through your contacts to collect guest details like phone numbers, last names, emails or postal addresses, especially when the list is long, always changing, and complete with unknown plus ones. To stop hosts hunting for information, Contact Collector lets guests add their own email, phone number and address straight into the guest list, updating in real time. That means hosts can simply add the details they have on hand and use the share sheet on their phone to ask guests to add their own info via whatever platform they usually use, be it Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram DM, or email.
My favourite place in the world to skip the crowds is..
Venice. I went for the Biennale last year with my mum and we had the best time. There’s so much to see: the Guggenheim, Doge’s Palace, St Mark’s Basilica, and of course cocktails at Hotel Cipriani, all of which would be made sweeter away from the hustle and bustle.
The best person to follow on Instagram for big-day inspo is..
The Wedding Edition is of course my first stop (not at all biased!), but otherwise I’m a regular on Love My Dress and The Wed. Super chic and always elegant.
And finally, what’s next for Gather..
At the moment it’s all about bringing in high-quality first-users, ready to experience something new. We as a team love to get in the weeds of user experience, be that the brand journey, customer acquisition, performance analytics or direct user feedback. We want to listen and innovate based on what our audience wants and needs, so we’re excited to head into this key learning phase that will inevitably make the platform bigger and better.
Discover more: hellogather.com
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