Two men suited sneak into a wedding. No one knows them, but there they are: providing with champagne, laughing with the guests and looking to flirt on the dance floor. It is one of the first scenes of Wedding wedding, The comedy starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in which the unthinkable played in play: infiltrate others.
What looked like an absurd fantasy today begins to happen really. In France, it is no longer necessary to invent excuses or disguise yourself as a distant cousin: it is enough to download an application, pay entrance and sit at the wedding of complete strangers. This is how Invitin has arrived.
The app that converts love into an entrance ticket. Created this year by the entrepreneur Katia Lekarski, exmodel and founder of Digital Platforms of Child Design, Invitin functions as a Wedding Airbnb. Couples publish their celebration, set the Price per person and those interested Buy their seat. The company stays with a 15%commission.
As he explained to The Guardian, the idea arose when his five -year -old daughter asked him why they never invited them to weddings. “I thought: what if you could pay the entrance to a wedding just like you pay a guided tour or dinner with strangers?” He said.
Anyone enters. As they detail on their website, the bride and groom can review the profiles of the attendees and they must sign a code of conduct: arrive punctual, dress elegant, not drink in excess and not publish photos without authorization.
The concept is not entirely new. In India, the Join My Wedding company already connects foreign tourists with local couples who celebrate traditional links, under the motto: “You have not been in India until you have attended an Indian wedding”. There, attending a ceremony can cost about $ 250 per person and is sold as a cultural experience.
Invitin takes that logic, but adapts it to the European context: it is not about offering folklore to visitors, but that French couples finance part of their wedding by making it a shared event.
The first wedding with unknown payment. The pioneers were Jennifer, 48 -year -old actress, and Paulo, exatleta, 50, who married this August in a country house near Paris. With an 18 -month -old son and after getting to get to an appointment app, they decided to try Invitin after discovering it at a bridal fair.
Its history, collected by The Guardian, has detailed that they sold five tickets to 130 euros each, who joined their 80 family and friends. The new “payment guests” enjoyed the whole day: votes in the garden, cocktail with live music, formal dinner (with vegetarian option, since the bride does not eat meat) and the posterior party.
How much is intimacy? According to Jennifer, money is almost secondary. “It helps cover decoration or dress, but we do it because we are outgoing and we think it could be fun to share. In addition, we have many more single friends than single men, so this helps to balance things a bit,” explained Daily Mail. Buyers – or guests – also live it as an opportunity. Laurène, 29, has confessed to The Guardian who saw him as “a way of living a different wedding and traditions” in a happy atmosphere.
However, the model is not exempt from controversy. In Daily Mail, some readers described the practice of “shabby”, remembering that the word “guest” loses all its meaning if it implies paying. In fact, they remember a case of a New York couple who asked for $ 333 per person to friends and family to marry the Cathedral of San Patricio. The outcome was with 80% of the guests refusing to attend. Lekarski defends, however, that it is a cultural and experiential phenomenon, not just financial. Le Figaro collects testimonies from couples who see it as an opportunity to replace absent guests, expand the list without shooting costs or even creating new friendships. A Russian user has summarized it thus: “Attending French weddings will allow me to better understand their traditions and culture.”
The transformation to the show. The phenomenon does not arise from nothing. In the last decade, weddings have become Macro events. As my partner has pointed out in WorldOfSoftware, there is an authentic “fever” for watching weddings on social networks, with videos that accumulate millions of views in Tiktok and Instagram. The bride and groom are looking for viral moments: theatrical entries, fireworks, rehearsed choreographies.
At the same time, the costs shoot. In Spain a link can cost what an average worker earns in a whole year. The tendency to fatten the invoice includes eccentric ideas: tattoo artists, virtual reality cabins, thematic photocalls. Even controversial restrictions are imposed, such as “without alcohol” weddings healthyto despair of the guests.
In that context, Invitin is almost a logical consequence: if weddings are already lived as a show and are unassumable for many couples, why not turn them into an event shared with payment tickets?
From the Airbnb sofa to the altar. Today the app adds only hundreds of users and a few confirmed links, but its founder already dreams of expanding to the US and European tourism. And it would not be strange if he did it: after all, we have already normalized sleeping in the bed of a stranger with Airbnb or dinner at someone’s house we don’t know through Eatwith.
Logic is the same: transform the intimate in payment experience. First was hospitality, then the family table and now the wedding. Invitin does not invent anything, simply pushes a border more: if we rent the living room and bed, why not also the “yes, I want”?
The question is if we will see weddings in Spain soon with payment entry, in a country where the links are especially expensive and the banquet is almost sacred. Because, for now, Invitin is a French experiment, but its incentives – a budget and convert an intimate rite into show – are universal.
Epilogue. In Wedding weddingthe protagonists infiltrated free in others to flirt and drink champagne. Today, with apps like Invitin, you don’t even need to sneak in: it is enough to pay admission.
What was previously a Hollywood comedy is now a real business model. And the question is no longer whether weddings are going from us, but if there is any corner of life that we are not willing to put up for sale.
Image | Unspash
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