OUR STORY
A Practical Wedding is a women’s media company that focuses on weddings and relationships. Bold and unapologetic, it’s made by, and for, smart feminist women. Founded in 2008, APW has spent the last decade as a pioneer in the wedding space, constantly pushing for inclusive, authentic, accessible stories of love and relationships. Our Founder and EIC Meg Keene has written two best-selling wedding planning books: A Practical Wedding, and A Practical Wedding Planner, which together have sold well over 100,000 copies. Meg is widely respected as the leading voice in millennial weddings. She is widely quoted in the mainstream press, including regularly being cited by The New York Times and NPR, along with The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Refinery 29, Brides, and more (you can see a full press list here). In 2017, she wrote an article for Buzzfeed about her parents’ wedding that went on to garner well over a million views.
Started by the newly-engaged Meg Keene in 2008, APW was founded with a mission to make the wedding industry a more feminist and diverse place. More than decade later, that change has taken root in much of the industry, and APW has grown to be the largest independently owned wedding site online, and is one of the top five wedding publications in the English language. It hosts one of the most engaged communities on the internet. We host 700,000 readers a month, and are one of the top 500 most commented on sites on the internet. APW is currently run by our founder Meg Keene, along with a diverse staff of (mostly) women, out of our studio in Oakland, California. All of our small business advertisers must sign our Inclusivity Pledge, and we particularly endeavor to promote women, LGBTQ+, and POC-owned businesses.
Our content is a mix of real wedding stories, how-to’s, and personal essays, but our approach is anything but industry standard. Our comment section is full of active (and respectful) discussion, our most viral real weddings were a Navajo couple, a same-sex black pop-up wedding, and a seven-year-old girl who was her mom’s ring bearer. We highlight the plus size wedding experience, and work to publish Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and other non-Christian weddings. We publish reader’s actual wedding budgets and we shy away from overly gendered language. Our essays encourage conversations around egalitarian households, and we talk a lot about sex and relationships. Our motto is “you do you”… and we’ll help you make it happen.
As for what we don’t do, that list has stayed the same for the last decade. On APW we don’t call people Bridezillas, we don’t call weddings the perfect day/best day of your life, or use pronouns assuming the gender of your partner.
But you will find a whole lot of love and connection. Life is messy, relationships are messy, and APW is dedicated to celebrating the messy reality of wedding planning, and well, life.
A Note On How We Make Money
APW is a small women-owned and run business, which means making money to fairly compensate our staff is one of our core values. We make money a number of different ways. We sell display advertising, along with video advertising. (Please whitelist our site. When you run an ad blocker, you see our content for free, and it’s hard for us to pay our staff.) We also publish posts written about brands. Those range from huge multi-national companies to tiny women-owned small businesses. All paid content is clearly marked as such. Using our discount codes, clicking our links, and telling vendors you found them through APW helps us pay our bills. We have a vendor directory where we feature vendors dedicated to putting diversity into practice in the wedding industry. You should look for your wedding vendors there because they are bad-ass people, and also because shopping there helps keeps APW online. We also run posts with affiliate links, which means we make a small commission if you click on the link and then buy a product on the site. We only recommend items we actually like, and think would make your life better. If you follow us on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube (which you should) you will also see clearly marked advertorial posts on our platforms there as well.
Thanks for supporting a feminist small business. We love what we do, and we hope to be able to keep doing it for years to come.
Our Team
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Meg Keene is the Founder and Editor-in-chief of A Practical Wedding, which started as a blogspot account on her kitchen table, and is now the largest independently held wedding publication in the world. Meg has published two (creatively named) books: A Practical Wedding, and A Practical Wedding Planner, both top sellers on the wedding bookshelf. Meg's work has been referenced in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. It's also showed up on sites like Jezebel, Feministing, Refinery 29, and The Hairpin. She's proud of her roots in California's Inland Empire, though she's also done her time in Brooklyn. Though you're never supposed to say you converted to Judaism (you're just Jewish), she always says it anyway. Meg works and lives in East Oakland with her husband and two tiny kids. For more: For more than you ever wanted to know about Meg, you can visit MegKeene.com.
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Alyssa (she/her) is a queer woman who lives in Sacramento, CA with her wife, Trisha, the cutest nine-year-old, a fluffy pup, and two cats. Alyssa is the VP of Operations & Managing Editor at APW, which means she sort of runs APW these days. She also connects smart, innovative brands with APW’s audience. Before joining the team at A Practical Wedding, Alyssa worked as a wedding planner throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for nine years. She’s planned and executed weddings for many dozens of couples, been a bridesmaid at least eight times, and even holds a certification in wedding planning. In addition to her on-the-ground experience in the wedding industry, Alyssa also helped Meg research her second book and has contributed her expertise to numerous articles and events at APW. When she’s not planning epic events, you can probably find her eating ramen, buying plants, or in the mountains somewhere sipping coffee (or a glass of wine, let’s be honest).
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As Director of Partnerships, Keriann has been connecting rad wedding vendors with what she has been told are "the coolest, kindest, and most creative clients” around for the past five years, though she’s been an avid APW readers since her own wedding back in 2011. She has more than a decade of experience managing and marketing small businesses in a variety of industries from dance, to film and TV, non-profits, and interior design in both NY and LA, and loves to pass on what she's learned in the trenches to the wedding vendors and brands she works with at APW. The rest of the time Keriann can be found fixing up her 1950's ranch in the NYC suburbs, working on the multi-disciplinary arts magazine ESOPUS and dabbling in all things mystical as the creator of The Woo Workbook.
Press
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The bible of all wedding reason
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For trans icon and author Janet Mock, getting married felt like an "an impossible dream come true." ... [She] notes how she initially had a tough time envisioning what she wanted her wedding to look like since, as she explains, "I had no blueprint for happily ever after." After consulting with friends, top-notch wedding sites like A Practical Wedding and hiring a planner, the destination event turned out to be everything Mock never even knew she wanted.
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Keene’s site offers almost-engaged girlfriends, brides-to-be, and new wives something like what Sassy magazine, in its early-90s heyday, offered pre-teen girls terrified by Seventeen: a space where messy reality is normalized and confronted.
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Fortunately, the person taking emails at A Practical Wedding
has the patience of a saint when it comes to the privileged and
entitled (a quality that I would also like to possess, but my doctor
continues to refuse refilling my Ativan).
